Abstract
Group preparation for teaching contest, or lesson polishing, is a teacher professional development activity unique to China. Through participant observation and discourse analysis of a typical case, this study explores how a science lesson evolved through lesson-polishing process and how such process influenced individual learning and the development of local teaching community. Our work illustrates both the values and the issues of lesson polishing as a type of teacher professional development activity. On one hand, combining professional interactions and trial lessons, lesson-polishing activity opens up space for critical yet cooperative professional interactions and tryouts of different designs and teaching strategies, providing opportunities for individual learning and development of practical rationalities within local community. On the other hand, the functions of such activities are greatly limited by the tendency of refining every detail in lesson design, the existence of overriding dispositions and authorities with overriding power, as well as the focus on practical suggestions that can be directly implemented. Suggestions for improvement are made in the final discussion.
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Notes
We did not come across any valid source mentioning the origin of teaching contest. A teacher instructor told us in an interview that this tradition started before the Cultural Revolution when China built its educational system in alignment with that of the former Soviet Union, but this was only what he heard from an older teacher instructor.
L and I are both male teachers; F is a female teacher. L has been a science teacher for eight years, while I and F were both in their seventh year teaching elementary science. They all have bachelor’s degrees and were all in their 30th.
C and U were both male and in their 40th. Both of them had taught elementary science for more than eight years before switching to administrative positions.
A was in his late 40th. He has been a teacher instructor for 10 years, before that he used to be a high school geography teacher.
When K asked “who will welcome the daybreak earlier, Shanghai or New York?” the student representing New York was sitting right at “the daybreak,” while the student representing Shanghai was 12 h apart sitting on the other side. The students were given the question without learning about the meridian line or dateline, thus many made judgments based on relative positions and earth self-rotation direction only, which led to the answer of “New York”. Their judgment echoed S2’s idea that “there’s no before or after.”
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This work is supported by a grant from the 12th Five-year National Plan on Educational Research (Grant BFA110052, “How sociocultural learning environments influence the effectiveness of classroom scientific inquiry”).
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Tang, X., Shao, F. On the Evolution of a Lesson: Group Preparation for Teaching Contest as Teacher Professional Development Activity for Chinese Elementary Science Teachers. J Sci Educ Technol 23, 252–266 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-013-9454-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-013-9454-8