It has now been more than a year since this key research project at the municipal and national levels, led by SUIS Qingpu, was approved. With the publication of “Double New Policies”, teachers at SUIS Qingpu have been committed to reforming and innovating the content structure of the school’s curriculum based on the new requirements for literacy, and have designed a series of project-based thematic learning courses for children. Students are given the opportunity to face various real tasks and problems so that they can actively explore the unknown and dare to meet challenges in practice. Students are trained to gradually develop creativity, critical thinking, communication and teamwork skills in the process of responding to and solving problems, to creatively study and practically apply, and to unify inner knowledge with action. To achieve this, one of our aims is to continuously find effective ways to promote teachers’ professional development.
On October 21, Zhu Lianyun, the Director of Qingpu District’s Education Research Center, was invited to SUIS Qingpu to guide the mid-term work of this research project. Two teachers from the school’s core project team, Summer Gao and Bill Pan, demonstrated the entry designs for the topics, “Making 365 Days Meaningful Every Day” (Grade 3; year, month and day) and “Campus Electricity Defense Plan” (Grade 5; decimal multiplication and division, statistics) respectively. Based on the curriculum standards and core knowledge, both teachers led students in problem solving-based disciplinary and interdisciplinary project learning (with cross-curricular themes) using authentic problems as a background and from a holistic unit perspective. Both teachers also conducted comprehensive teaching reflections and made useful attempts at further exploration for the project-based learning entry course.
The school hopes to drive forward its implementation of research-led teaching through its research on the regular implementation of project-based learning. This research and action will promote the exploration of further professional development for teachers in the project team, improve interdisciplinary thinking and teaching ability, and achieve a paradigm shift for referenceable cases and operations in regards to the overall promotion of professional development for all school teachers. The school is attempting to achieve replicable and applicable interdisciplinary theme-based learning for core knowledge exploration, and at the same time provide teachers with opportunities to gain more experience and a better understanding of how to implement project-based learning into the curriculum, all through the research and polishing process. It was notable that the professionalism of the teachers in the project team significantly improved as a result of their participation in this project.
Director Zhu Lianyun and Co-Principal Sunny Huang evaluated the entry designs and courses afterwards, and gave targeted guidance as well. In the afternoon, Director Zhu conducted a theme-based training – “The Pursuit and Construction of PBL in the Context of the Double New Policies”. Using three excellent cases from different disciplines, Director Zhu made clearer for the participating teachers both the essence of project-based learning as well as practical operational methods.
Research achievements of year 2021-2022
