From Dr Shorrock in Shanghai

My first week in Shanghai has come to an end and what a week! I have spent my time at the Shangbo Experimental Primary School observing maths lessons with all year groups: maths lessons are taught by maths specialist teachers and last 35 minutes. Similar to England, Chinese maths teachers design the steps to the lesson carefully with consideration of prior learning and learning that will follow. The lessons are quickly paced and tied into real life contexts to inspire the children. Following the maths lessons, the maths teachers all get together in a ‘Teacher Research Group’ (TRG) and discuss what the teacher did to expose the structure of the maths and provide constructive feedback for one another. Today, there was an additional TRG (these happen monthly) where the local maths expert, for this school it was Mr.Zhu Wei, attends a TRG and all the maths teachers discuss how to plan and teach a lesson: this was all about calculating the area of the parallelogram - I look forward to teaching my Year 6 children the lesson that was designed today! The Chinese teachers have looked after me very well and are excellent at translating the lessons, which are being taught in Chinese. However, the learning is easy to follow, even in Chinese, due to the small steps taken. In addition to observing maths lessons and participation in TRGs, I have had the opportunity to be taught ‘ping-pong’ - this school successfully competes at ping-pong - and have created a Chinese painting. I am looking forward to visiting a different primary school next week.