Chinese Teacher As Teacher and Learner

MACT Synthesis Paper

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in Curriculum and Teaching
Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University

Tao Shen
PID A48827122
April 17, 2016

Introduction
What is this? a doubt rose when I first stepped into a US classroom in 2013. At that time,
I saw four students lying on the carpet, coloring a piece of paper while talking to each
other, five students were carefully listening to the teacher telling a story and the rest of the
students were doing writing assignments, reading books and organizing tables and chairs.
This scene deeply shocked me, a person who had been a student for 16 years back in
China. I was wondering if the teacher could deliver knowledge to students in such a
messy environment and whether students could concentrate since the classroom seemed
too noisy to me. I found a spot, where I could have a full view of the classroom and about
15 minutes later, I saw what I was familiar with: Teacher was standing in front of students,
giving instructions about one chapter in math and students were listening carefully without
talking. Now, I had a bigger doubt in my mind: Is education in China and the USA
completely different? Are there different purposes for teachers and students in China and
the USA?
Back in China, A free nine-year compulsory education system has been established, which
has become a milestone of the successful changes of public policies on education. This
means students in China have to make sure that they graduate from middle school and the
fact is most of them will choose to continue their education in high school and then go to a
college or university. Due to the huge population in China, the teaching from 1st grade to
12th grade that I see is usually like this: a teacher is instructing in front of 40-55 students in
a classroom and students usually take notes of what the teacher says because the time for
the teacher and students is so limited since there are lots of tests waiting ahead. In this
system, teachers in the k-12 system are busy delivering content to students and helping

them prepare for all kinds of tests, for example, weekly tests, monthly tests and even daily
tests when students are in 12th grade, preparing for the college entrance examination. What
I did when I was a student? I had unforgettable moments with my classmates, I learned
precious lessons from my teachers and the most important part is I had numerous tests of
all subjects. What should I do?, I was wondering, sitting in that messy and organized
classroom, Can I succeed to be a Chinese teacher in the USA?

What Teaching and Quality Teaching Look Like

'Is this teaching? How does it work? Can students really learn something in this 'loud' and
'messy' classroom?' I sat there, with hundreds of questions in my mind. What is teaching?
If there is a certain definition about it, then why the teaching I saw in America was so
different from that in China? 'Teaching at its most literal level educating, imparting
knowledge is the most fundamental part of a teachers job. It is more obvious than (though
just as important as) inspiring, motivating and forming relationships.' My doubt was solved
by this and the question about teaching in China was also answered that it was just another
way of teaching. Basically there is no right or wrong of teaching but efficient and
inefficient. Then what does efficient teaching looks like and how should I achieve that
became another rock in my way to be a Chinese teacher in the US. ' Quality teaching, we
argue here, consists of both good and successful teaching.' In the Artifact 2, I developed
my own understanding about quality teaching: the classroom needs to be efficient and
collaborative to enable students with disciplined and productive behavior to learn;
differentiated teaching should be carried out to make sure all students can be engaged into

teaching and consistent assessment and proper adaptations should be made to make sure
the teaching can be accurately assessed and revise to a good direction.

Chinese Teacher as A Teacher

Establishing A Chinese Classroom In The US Context

It was difficult to decide how to establish my Chinese classroom before I began to teach in
my first year. Copying from a classroom back in China was my first thought, but it was
denied by myself several minutes later, giving the fact that it was a Chinese classroom in
the US, students, colleagues, school environment, community were all different from that
in China.
They emphasize that consistency involves creating a predictable environment where
children know what to do and what is expected of them. In my Artifact 3, I applied what
students were familiar with, rules, routines, precedures, into my classroom to erase the
unease when they needed to stepped into a classroom which they did not know what to
learn. By doing this, students knew, at least, how to behave and consequences they would
have once they misbehave. The begining weeks of my class went smoothly with the help of
the classroom management plan in Artifact 3 and I would give the credit to borrowing
from the US classroom management system which helped me to make students familiar
with the Chinese classroom after they walked in.
Whats more is that the classroom management plan was developed according to those
home-room teachers: I acquired their management plans and incorporate them with each
other and developed my own plan. As is said: Classroom management is perhaps one of

the most difficult aspects of an elementary teacher's job. The difficulty of managing a
classroom was reduced by maintaining the consistency of those systems from other
teachers. Robert Marzano (2011) emphasizes the importance of consistent follow-through
with rules and procedures. Wong and Wong (2009) also emphasize consistency as one of
the keys to successful classroom environments. They emphasize that consistency involves
creating a predictable environment where children know what to do and what is expected
of them. I used the management planed, developed from other teachers, and the
consistency was brought into my classroom which students were not familiar and even
though they were not familiar with what was taught to them, they were familiar with the
classroom environment they were in and what to expect from

Preparing Students For A Chinese Classroom

Unlike English, the first language for most of students in the Us, Chinese is a tonal
language which means words with different tones can have different meanings. Tone
teaching is also a huge issue in Chinese teaching since lots of students dont realize the
importance of tone and even they do, it is also a tough process for them to learn how to
pronounce the four tones in Chinese correctly. In this case, building up strong impression
about the importance of the tones becomes a fundamental project no matter what I wanted
to teach in the future in my classroom.
In Artifact 4, it describes a possible method that I tried to help a student to succeed in
speaking the four tones in Chinese correctly. As is shown in the artifact, multiple
instructions were applied to that student and it turned out that these really worked. But it
was just a experiment on a certain student, it needs to be modified if I want to use these

method in my classroom to help all the students to succeed in building the fundamental
project before they learn some actual content that can enable they to speak Chinese.
Chinese is totally a strange language to students, so as many aspects of China. Students
may have learned some small details about China but I feel that it is my responsibility to
help students build up a global view through teaching Chinese, including the language and
the culture. I planned some reading materials about history, social issues, economy and
many other aspects of China for students to read and this really helped students to get some
background knowledge about China as well as its language. Like other language teacher
do, I listed all kinds of benefits of learning a second language to encourage students to
learn Chinese in my classroom. Guess what? They really enjoyed learning Chinese, no
matter the language or the culture.

Chinese Teacher as A Learner

Involve into a US school community

Chinese is far away from most of the students life experience and I am often ask one
question-- Why are we learning Chinese? We can blame children for asking this because
the fact is Chinese is too strange to them. Same thing happens in China that students will
ask teacher why they need to learn English since they are not going to use it after they
graduate. Thus, giving learning Chinese a meaningful purpose becomes so important to
motivate student to learn it.
As we know that school is not an individual institution, this rule also applies to me as a
Chinese teacher who is teaching the most unique subject in the school. My assistant

principal who is evaluating me always tells me that I need to involve myself into some
school activities like all kinds of sport matches, staff gathering or some ones that can show
my image to students.
I merely take part in students sports matches as a admission person or even a scoreboard
person because I am always too busy planning what and how to teach and I feel time for
me everyday is so limited that I have to eliminate all kinds of unuseful activities to make
sure that I have enough time to do with my teaching and learning. But in my class, my
students always invite me into their activities and they always say they wish to see my face
and want to teach me how to play in those activities. From last year, I started to join into all
kinds of school activities such as basketball competitions, track training, football games
and many more. Through these, I learned what students were interested in and incorporated
their interests in my Chinese teaching and also we sometimes shared about some topics in
my classroom and this really helped me build up relations with my students.

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