Three Chinese stories win applause among educators in Finland

Niu Niu, nickname of an 8-year-old Chinese boy, was too shy to play any big characters in a children stage drama. The teachers then designed a role for him -- a stone. Niu Niu performed the stone wholeheartedly, and was finally buoyed up by the great applause from the audience.

The story was one of the three given examples in a speech by Dou Guimei, principal of Tsinghua University Primary School, during the 12th Conference of the International Principal Confederation last week in Helsinki.

In the second story, a girl used to worry about her poor mathematics test results and was even afraid of learning maths. The maths teacher found out she was good at drawing pictures, and encouraged her to bring the mathematics into her cartoon world.

The girl started making a cartoon story, in which the main character is always ready to learn maths in real life, such as how to count the interests of a bank account. When the story was concluded two years later, she could score good marks in maths exam and was accepted by the secondary school as a special student with maths expertise.

The third story told the experience of a boy fascinated by insects. "He even tried to prevent his father from killing a fly because he believed the mother fly was bearing a baby," said Dou.

The boy's hobby was carefully protected by the school despite his parents' fear that it might affect his normal classes. Later on, the boy managed to travel a lot abroad and worked out a book on insects.

When the speech was over, Dou found herself surrounded by principals from around the world echoing and celebrating the stories. "This is a kind of approval of the teaching philosophy," said Lin Changshan, teacher and researcher of the Tsinghua University Primary School.

Dong Li, vice president of the Finland-China Education Association (FICEA), noted that the teaching philosophy focusing on personal development resembles that endorsed by many of the western countries including Finland. He noted that it has been worldwide concern on how to encourage problematic students.

Satu Sepanniitty-Valkama, principal of the Comprehensive School of the City of Ylojarvi, told Xinhua reporters that she endorsed the way to develop certain teaching methods for a student according to his or her special personalities. She said, in Finland, the headmaster and the teachers will meet to discuss over every class. If one of the students is lagging behind in study, teachers will offer special support.

"The pupil will get more support in the school not only to survive by themselves at home," she said. "When pupil gets the knowledge, he or she will have interest in learning it, and he even wants to learn more."

Jari Andersson, mayor of Sastamala City and director of FICEA, said he agreed very much with Dou Guimei especially in one sentence from her speech -- "Do not teach children the way you think is right, but teach them with the way they think is correct." Andersson believed, in this way the children can obtain self-confidence, and they will not fear even if they fall.

Dong Li said China is undergoing a massive reform on basic education, and one of the aims is to have the allocated resource balanced and educational quality evened. "One of the approaches to achieve this goal is to give schools more freedom on developing their unique teaching methods."

Asked to comment on the latest documentary aired by BBC on a comparison between Chinese and British teaching models, Lin Changshan said it is difficult to pick one model that can represent the teaching methods of the whole China.

"While the exam-oriented methodology is quite common in the country, many schools have kicked off massive reforms" intended to bring a change in the basic education in China, Lin said. He said China's ancient educators like Confucius already started to practice teaching in accordance with students' aptitude, but very lately the approach has been much neglected by administrators who stress standardization.

As one of a dozen pilots schools in Haidian District, a district with over 3 million population in Beijing, Tsinghua University Primary School has developed a system called "one plus X". One refers to the fundamental classes under the current national guideline, and X refers to extensive personal development classes. "Because of the system, stories like the ones mentioned above have been taking place every day," said Lin. Endit