The Whole-Brain Chinese Roller Coaster

I believe, as the kind of teacher who wants to be a particularly "good" teacher, with, like, esteem and such, that the whole setting high expectations thing is about as important as it gets.  It's fairly easy to run a classroom with low expectations.  Students are generally bored and classroom management is a bit unwieldy, but there is no danger, at any time, of the teacher being the bad guy.  Teachers and students in this situation exist in a kind of general passive ambivalence toward each other in which something resembling learning is done, most of the time, mostly for show. This more-or-less describes my first year of teaching.

Now, going into my second year, I am in rare and important position.  I have the advantage of having seen the effects of my weaknesses and strengths from a position of self-evaluation, which is really about the most powerful tool any of us has for self-improvement.  Normally, my answer to this observation would be to improve my weaknesses, through brute strength, as quickly as possible in order to fail less profoundly this year, but a larger window of self-evaluation has very recently revealed to me a truth that I wish I had had access to all along:  Self-improvement takes time.  With this in mind, I have resolved to build my class in a way that provides fail-safes for my weaknesses while allowing my teaching strengths to shine.  With this in place, I can work slowly, consistently on my weaknesses without allowing them to open up any cracks through which students can slip.

But this assignment isn't about my methods; its about evaluating some tried-and-true methods of high-standardsing that are used around the world to give ALL students access to the top of the mountain (which, I believe, is the highest goal of any good teacher).  These three methods are as follows:

• A Project-Based STEM lesson in roller-coaster building,
• The Chinese math(s) curriculum and methods, and
• The Whole-Brain learning phenomenon.

I'm going to go kind of out-of-order here for the sake of suspense, so bear with me.

First, the Chinese math system.  My evaluation here is based in whole on a demonstrative (but not particularly informative) video, "3rd grade Chinese--math class.avi," and an article, "Explainer: what makes Chinese maths lessons so good?" by Beijing Normal University Associate Professor Kan Wei.  The two reveal a fascinating system of choral answering and high-expectation individual demonstration founded on thousands of years of Chinese tradition.  The system favors whole-class instruction over group work, and boasts highly involved parents and dedicated students.  Test scores show the process to be very effective, so much so that the British government is bringing in 60 teachers from Shanghai to mentor British teachers (Kan, 2014).

In the Chinese system, expectations are quite high and there is seemingly little differentiation for different levels and modes of learning, resulting in a class in which all, or most, students are always at the same high-level.  To an American teacher, this kind of undifferentiated, consistent success might be confusing, if desirable, but they key is apparent:  Chinese tradition.  China is a highly collective society, as opposed to the US and Britain's individualist societies.  This means that there is little emphasis in China on individual success, but much on the success of the family, class, and nation (Hofstede Centre, 2015).  Therefore, where American classrooms are dedicated to the success of each individual student, the needs of the individual student in China is considered less important than those of the class as a whole.  The test scores, which we read as individual scores in the west, represent pieces of a team score in their country of origin.

Based on my observations of my own class and my reading on American teaching principles, I cannot but assume that the main ingredient that makes Chinese classrooms so successful is shame.  Individual demonstrations of problem-solving is used widely in the west, but recent research has underscored the necessity of finding a balance between protecting the individual child's self-esteem and holding him accountable for high levels of learning, an idea which makes carefully selected groups and other forms of differentiated learning preferable.  Where students in the US are motivated by individual achievement, those in China, I assume, are motivated by the avoidance of the shame that would naturally come from diminishing the pace of the class or lowering its scores, thereby also bringing shame on their classmates.

While Chinese educational systems are obviously very effective and have helped to produce a technologically advanced and highly organized society, I would argue that they are likely incompatible with many western ideals.  I think Britain's experiment of using Chinese teachers as mentors is a little misguided and I don't see it being very successful.  British tradition and values are very distinct from the traditions and values that created and support the Chinese system.  In my classroom, I tend to focus on the individual learning experience, and I don't think the Chinese system would be very effective for me.

This is getting long-winded, so moving right along...

The Whole-Brain Teaching video showed some interesting techniques that I can see being useful in certain scenarios.  My understanding of what was going on was certainly bolstered by the Whole-Brain Teaching website, which described what was happening in the video in a lot of detail.  In the video, the students and teacher demonstrate Whole-Brain Teaching principles like "Students-yes," "Mirroring," "Teach-okay," and the "Scoreboard" technique of classroom management.  These techniques are used to connect information to different centers of the brain in order to facilitate learning, while keeping a well-managed, shame-free classroom culture (Whole-Brain Teaching, 2015).  This is very smart stuff, and I hope it continues to gain traction.  The students were engaged and on task, and seemed to enjoy the activity built in to the lessons.  I imagine students with attention disorders and who feel disconnected from classroom activity would benefit quite a bit from this methodology.

The Project-based STEM lesson was incredibly effective, and the video was structured well to impart the information needed to follow it.  In fact, the video was successful enough that the accompanying lesson plan didn't really give me any new or necessary information.  In general, students were engaged by the roller-coaster lesson and got to practice all of the STEM techniques simultaneously.  The lesson started challenging, and the teacher consistently added elements to increase the challenge as student skills improved.  Students were assigned roles within their groups to keep everyone focused and contributing.  There was an economics and scarcity of resources element that added another dimension of realism and challenge.  Students received immediate feedback on their designs both in computer simulations and in practical applications of their experiments, and they were motivated to succeed.  It would be hard for me to imagine a more successful lesson than this one.  I wish someone would demonstrate to me how to apply these principles directly in English.  I'm working on it, but it's astounding how much one has to stretch to make the English standards applicable in such exciting ways.

By my personal standards, which prioritize the individual experience of education, healthy competition and collaboration, shame avoidance, and high educational standards, the roller coaster lesson was a huge winner among these three.  Whole-Brain Teaching is interesting, but I feel like I would have been a bit put off by it in High School.  That experience may fade with time among students, and as it becomes more mainstream it may not seem so silly to me, but I feel like buy-in in the single most important student-teacher communication tool.  If the students don't buy in, and I feel confident that 16-year-old me wouldn't have, they are going to feel alienated and imposed upon.  The Chinese math system, as described in the article, seems to have little to offer me.  I feel that anything that is built so strongly on such specific cultural needs will be wildly successful, but only in that culture.  If we are hindered by anything as American teachers, it is the lack of a cultural backbone to hang a method on.  Personally, however, I feel that it is exactly our cultural diversity that is giving rise to so many new and exciting developments in the world of American teaching.  China has a single, effective, national system, but we have an almost unlimited opportunity to experiment and grow.

Sources:

Chen, C. (2011, June 13). 3rd grade Chinese--math class.avi. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7LseF6Db5g

Kan Wei. (2014, March 25). Explainer: what makes Chinese maths lessons so good? Retrieved from 

The Conversation: http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-makes-chinese-maths-lessons-so-good-24380

Mackens, R. (2011, May 31). Whole Brain Teaching Richwood High - The Basics. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iXTtR7lfWU&feature=youtu.be

Teaching Channel. (2015). Roller Coaster Physics: STEM in Action. Retrieved from Teaching Channel: https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/teaching-stem-strategies#video-sidebar_tab_video-guide-tab

The Hofstede Centre. (2015). China in comparison with United Kingdom and United States. Retrieved from The Hofstede Centre: http://geert-hofstede.com/china.html

Whole Brain Teaching. (2015). Whole Brain Teaching. Retrieved from Whole Brain Teaching: http://wholebrainteaching.com/