The seeming ‘round trip’ of learner-centred education: a ‘best practice’ derived from China’s New Curriculum Reform?

Chinese students’ perspectives on learner identity

“…Here, the school transition is more than an educational routine of continuing to next-level education; it also involves decisive changes of identities (Amaral et al 2016). It is a process of negotiating with rising pressure at school and in families (You 2019;Zhao 2015). While the participants' experiences cannot represent the situations of all Chinese students, they provide interesting insights into how the current generation defines their roles as learners.…”

“…The exam-oriented learning and teaching to pass this high-stakes exam has been maintained after it was abolished in 1903. For most contemporary schools, particularly those with few resources and those with students transitioning to post-compulsory education, these exam-oriented strategies are still considered the most efficient in helping students pass their exams and gain opportunities to continue their education (Wu 2016;You 2019).…”

“…Schools with high recruiting requirements are favoured because their students have better chances of earning places at top-tier universities and acquiring good jobs (Zhao 2015). Despite many attempts to change the summative assessment of zhongkao, its "objective" judgement is still considered the most reliable and equitable method for selecting intellectual elites (You 2019), particularly among students with limited educational resources to gain a competitive edge in an otherwise subjective selection system (Dello-Iacovo 2009).…”

“…The participants described a series of pedagogical strategies that their school had introduced to secure their academic success, as other Chinese schools do (Wu 2016;You 2019). First, only the subjects examined by zhongkao (the "major subjects") were worthy of being taught.…”

How Teachers Teach:

“…Many discussions of teaching practice in different regions have been characterized by speculation and stereotyping (Park 2013, You 2019, which is partly fueled by insufficient evidence concerning teaching practices in different locations. One might assume that studies done using standardized classroom observation methodologies such as TEACH (Molina et al 2018a), Stallings (Stallings 1977), or CLASS™ (Teachstone 2017) could be compared across countries.…”