Our teaching practicum started Saturday … and boy was it interesting. My fellow volunteers and I have been divided into 13 teams of 3-4 people and have been assigned a group of 30-40 Chinese students. These students are taking a week of their summer break to come and learn English with us for about 3 hours every day … and in return, we get a lot of hands-on practice in lesson planning and implementation. It’s so helpful to see what works and what doesn’t, and it’s great to try things out with immediate feedback and teamwork from others. At this point, we’re all being humbled and scrambling to improve our lessons … but the kids are extremely forgiving and excited to be taught by waiguaren (foreigners).

Chinese education is vasty different than American education. It’s very teacher-centric, focusing on lecture-based classes and rote memorization and repetition … so bringing in multiple inteligences, learning styles, self-directed learning, and any other number of American educational strategies is completely foreign to them. It’s crazy … but I’m sure I’ll be writing a lot about this later on as the school year progresses.

Posted to webeldotnet on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 8:57 pm EST in China & Education (comment feed). If you refer to this post on your blog, please trackback. Thanks!