Shanghai Secrets
Shanghai Secrets
Shanghai Secrets
I’m just back from an ten-day study visit to Shanghai with 35 students and staff. We were continuing our partnership work with the Shanghai Yangjing-Juyuan Experimental School which, over the past four years, has focused on developing students’ advanced leadership skills through sport, dance and music. This year we took ten Sixth Form students and added a new dimension of literacy and numeracy.
To get a flavour of our partner school, see this video made at the end of day one. The picture above, by the way, was taken by Year 10 student Harry Snell.
Here are some reflections on the education we saw in Shanghai:
Background
When I was looking for music to accompany one of our homemade videos of our study visit to Shanghai, it wasn’t hard to think of an appropriate track: the title of Daft Punk’s
“Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” says it all about Shanghai. It’s an intoxicating mix of ambition and relentless hard work. Four years after I last visited, the cityscape is punctuated by more new skyscrapers, each vying to be bigger or more eye-catching or more gleefully ostentatious than the last.
This, in other words, is a city which is on a self-conscious mission to be bigger and to do better than all others. It’s therefore no surprise that it entered the PISA international rankings as number one. It wouldn’t contemplate being anything less.
The purpose of our ten-day visit was to continue the powerful partnership we have developed with the Shanghai Yangjing Juyuan Experimental School in Pudong District. It’s an all-through school of 1400 students, with students moving to a separate site for their final year and taking a city-wide test which determines which senior school they will attend from 16-19. We visited two of those senior schools (equivalent to our sixth form colleges) which were deemed by our hosts to be amongst the best in the city.
Our partnership so far has involved groups of 25 or so students from each school - in Bury St Edmunds and Shanghai - visiting the partner school for a week or so each year. The focus has been on developing leadership (a core strand of our school’s work) through PE and sport, dance and music.
This time we also took ten Sixth Form students to work as ‘literacy and numeracy leaders’. Their role was to lead some teaching of English and Maths, but it was also to help me and Head of Maths Sarah Whyand to look beneath the surface of the schools we visited to understand what the essential ingredients appear to be in Shanghai’s educational success. They were a great bunch of students to work with - and proved hugely analytical and reflective about what they saw. We will be publishing their comments separately.
Suffice to say that two Year 12 students studying Maths A-level were astonished that they watched a Maths lesson in which students aged 12 were covering similar material to them in mixed ability classes (all classes are mixed ability).
School ethos
It’s important to know that our partner school is an ‘experimental school’. This means it is one of a small number of schools in Shanghai deliberately designed for innovation. One of the most striking - and flattering - features for me, four years on from the initial visit, was to see how ideas from our school in Suffolk have been embedded at the school in Shanghai.
Some of these are relatively cosmetic - the school environment has been transformed from a brutalist, concrete mix of classrooms and corridors to a place containing plants and with walls covered with the kind of images of student achievement that we have at the heart of our ethos. Their dining room has been completely refurbished to create a better version of ours - music playing, TV screens showing motivational videos, a stage for live performance.
More significant is the way the school has embraced the leadership culture that is central to our values. Shanghai students now participate in extra-curricular clubs and activities and are developing the kinds of skills in leading their peers and younger students that we take for granted.
All of this is significant because it shows a key feature of the Shanghaiese mentality - a desire to learn from and then very systematically to implement what they see working well elsewhere.
I was struck by this on our last night in the city. We took our students to a karaoke bar on the sixth floor of one of the ubiquitous skyscrapers. It was an entertainment palace on a characteristically huge scale. We noted more than 100 rooms, each self-contained with audio, TV and lighting system. Hundreds of people had booked a room and were singing their hearts out in a massive factory-scale place of recreation. Like the schooling we saw, it was clever, impressive, but not, of course, creative in the true sense of the word: rather, it was a place where you went to sing other people’s lyrics to other people’s tunes, not to create your own.
The curriculum
There is a national curriculum, a local curriculum (Shanghai-wide) and a school curriculum. One school leader told us that the national curriculum counted for 80% of lesson time. For example, in one school we observed a ‘psychology’ lesson (akin to thinking skills/problem-solving): this counted as part of the school’s own curriculum, something they felt their students needed.
English, Chinese and Maths lessons take place every day. Every lesson is forty-minutes long. This is non-negotiable and headteachers cannot tinker with it. All lessons are mixed ability. Our Sixth Form students were struck by the fact that only in their final year - aged 17 - do Shanghai students get to specialise, by dropping one subject and choosing one option.
Behaviour in lessons is highly respectful and consistently obedient. We saw no behaviour in class that wouldn’t be classed as excellent. Teachers wield great authority and yet relationships are relaxed and informal. Around the school students hurtle along the corridors, play games, and enjoy great freedom. The stereotype that the ethos would be controlling and regimented quickly melted away, and we were reminded throughout our visit that kids are kids.
That said, each week begins with a flag-flying ceremony and each day with physical exercises. All young people will have a period of volunteering and national service before university. All of this was presented to us as integral to building self-discipline and a sense of citizenship.
Teaching styles
The teaching we watched was heavily didactic and consisted chiefly of instruction and demonstration: I’m not saying that pejoratively, by the way, as students were clearly engaged by the style of teaching.
Watch this 90-second clip of a Maths lesson to get a flavour of what I mean. Note how students stand up to give an answer. Note that it’s all about listening and there’s no writing taking place. Note how much smiling the teacher does. These lessons are harmonious and built on mutual respect.
What we found most striking was that the teacher would explain a concept using an interactive whiteboard, then demonstrate how to apply the concept on a chalk-board. Students saw how to work things out: it was about process as much as product. Students were asked questions and they stood up to respond. All students were expected to answer questions. In general there was very little writing: the lessons we saw were about building understanding and mastering techniques, not about practising them.
Critically, though, each subject had a work-book which contained relevant exercises to allow the subsequent practice of the skills/knowledge covered in the lessons. These books were used by students for homework. Students talked of doing upwards of three hours of homework each day, so that the amount of learning and practice was very striking. Homework was being used used to reinforce what had been taught earlier.
Student motivation is very high. The tests needed to get into the senior school are high status and are administered by the education department. Students talked of attending extra classes at weekends in subjects they were finding difficult. Teachers talked to doing extra tuition, especially in the run-up to the exams.
Professor John West-Burnham quips that you can walk into any school and see lots of good teaching going on and lots of good learning - but only occasionally is it in the same classroom. What we saw was teaching - very didactic, genial, clearly explained instruction, usually illustrated by PowerPoints rich in clip-art and animations.
We didn’t see much learning. There wasn’t talk of progress.
As part of the visit, I had been asked to give a 90-minute talk to 200 or so English teachers from across the Pudong district. It was preceded by a demonstration lesson by a young English teacher which was then very publicly analysed by education officials. They asked for my comments and I talked of the way we would judge the lesson chiefly by the progress each student made.
But in reality the students didn’t demonstrate progress because there wasn’t a way for them to do so. They showed that they understood the topic; they worked dutifully in pairs on discussion; they remained responsive and attentive. But their progress would only be demonstrable, it seems to me, once they had completed the homework task which would show whether they had fully understood the topic and were able to apply for themselves the new vocabulary taught by the teacher.
Teachers were interested by my talking of learning rather than teaching. They were curious about my suggestions for alternatives to hands-up and for ways of grouping students with people other than their immediate neighbour. Some teachers expressed frustration with the confining nature of the 40-minute lessons and the need always to teach towards a test. But there was also huge pride in being part of a system that delivers so well.
Conclusions
What I didn’t get in Shanghai was what a teacher from Finland had said to me the week before. She was dismissive of the emphasis on international comparisons. She thought our obsession with ‘policy tourism’ (Dylan Wiliam’s phrase) - nabbing ideas from a range of different countries - downright laughable.
She said that in a previous job she had had to arrange visits by UK politicians to try to uncover the secrets of the Finnish system. Her view was that the PISA comparisons were meaningless - that because Finnish is a phonologically predictable language (what you see is what you say) - reading is a relatively easy thing to learn to do. And teachers have high status. And parents send their children to the neighbourhood school. And therefore, she said, we weren’t comparing like with like - a monocultural comprehensive system with the increasingly complicated choice-driven multicultural educational landscape of England.
In Shanghai I met no such scepticism. Shanghai students want to be at the best schools and their teachers want them to achieve the best results. Almost all the teachers we met were weary with the sheer amount of planning and assessment they were required to put in: the sense of a system being pushed harder and harder was palpable.
Which brings us to what I think are the essential ingredients in Shanghai’s extraordinary success: hard work, by which I mean really hard work. Students and their teachers work long hours. They want to do well. They put in huge amounts of extra time. Through homework they relentlessly practise the drills and routines needed to achieve highly in tests.
The whole city is driven by relentless ambition and, as people there reminded us, it’s a place of considerable wealth and relatively little social disadvantage.
The teachers there are certainly not complacent: the better they do, it seems, the better they want to do - hence their link with us. They are aware that for all their high performance there’s something about the education system which is akin to that karaoke bar we visited, something slightly mechanical. That is why school leaders in Shanghai are taking so much interest in the things we are seen to excel in here in the UK: headteachers having autonomy over the curriculum, an emphasis on extracurricular learning, taking more risks in teaching, giving more emphasis to learning over teaching and - most urgently of all - wanting to capture a sense of creativity.
I came away from Shanghai with a huge sense of admiration for what they do, and a feeling that - in Maths especially - we could learn a great deal from their approach.
But being 7000 miles from home with thirty of our own students and seeing the way they showed such confidence, displayed such leadership, demonstrated so much creativity and a capacity to solve problems under pressure and to adapt to fast-changing circumstances - all of this reminded me also of the strengths built in to our system.
As we looked at Shanghai, we also held a mirror up to ourselves and to our own approaches, which, though often sniped at by the very people we might expect to praise them, are clearly of significant interest to the people working within the world’s number one education system.
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
25 October 2011
Our partnership arose from the Youth Sport Trust’s ‘Dreams & Teams’ programme, with the active support of the British Council
Monday, 24 October 2011