2018年CRI More exchanges conducted between China, UK on education

As part of the cooperation between China and the UK in education, more and more British primary school teachers and their Chinese counterparts have been conducting exchanges in a bid to learn from each other.

A group of over 30 Chinese math teachers have been sharing the Chinese approach to teaching primary school math by giving demo classes in more than 10 local public schools in the UK.

One of the highlights was a 4th grade math class on fractions, including the concepts of denominator and the numerator.

According to the teaching syllabus 1 from UK's education authorities, teachers should use shapes and length to explain the concept of fractions.

However, no specific instructions on how to break the subject down for students are available in the syllabus.

But the Chinese teachers were able to use a series of visual examples, making the concepts more simple and understandable.

"The Chinese teachers, they made sure that everyone would understand. And they will give more practice, so they will keep trying until everyone would understand," says one student.

"It's very easy to do -- just splitting up shapes and adding parts from the shapes," says another student.

Sue Wilson, head instructor 2 at Northern Parade Infant and Junior School, says because the teaching syllabus is short on details, every teacher adopts their own different teaching method.

As such, there's often a big gap in students' math grades as they advance in school.

Many Chinese teachers, like Li Yan from Shanghai, also notice the problem.

"Because there are no unified 3 textbooks and teachers don't do collective lesson preparation, when they have a class about fractions teachers think this content is good and that content is also good. And they try to teach it all in one class. Then they find that students will find it easy at first, but later on fewer and fewer students can keep up," says Li.

Primary schools in the UK traditionally use handouts 4 rather than textbooks, as handouts are easier to revise.

However, Sue Wilson says unified textbooks are becoming more common in primary school classrooms in the country.

"So I think the future is definitely about educating our teachers as to where the positives of the textbook are, and where they can supplement what's in the textbooks," says Wilson.

Currently over 400 schools in the UK are using an English version of "The Shanghai Math Project," which are supplementary 5 studying materials originally published in Shanghai.

British students are also adopting another set of Shanghai math books known as "Real Shanghai Mathematics," which have been translated into English.

Chinese teachers have been visiting the UK to share their teaching methods for 4 consecutive 6 years since a Shanghai-UK teacher exchange program started in 2014.

The UK is planning to use the program to train 700 teachers between 2019 and 2020.

Sue Wilson says the Chinese math-teaching method is of great help.

"For me (it) was the very small steps that are taken with the China teaching so that we make sure every single child understands that small step before we move on to the next step," says Wilson.