Cleverlands Read online

  Timetables and KFC

  The English lesson about Frog and Bird was 40 minutes long, in common with all of the students’ other lessons, and was followed by ‘eye exercises’ set to music, where students rubbed their eyes for five minutes to improve blood circulation and relax ocular muscles. The beginning of my lessons were interrupted a couple of times by music coming on over the school speakers, with the familiar chanting ‘Yī èr sān’, in time to which the students rubbed their eyes. Primary students typically start school at 8am, and have four lessons each morning, followed by lunch in the canteen, and then three more lessons in the afternoon. In junior high they start half an hour earlier, and fit in five lessons in the morning, and four in the afternoon, and in high school where students are preparing for their gaokao, the school day can stretch to be as long as twelve hours in some schools.

  The work doesn’t finish there though – as mentioned previously, students in Shanghai receive a huge amount of homework every day, compared with their peers in other nations. And there is no getting away with not doing it. Sophie explained, ‘If you don’t finish your homework you have to do it three times in class, so stay late, maybe till seven. And if you forget it they assume you haven’t done it, so you have to do it again after school.’

  Teachers, on the other hand, do not attend that many lessons. Although class sizes are large compared to elsewhere – up to 50 in one room – teachers have much more time for planning and marking than their Western counterparts, as they teach just 12 to 15 classes each week. To put that in perspective, I was teaching ten additional lessons per week on top of that when I was still a trainee teacher in London (and my lessons were longer too). Like teachers in Japan and Singapore, Chinese teachers use some of this time to plan together with colleagues who teach the same subject. They also spend a lot of time observing other teachers, in their own school, and in other schools in the district and across the city.

  One Thursday afternoon, I was invited to go with two English teachers from the school with the orange tracksuits to another school about 20 minutes drive away, where a ‘demonstration lesson’ was taking place. We pulled up in the school car park, and filed into a classroom which was already full of 20 or so other teachers. ‘Where are the students going to sit?’ I thought. I then turned to face the front of the classroom, and saw that there was a large screen in the wall which was transparent, allowing the visiting teachers to observe all that was going on in next door’s classroom. There were also TV screens along the front; one projecting the board, one with a close-up of the teacher and one from a camera that faced the students, allowing us to see their activities and responses.

  The lesson itself was not as exciting as the set-up – the students were studying a passage from Tom Sawyer, in which Tom tricks a friend into painting a fence for him. They read it out together, they repeated sections after her, she asked them questions about each section, and they then answered comprehension questions. Having sat through a lot of English lessons during my time in Shanghai, including the lesson about Bird and Frog four times, I’d say this was fairly typical of a primary/junior high school English lesson, with the level of difficulty of the comprehension questions changing depending on the age group.

  Science lessons seemed to be a bit more active, with students trying out experiments that demonstrated the concept of the lesson, like rubbing blocks of wood on the desk to demonstrate friction, or trying out the magnetism of different metals. Chinese lessons included a lot of recitation of the texts being studied, with the teacher asking students why the author had used particular turns of phrase (or particular Chinese characters), and explaining why if they weren’t sure. The main subject I’m going to focus on though is maths; partly because this is a subject Shanghai did extra-specially well in (with an average score 119 points above the OECD average in 2012, equivalent to nearly three years of schooling),160 and partly because there has been much more research on how Chinese teachers teach maths than on how they teach anything else.

  In maths and other subjects, there seems to be more consistency amongst different lessons with different Shanghai teachers than there is in England or America. In their teacher training, teachers are taught to teach in a particular way – to consider the order in which they teach concepts, to think about how appropriate connections can be made between classroom activities and the content being taught, and to reflect on how that new content relates to things that students have already learnt.161 They talk through this together in their planning sessions, and some of this knowledge is contained in the structure of the textbooks they use. The logic behind this was explained to me by a renowned head teacher, whom I shamefully overlooked when I first came into his office as he was sitting on a sofa wearing jeans and a grey North Face fleece.

  ‘In teaching style, individuality is fine, once you’re experienced. But you need to reach a certain standard first. You need to know about the best order of the content, the big problem then the little, the major then the minor. It’s like KFC!’ His eyes lit up. ‘Why does all their chicken taste so good? They don’t have amazing chefs in every store, but they have certain procedures in place. Once teachers have mastered these procedures and skills, they can be more experimental.’

  Demonstration and Intuition

  The most obvious difference between mathematics lessons in England and lessons in Shanghai is the amount of time spent in ‘whole class teaching’ – i.e. directed by the teacher from the front of the classroom. This includes carefully planned lecturing, but it isn’t all one-sided; teachers actually ask the students huge numbers of questions (on average 50–120 per lesson) during this demonstration period, making it highly interactive.162 Some of these questions are deliberately very easy, so that teachers start where the children are, and build up their explanations and questions, gradually moving to more difficult mathematical concepts.

  Schleppenbach and colleagues compared Chinese and American teachers’ responses to children’s answers in class, and found that Chinese teachers were more likely to ask follow-up questions when a child got an answer wrong, in addition to explaining their error – whereas the American teachers tended to move on after pointing out the error.163 Expert Chinese teachers will also bring other students into the conversation when responding to answers in class, by asking them, ‘Is that right? Do you agree? How would you do it?’ and then getting the original contributor to respond. Novice teachers don’t do this as much however, and are more likely to simply comment on a student’s answer.164 Perhaps this is something they pick up in their numerous observations of demonstration lessons.

  In Chinese mathematics lessons, the demonstration and modelling is followed by practice. Luke, a teacher from Yorkshire who visited Shanghai on a study tour, described the process as ‘ping pong’ style – you do, I do, you do, I do. Students don’t work for extended periods of time on independent work in class (apart from in their ‘study lessons’), but they do a huge amount of practice on each topic as part of their homework. The textbooks guide this, offering progressively more difficult questions for the students to tackle.

  The benefits of this extensive practice came up in my discussion with Rony when we were discussing the differences between the Chinese and Canadian students that come to him for private tuition in preparation for their college entry exams. There is a particular type of maths question that gives you some facts about a number (e.g. x is a prime number, x is a factor of 56, etc.) and asks you to find what the number is. Rony finds that the most effective way of teaching his Canadian students to answer this kind of question is to give them an acronym – Zone F – as a checklist of all the types of number it could be: ‘Zero, one, negative, extreme numbers, Fractions. They don’t have the instinctive awareness about all these different categories, so they like having the checklist, they like doing one thing at a time, they like having a structured frame going to a question.’

  ‘When I try to teach the same concept to a Chinese student of roughly the same level,
they find the idea of ‘Zone F’ and the idea of having to check through everything a little too… hm... they find it strange, they’re uncomfortable doing it, they find it dogmatic. What they feel more comfortable doing, and what they prefer, is to have an intuitive understanding; when you think of a number, that number could be anything. And out of the ocean of numbers I’m going to start picking them.’ I asked Rony why he thought they had a more intuitive understanding of number. His answer surprised me.

  ‘For the Asian teacher, before they help their students onto that level, they actually use a more systematic approach… you know, a massive amount is drills, exercises and homework, to make students master things, to feel the intuitive side of it, but this comes from a massive amount of homework and practice. Whereas the typical Canadian student has so much less experience practising with numbers, that they’re still on the stage of following the structure, and partly because they didn’t have enough of the structure at school, they still appreciate how their tutor has this secret weapon of “Zone F”, so that they can solve the puzzle. So they’re still on that stage.’

  This was echoed in a conversation with Sophie, when she complained that she had to follow all the structured steps to come to an answer in her Canadian mathematics lessons, even though she could just ‘see’ the answer so was able to do it in just one step.

  ‘They just require you to do it the way they taught you. They give you an example assessment question in class with some numbers plugged in, and then you have to use your calculator to find the answer. In the exam it would be exactly the same question, except the numbers are changed, so as long as you memorised the way to do it and plug in the numbers you would get it right.’ The Chinese were accusing the Canadian approach to mathematics of being dogmatic and of being based on memorisation rather than understanding. I was flummoxed. Isn’t that what Westerners accuse the Chinese of?

  Tennis

  I was very grateful to Rony; as a man who has spent a lot of time thinking about and analysing the differences in pedagogy between the country he grew up in and the country he now lives in, he was able to sort through this muddle with a clever analogy.

  ‘An analogy I give about learning math, is that it’s like learning any sport. Take tennis. A tennis coach teaches you how to serve. You toss the ball, you practise tossing the ball 100 times until you reach that consistency, then you practise pulling back your racket, and you pull back your racket enough times, and you try to smash it, you try to smash it again, and your coach gives you feedback. And they break it down into steps. Thing is, when Roger Federer serves, he doesn’t think through those steps, it becomes so a part of himself, it’s in his blood, and he has that natural instinct to do it. So now, translate this to learning anything, or learning, for example, math. You need to have a massive amount of practice until you forget those steps. But the thing is, the Asian system is good at giving students so much practice, that they forget about the steps. They think this is just an intuition, or they perceive it as intuition, but of course it’s not natural intuition. But then again, you know, for students who are not used to doing that much practice, they still need to do that practice.’

  There are two more things to pick up here about how Chinese students get to this stage. Yes, they have lots of homework, and this might not be something we’d want to introduce to the same degree in the West (remember Nancy? She had a callous on her finger from writing so much… ). But this isn’t the only reason they get more practice – they also spend longer on each topic. According to Sophie: ‘The most significant difference I find is the depth of material covered. In Canada they do a little bit of everything, and they do it really fast, before you really get the essence of that part, and then they jump into something else. Whereas in China they go on about some knowledge for quite a long time, maybe several weeks before they move to the next topic, so you get a lot of practice, and you really know it.’ Like the Japanese, the Chinese have a narrower but deeper curriculum.

  The other important point to emphasise is the feedback. Practising at length is not useful, and can even be harmful, if you’re practising in the wrong way. Chinese teachers make the most of their extra non-teaching time to offer feedback to pupils in three ways. Firstly, they will often mark the students’ classwork and homework on the same day it’s handed in, using a set of symbols to indicate what the students got wrong so that students get immediate feedback.165 This doesn’t always happen; in some schools I saw students in the staffroom marking their peers’ work using the mark scheme, but this still gives the teacher an idea about the distribution of mistakes, which they can use in their planning.

  Secondly, they discuss common mistakes or misunderstandings at the beginning of the very next lesson, and ask students who got the tricky questions to demonstrate how they did it on the board to the rest of the class. On one occasion a maths teacher was hesitant to let me observe her class because, she said, ‘we’re only going over homework’, yet this is probably where the most learning gains happen.

  Thirdly, they also have one-to-one or small group sessions during and after the school day with pupils who need extra help – so although the lessons are mainly directed to the whole class, and don’t have much individualised instruction, students who need it get this extra help later on.

  The Paradox of the Chinese Learner

  Repetition in Chinese schools is not limited to the practice of mathematical procedures; it is a fundamental part of Chinese education. Part of the reason Erin was ‘in trouble’ with the teacher for not supervising her son’s homework was that his homework was often to recite something five times, and there was no evidence of him having done this if she wasn’t there to hear him. I saw several Chinese lessons in which the whole class would recite a poem several times, and English lessons in which the whole class, sometimes in two halves, would repeat the English text after the teacher, then again, then again (so although I only saw the lesson about Bird and Frog four times, I heard the story at least twelve times). This focus on repetition (and consequently memorisation) goes back to the times of Kuang Heng and Li Bai, who had to memorise huge swathes of classical poetry for the civil service examinations.

  Herein lies the paradox. In the West, we tend to think that rote learning is unhelpful and old-fashioned. To us, hearing someone repeat something again and again suggests that they don’t understand it, and that they’re just doing it for the sake of a test where they will regurgitate what they’ve learnt onto the page. It doesn’t allow for true understanding and use of the information, and doesn’t allow for enjoyment or appreciation of the subject matter. Yet students from Asian countries that take this approach consistently outperform Western students on PISA – which is a problem-solving test. PISA doesn’t allow for regurgitation – it requires the intelligent use of what you know to solve a given problem. How can this be? Biggs coined this puzzle ‘the paradox of the Chinese learner’ in 1992, and has since also suggested its solution.166

  Our mistake is in our assumption that memorisation and repetition necessarily imply only shallow, surface-level learning. Watkins and Biggs distinguish between two types of learning strategies that outwardly look the same – rote learning and repetitive learning. Rote learning is what I just described; shallow, mechanistic, with no attempt at understanding. Repetitive learning, on the other hand, involves deepening your understanding through deliberate repetition, paying attention to the features of whatever it is you’re repeating. Unlike rote learning, repetitive learning can lead to deeper understanding of the subject content.167

  The second time I met Rony, it was with his girlfriend Sophie too, and I asked them, ‘Why is it considered useful to read something over and over? I saw this in a number of classes.’

  ‘Great question; why is it not?’ Rony turned the question back on me, and I felt momentarily taken aback. ‘If someone from Asia comes and visits a school in England, that’s going to be one of the first questions they ask: “Why don’t you make your students repeat t
he Shakespeare verses so that they truly make sense of it?”’

  ‘Umm…’

  Luckily I was rescued by Sophie’s interjection. ‘I guess it’s about knowledge consolidation, the more you repeat it the more you get it.’

  That gave me time to recover. ‘The Western conception is that if you’re just repeating it over and over, you’re not understanding it any better each time.’

  ‘In China, when we repeat ancient poems the fundamental assumption is after we memorise a certain amount of input, you become intuitively familiar with each Chinese character, the meaning behind each character, and also the rhythm of it. It comes naturally to you,’ said Rony.

  Sophie nodded. ‘It really does.’

  Although I didn’t think it at the time, this reminds me of what they’d previously said about maths – that after lots and lots of practice, they forgot the steps and it became intuitive. There is some memorisation in maths too – not of individual steps to solve a problem, but of times tables, and basic number facts. This means that when they are solving more complicated problems that require these facts, this part of the problem comes easily to them, and does not take up more of their working memory – the psychological concept we came across in the Japan section.

  Even if you acknowledge that the Chinese approach to teaching and learning can lead to deep understanding and an advanced ability to problem solve, two important concerns remain. Sure, Chinese children are (on average) good at learning, but can they really be enjoying it when it is so repetitive and they are under so much pressure? And what about the skills of the 21st century – critical thinking, personal skills and creativity – doesn’t all the drilling squash these important traits out of them?