Lessons From Chinese Classrooms
Deborah Meier is traveling in South Africa this week. She wrote this blog post before she left.
Dear Diane,
I wish I had read Nancy Pine's Educating Young Giants, What Kids Learn (and Don't Learn) in China and America before I went to China in 2007! But it fits neatly with my thoughts from last week.
It's a thoughtful and thorough account that starts with classrooms in both nations that come alive in her telling. She has a familiarity with both, and a breadth in both, that makes her efforts to draw from them very credible. And she's a good storyteller as she shows how her understanding unfolds over the years.
Starting in 1990 (more or less) both the United States and China began to consider major pedagogical reforms that started from a base about as far apart from each other as they could be. And each embarked on reforms that were even intentionally efforts to introduce—or mimic—each other's educational approaches. Its focus is the classroom, but of course issues of testing, certifying, et al go along with it, including who makes what decisions. Much of the book reminded me of what I saw and heard on my recent trip to Japan.
Dear Diane,
I wish I had read Nancy Pine's Educating Young Giants, What Kids Learn (and Don't Learn) in China and America before I went to China in 2007! But it fits neatly with my thoughts from last week.
It's a thoughtful and thorough account that starts with classrooms in both nations that come alive in her telling. She has a familiarity with both, and a breadth in both, that makes her efforts to draw from them very credible. And she's a good storyteller as she shows how her understanding unfolds over the years.
Starting in 1990 (more or less) both the United States and China began to consider major pedagogical reforms that started from a base about as far apart from each other as they could be. And each embarked on reforms that were even intentionally efforts to introduce—or mimic—each other's educational approaches. Its focus is the classroom, but of course issues of testing, certifying, et al go along with it, including who makes what decisions. Much of the book reminded me of what I saw and heard on my recent trip to Japan.
