With the release of the "General High School Curriculum Plan and Curriculum Standards (2017 Edition, Revised in 2020)" and the "Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan and Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition)", "literacy orientation", "subject core literacy", "teaching-learning-evaluation" consistency, and "big concepts" have gradually become popular words in teachers' general education, subject training, and teaching and research on various topics. Literacy-oriented teaching requires teachers to carry out long-term exploration in lesson preparation groups or subject groups, especially some teachers need to carry out innovative exploration before leading teachers to carry out regular teaching and research.
The author believes that there are three innovative teaching and research paths worth exploring in depth, and any one of them may become an incubator for the school to carry out innovative school-based teaching and research.
Promote "collaborative" teaching and research in alliance schools and group schools.
In order to expand high-quality educational resources, many regional education authorities have adopted the method of establishing alliance schools or group schools (hereinafter referred to as "group schools"). Group schools generally adopt the method of exporting management cadres from the parent body to the newly joined schools to replicate the culture and management experience of the parent school. In fact, the most important thing to export is the teaching and research method or teaching and research experience, but it is also the most difficult to do. It is unlikely that the literacy-oriented classroom teaching reform will be able to complete the transformation by introducing a set of teaching operation processes.
The author believes that the following three points need to be paid attention to in order to realize the transformation of teaching and research in group schools.
The first is to carry out the top-level design of joint teaching and research with the goal and path of classroom teaching reform as the core. It is very important to form a joint teaching and research leadership team of the group school. Each member school should send a university-level teaching and research leader to participate, and the team also needs to have its own or hire a teaching and research expert who can propose innovative teaching and research goals and paths. If there is no such expert for the time being, then the joint teaching and research leadership team needs to spend more time learning first, find the team's teaching and research goals by conducting research projects, and then carry out serious argumentation activities to ensure that the goals and paths are in the right direction.
The second is to maintain predictable participants, landmark outcomes and activity frequency. In the process of joint teaching and research, the group school should maintain a relatively fixed number of participants, have clear goals and tasks, and continue to discuss and share new explorations in the process, so that more people can learn from and imitate the results of exploration, and then continue to discuss until the daily teaching method that is effective, recognized, and widely learned and disseminated is formed. If there are no fixed participants, no clear goals and tasks, then the participants will not have the pressure and responsibility to explore, so it is not easy to obtain visible results.
The third is to promote individual breakthroughs in the atmosphere of joint teaching and research. The true meaning of joint thematic teaching and research is to show all participants the focus of the collective focus of the group's teaching and research leaders on a larger scale than school-based teaching and research. The collaborative teaching and research mechanism sends directional signals to the teachers of each member school to guide the attention of teachers. The positive responses of the participating teachers to the motivational signals came from both the school organizers and peers, as well as the outstanding peers from other schools in the group. In fact, in addition to the school-based teaching and research environment, it has created a cross-university teaching and research environment with more focused goals, more effective feedback in the process, and more inspiration and inspiration from teaching and research partners.
Promote the overall reform of literacy-oriented school-based teaching and research.
Literacy-oriented new teaching and research should be carried out in the context of school-based teaching and research. However, school-based teaching and research in many schools is still relatively traditional, and there is a lack of effective measures to promote teachers' literacy-oriented teaching exploration. The author believes that new teaching and research explorations should be carried out around the following two points.
The first is to organize teaching and research with teachers as the center. Teaching and research activities should be designed according to the characteristics of the best learners, and must be combined with the reality of teachers' busy work, and embedded design from the perspective of improving existing teaching and research activities, rather than organizing teacher training by increasing the frequency of training and occupying teachers' rest time.
The design of embedded teaching and research should be teacher-centered, according to the teaching and research path of the "four steps" (know the design requirements - try to use - say the design intent - targeted feedback) teacher's innovative collective lesson preparation process, and create opportunities for teachers to explain why they designed the teaching objectives that way, what kind of evaluation they designed, what kind of real situations were created, and what kind of questions were raised to guide students' exploration behavior, etc. The objectives, evaluation and implementation of the modules should be structured and implemented at the right time.
The appropriateness of the new approach to instructional design must be validated in the classroom. Many schools organize listening and evaluation activities by grade group or subject group every semester, which takes a lot of time, but does not achieve the expected results. The reason is that almost all of these listening and evaluation activities are designed separately and are not implanted in the "four-step" exploratory teaching and research chain. The best way to stimulate and maintain inner enthusiasm is to respect their initiative as professionals and invite everyone to work together**, rather than having teachers copy the model designed by others.
The second is atmosphere creation and rhythm planning. Compared with top-down training organized by education authorities or universities, school-based teaching and research has its own advantages, that is, the right to create an atmosphere and plan a rhythm.
Literacy-oriented instructional design involves many elements, not only the determination of teaching objectives, the formulation of first-class problems, the design of process evaluation, the design of real situations, etc., but also some "old" problems that we have been exploring for many years, such as cooperative learning, students' increasingly complex personalized differences, and so on. In the reform situation where complex elements are superimposed layer by layer, only when the school leaders formally transmit a stable willingness to reform, involve all relevant teachers in the reform trend, and make every participant aware of their own responsibilities in the organizational way, can it be regarded as creating a reform atmosphere. In the atmosphere of "exploration is beautiful", the teacher's exploration anxiety will not be so great, because the typical discussion atmosphere allows the teacher to have his own ideas and rhythm, and stimulates each participant to focus on the exploration rather than the individual's age, position, title, honorary title, face and the like.
Promote the innovative exploration led by the cross-school famous teacher studio.
The Famous Teacher's Studio is an important part of the construction of the teacher's professional development mechanism. From the perspective of innovative exploration, no matter which level of famous teacher studio, there are some difficulties at present, one is the lack of time, and the other is that there are many and complex problems for research or exploration, and it is not easy to focus on a certain problem for long-term exploration and make breakthroughs. To this end, the author puts forward three suggestions.
The first is to set up a problem-solving studio. A problem-solving studio should focus on a single problem or problem. If the host of the studio is a famous subject teacher, he should focus on the literacy-oriented unit teaching design of "teaching-learning-evaluation", and shift from the "teaching" of the design teacher to the "learning" of the design students. The reading in the workshop focuses on a few monographs that can help members learn more about the literacy-oriented unit teaching design. The establishment of literacy-oriented instructional design is not only to clarify the goal for the collective exploration of studio members, but also to set a new frame of reference to guide members to turn their focus back inward. In a hectic and low-time workshop, this "problem-solving" studio can focus on key issues, unite members who really want to improve their teaching skills, and make the combination of online and offline teaching and research activities more attractive.
The second is to design studio activities with problem solving as the main line. The studio is generally composed of cross-school or even cross-school subject teachers, and it is unlikely to organize activities frequently, and innovative exploration requires long-term focused discussions, so the moderator must have a clear goal when planning the studio and design activities around the goal. Once the goal is determined, it is necessary to design which tools to use in the exploration process, what kind of process to follow, and what kind of signposts to design. To do this, you need to think about what kind of lesson preparation template to useWhat are the main concepts involved in this set of lesson preparation templates?Which book can be used as a reference book for members so that they can consult the links that they do not understand or cannot operate at any time?Wait a minute. In the process of the studio, we should not only strive to solve the problem of how to carry out literacy-oriented teaching design under the new curriculum standard, but also solve the problem encountered in choosing to use a certain lesson preparation template. As soon as the journey begins, these questions are essentially personalized. The secret to the studio's success is to establish a structured dialogue mechanism that continuously drives problem solving.
The third is to focus on the solution to the problem for process evaluation. Studio members cannot be evaluated quantitatively, such as activity attendance, the number of reading notes or essays written as evidence. Such an evaluation method will not play a role in guiding members to engage in innovative exploration. The progress of the exploration process determined by the studio should be evaluated, and the basic way is to discuss each person's design plan and present the better plan in the external setting of the studio. Task-focused process evaluation is the most effective way to evaluate.
In short, in order to achieve the high-quality development of basic education, whether it is group school teaching and research, school-based teaching and research, or teaching and research in the context of famous teachers' studios, we should take the initiative to carry out "new teaching and research", take literacy-oriented teaching design as an exploratory task, and strive to develop teaching objectives, evaluation methods, tasks in real situations and learning tools that point to students actively processing knowledge, and cultivate students' core literacy, consistency of "teaching-learning-evaluation", Reverse design is integrated into deep learning design to achieve moral cultivation in real situations.
Chen Yuting is a researcher at the Institute of Educational Sciences of Guangming District, Shenzhen, and a doctor of education. This paper is one of the results of the 2022 Guangdong Provincial Education Planning Key Project "Innovative Exploration of Classroom Teaching Evaluation Pointing to Core Literacy".