Following a series of sports carnival activities, the annual Professional Development Day for all high school teachers took place on October,14th. This year’s PD Day, themed “Cohesion and Competency”, is an all-day event consisting of two sessions.

In the morning session, teachers participated in team-building activities in the indoor tennis stadium. The Chinese teachers and foreign teachers are mixed and randomly assigned to eight groups. The teachers got to know each other further through icebreaking and nominated their team leader. With a simple and entertaining game “Radish Down”, teachers quickly remembered their teammates, and team spirits were gradually boosted. Then they set off to various challenges with opposing teams. Together the team came up with strategies, solved puzzles, and worked cohesively to reach the goal.

Here are some scenes on the spot! In the obstacle course, the rule is to go through all the obstacles with a fixed number of person-time and the fastest team wins. Then there’s heated discussion everywhere: “Let the fastest teacher in our team run ten times and we’ll win!” “All the male teachers going in the relay is a better tactic!” ……

There were other games such as speed contests, pyramid building, and team drumming in different areas of the tennis stadium taking place simultaneously, and thus the stadium is filled with laughter of joy and cries of cheer. At the moment, there was no borderline of nationality or subject; everyone shared the same aim: work in a team and fight to defeat!

In the awarding for the teambuilding session, the leaders of the champion teams shared their experience working in the team and commented that the most important factor in their victory is that they brought every teammate’s superiority into full play based on mutual understanding and cooperation.

In the end, Principal Ma wrapped up team-building with a short summary: no single tree can make a forest, and hundreds of rivers gather to be the sea. Whether a group or a school, only when we work collaboratively, think coherently, and make efforts consistently, can we get closer to the top and continue to surpass.

Competency-Oriented Teaching Discussion

In the afternoon, teachers went to different venues to listen to lectures in accordance with their disciplines.

The foreign teacher participated in an insightful mental health lecture. During the speech, the lecturer proposed some well-designed breathing and thinking exercises to help teachers understand emotions and pressures positively and get the hang of simple mindfulness practice.

The Math teachers participated in a seminar on teaching practice in Math class given by Mr. Huang Hua, senior middle school mathematics teaching researcher and a teacher of distinctive honour from the Teaching and Research Office of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission. Firstly, Mr. Huang combed through the evolution of a competency-oriented teaching perspective with examples of some teaching practices. The mathematics curriculum standard extends from “two basics” education to “four basics” education, emphasizing basic thinking and basic activity experience; from "two abilities" to "four abilities", emphasizing the ability to identify and raise questions. The "three capabilities" links the compulsory education stage and the senior high school stage, and prepare for subsequent higher mathematics education. Teaching objectives are also developed at different stages of education. Secondly, Mr. Huang pointed out the characteristics of a good class. He emphasized the appropriateness of problems and situations of the problems; the setting of teaching objectives must be specific and holistic. Mr. Huang vividly demonstrated possible problems in teaching through some open class examples, such as inaccurate definitions, inappropriate examples, and inadequate concepts. At last, the teachers had a warm discussion with Mr. Huang in the Q&A session based on their own experience.

The STEM teachers earnestly studied the lecture on "Teaching of STEM subjects based on Core Competency" brought by Ms. Sang Yan, the deputy dean of Xuhui District Institute of Education, a senior high school physics teaching researcher and a teacher of distinctive honour. Starting with the development of the evaluation in STEM subjects, Ms. Sang took the evaluation content and teaching process in other countries as examples and introduced the experience that can be learned from other countries. From the teaching of knowledge theory to the cultivation of student's ability to explore, practice, and think in combination with real-life situations, teaching based on core competency has put forward higher requirements for all aspects of the teaching process. Ms. Sang's lecture provided valuable suggestions and ideas for all the STEM teachers to further improve their professional development.

Ms. Meng Sha, an English teaching researcher and a teacher of senior professional title in Xuhui District, also gave all liberal arts teachers competency-oriented lectures on liberal arts class practice. Firstly Ms. Meng introduced the goals of three teaching reforms and described the teaching purpose of competency-oriented education as to cultivate students' essential qualities and key abilities. Then she took specific disciplines as an example to explain the difference between the conventional classroom and competency-oriented classroom, namely, from isolated knowledge points to knowledge networks and from teaching-centred to learning-centred. Lastly， Ms. Meng gave all teachers lots of useful suggestions about how to teach and rethink our education.

With the PD day coming to an end, the teachers’ reflection on it didn’t end. We played, laughed, learned, experienced, and gained today.

There is a long way to progress in teaching. On the road to building a world-class international high school and providing higher-quality education for students, high school teachers will continue to explore.

(Written/Pictures by: Teaching Affairs Center of High School)