The development of the Internet and technology has quietly changed everything around, and so has education methods. Will traditional classrooms and schools no longer to be places of learning? What is the future education trend? Who will teach? What to learn? How to learn? How to evaluate? In response to this series of issues, recently, the deputy director of the Basic Education Reform and Development Research Center of East China Normal University and the chief expert of the major project “Theory and Practice of Future School Organizational Form and System Restructuring” Professor Bu, researcher Fang of the Chinese Academy of Educational Sciences and Dr. Gu from the Great China Institute of Wisdom came to WUIS (Cooperative Research School) to carry out a survey activity on the vision of future school organization.
Then the team observed two lessons. The English reading lesson brought by young teacher Sylvia was highly recognized and praised. Professor Bu comments that Xiehe’s classroom pays more attention to the development of children’s higher-order thinking, with a wide range of values, and group cooperative learning. At the same time, it is also pointed out that students in reading courses need to have more contact with tangible words since the combination of pictures and texts enhances the valuable experience of students’ cognition and development, which leads the direction for future teaching. Teacher Miranda’s P4C lesson stimulates students to think about life experience. Students’ good discussion literacy are fully nourished and grown in P4C class. At the same time, Dr. Gu proposed that teacher can infiltrate the classroom as the role of “uninformed”, inspiring students to use their subjective initiative to construct each other and clarify each other’s ideas and opinions.
In the morning, Angel Lin introduced the school’s educational philosophy and development overview. Through visiting our campus and understanding school curriculum, the visitor realized that Xiehe is a campus that adheres to the concept of where East meets West, develops towards the future, focus on people orientation, and trains students to become High-quality schools for life-long learners. This provides possibilities for future school practice paradigms.
In the afternoon, more than 40 people including WUIS leaders, middle-level cadres, teacher representatives, and graduate students from the School of Humanities of Jiangnan University participated in the “Future School Vision” workshop to understand the leadership and faculty’s vision for the school’s future. The expectation will provide a basis for planning the future school construction.
This workshop has been conducted from four levels which contains goals and functions, organization and structure, teaching style and local governance and school policies. We discussed the possible development and expectations of WUIS now and in next 15 to 30 years.
Finally, Professor Bu fully affirmed the richness of the results of group discussion and the effectiveness of the process. At the end of this workshop, she commented: WUIS is not only full of diverse culture, but also with equality and inclusiveness. She said that the survey activity is not only a preliminary attempt of joint research, but also an effective collision and dialogue between educational theory and practice, educational ideals and reality. It is useful for deepening the research on the socialist education theoretical system with Chinese characteristics and exploring the future school organization. In the future, she hopes to visit WUIS again to do more research.