This newspaper (chinatimesnet.CN) reporter Wen Mei and intern reporter Xu Peiyan report from Beijing.
Can I call you Mommy? Liu Yujuan said to her teacher.
Liu Yujuan is from Jingyuan County, Gansu Province, and her mother ran away from home 30 days after giving birth to her. Her teacher, Shi Xiaoyan, a fifth-grade Chinese teacher at Xinping Primary School in Beiwan Township, Jingyuan County, noticed Liu Yujuan's special situation because of the "Rural Happiness Class" (hereinafter referred to as the "Happiness Class").
The Happiness Class Project is dedicated to the development of rural children's social-emotional skills and the improvement of teachers' teaching and research capabilities, and is jointly built by the Beijing Cihong Charity Association and the team of Professor Zeng Xiaodong of the Faculty of Education of Beijing Normal University. Since it takes at least two and a half years for a student's behavior to change, a set of curriculum resources for 165 lessons in primary school has been developed after 6 years led by Zeng Xiaodong's team.
Let students express themselves in the experience
This child's face is dirty all day long, and her hair is messy, so I often comb her hair," Shi Xiaoyan told the China Times: "When the child is really unattended, I think about how she will face this society in the future, and I have a lot of touches in my heart, and I will have the obsession to help her." ”
The introverted Liu Yujuan, even when faced with the teacher's questioning, usually just stood up and remained silent. However, she showed a high desire to express herself in the happiness class, in Shi Xiaoyan's words, "She has to rush to say anything in class!" Liu Yujuan formed self-awareness in "My Self-Portrait" and "Customizing the Perfect Child", and learned the norms of life in "Being a Clean and Tidy Me". Shi Xiaoyan's continuous encouragement and praise made Liu Yujuan slowly open herself up and make changes, which subtly cultivated her self-confidence, and her academic performance also improved from forty or fifty points to ** ten. Shi Xiaoyan was delighted by this and dialed Liu Yujuan's father's **.
I am your child's teacher. The other person paused. "Did you know you have a daughter? She's excellent, you know? ”
The teacher told her father about Liu Yujuan's excellent performance in school, and she was about to present her with an award on Children's Day; At home, she is sensible and filial, and she will also make noodles for her grandfather. Three or four days later, my father returned home from Xinjiang. He found Shi Xiaoyan, "I thought that female dolls would marry when they were teenagers, and I never thought that my children would be able to take the road of learning," the father cried excitedly, "I will never go so far to work in the future, I will find some work around and pull my children up." ”
The period of childhood and adolescence is a critical period for human growth and development, as well as an important stage of psychological development. During this period, children and adolescents are still physically and psychologically immature, emotionally unstable, and more susceptible to the influence of the external environment. Lu Lin, President of Peking University Sixth Hospital, pointed out that about half of the mental and psychological problems begin in children and adolescents, and early detection and early intervention will greatly reduce the occurrence of mental illness.
We hope that through the Happiness Lesson, children will be able to understand their emotions and be able to express them, especially in body language. Li Xueting, deputy secretary-general of the Beijing Cihong Charity Association, told reporters. Based on children's perspectives and life experiences, teachers independently choose topics suitable for students' current development, create a large number of situational stories and introduce relevant concepts, improve students' enthusiasm for participation through group cooperation and other forms, and understand themselves, others and society through dialogue with peers.
For example, under the theme of expressing gratitude, teachers guide students to experience the qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty through words, words, or body movements, and to gain comfort and seek recognition in communication with peers. Finally, on the basis of experience, self-emotional output is carried out, and this kind of "short expression" is the improvement of students' comprehensive ability.
Students' Classroom Outcomes Courtesy of Beijing Cihong Charity Association.
So, what is the impact of the Happiness class on students?
Zeng Xiaodong told reporters: "There are no accurate data measurements of student benefits, but it is clear that after more than 10 lessons, the children's prosocial behavior and well-being are effective." Due to the pandemic, the latest program evaluation report is the 2017-2018 "Health and Wellbeing" Curriculum Evaluation Report released by the ** Association in 2019, and through a year of intervention, students have improved to varying degrees in the three social-emotional skills of life satisfaction, self-confidence and self-awareness.
"Fun" and "happy" are the simple and straightforward answers given by children. Wang Tingfang, a teacher from Ping'an Hope Primary School in Duiziqian, Suichuan County, Jiangxi Province, shared with reporters the students of the primary school she taught**. When faced with the question of "what class do you like?", the most common thing that children talk about is "happiness class". In the eyes of the teachers, the children felt that the happiness class was very novel, and they were very engaged in listening, and "taking the initiative to get close" and "daring to express" were their biggest changes.
When you rush into the bottom line of poverty, your emotions will not be able to get out for a long time. In 2015, out of practical experience of the life and psychological conditions of children in poor areas, Zhuang Wei, secretary general of Beijing Cihong Charity Association, and Zeng Xiaodong coincidentally wrote their ideas in the palm of their hands on the kang head of Jingtan Primary School in Beitan Township, Jingyuan County, and this immature curriculum idea gradually became a reality.
At present, the project has cooperated with the education bureaus of 7 counties under Gansu Province, Jiangxi Province, Guizhou Province and ** Autonomous Region, with a total of 1,156 teachers in 139 schools and 33,559 primary school students.
Teacher training has become a pain point
For urban families, the most "effective" way of education is often the risk control of children's growth, and most parents tend to use family discipline to soften the direct conflicts that children inevitably face with society.
On the contrary, for left-behind children in rural areas, the long-term absence of parents leads to relatively weak educational and psychological resources, and their physical and mental growth and development are highly vulnerable to the invasion of risk factors. Therefore, the teacher-student relationship plays an absolutely dominant role in its social development and becomes an important guide to help them regulate themselves. Zeng Xiaodong believes that the biggest need for rural children's mental health is to be "seen", first of all, to be seen by their teachers, to have the opportunity to express their emotions, and to obtain individual psychological satisfaction in the company and encouragement of teachers.
It is true that the teaching journey of rural teachers has not been smooth. The prevalence of problems such as mobile phone dependence, poor schoolwork, and bullying behavior, combined with the special background of a high proportion of left-behind children, is a source of confusion for young and inexperienced teachers. "It's very difficult for students to manage, and it's hard to teach," Ms. Wang said, "and we don't have much opportunity to go up, let alone get out." Under the dual pressure of hopelessness in teaching and difficulty in rising, Wang Tingfang didn't know how to improve herself, and she couldn't see the direction of the future.
Rural teacher burnout is not conducive to the improvement of the quality of education supply, and it is difficult to meet the needs of rural children to build positive psychology and healthy interpersonal relationships. According to the "Survey Report on Rural Children's Mental Health" released by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2021, the detection rate of depression among rural primary school students is 252%, and the detection rate of anxiety risk was 252%。
It just so happened that the happiness class brought a ladder of growth for the teachers.
Wang Tingfang shared with reporters, "At first, I only regarded it as an ordinary teacher training, but then I found that its training method is very different and interesting. It uses a lot of participatory activities to connect the content, and then goes from shallow to deep to the theory behind it. "It can be seen that experiential pedagogy begins with the teacher and ends with the student.
* Scholars, experts, local education management departments and other resources will be organically combined to provide technical and financial support for teachers to do service learning in public welfare projects. When teachers encounter difficulties in practice, they can communicate one-on-one with experts by submitting "teaching notes", and can also participate in the online teaching and research courses of the "Little Wave Plan" to learn about other teachers' lessons and the process of teaching reflection. For outstanding teachers, the first meeting will also cooperate with the county education bureau to establish a "happiness class famous teacher studio" for them, with the purpose of accumulating the resources of the wisdom output of all parties organically generated during the operation of the project to form localized content.
In addition, Li Xueting introduced that the first meeting is expected to hold a rural teacher summit forum to spread the active educational exploration and thinking content of teachers in various regions to the outside world, provide experience reference for more teachers, schools and education bureaus who are willing to join, and jointly promote the development of rural education to form a joint force.
This multi-party project model is called a "wisdom snowball", and it is a very vivid rolling process, which is getting bigger and bigger, and it contains everyone's wisdom and participation. Li Xueting commented.
From 2015 to October 2023, the Association has carried out a total of 83 first-level, second-level, and first-class trainings, attracting 3,076 people to participate, organizing 6 competitions and 76 local teaching and research sessions.
Teachers break the original concept and model in the practice of teaching in one class, improve the ability of teaching design, teaching, and handling the relationship between home and school, and burst out young and energetic educational forces in the county. Teachers and students are happy and find happiness together under the framework of positive psychology, and bring positive feelings in their interactions with each other, which is a kind of mutual "redemption". One teacher described his happiness class with "I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you."
As the host of the famous teacher's studio, Wang Tingfang has stood on the stage of many self-presentations in more than two years of practice. She said: "The happiness class really gave me the confidence to go from obscurity to now I have some achievements. Although it may not be much in our education system, I think it gives me a lot of inner strength and makes me feel that there is another way in life. ”
On January 31, the project progress was updated: The last two happiness classes before the holiday came to an end, and we grew together in the training, with good expectations, we looked forward to a happy future together.
Feelings cannot replace everything
The happiness class can be included in the teaching schedule, and teachers can continue to devote themselves to teaching, which is inseparable from the support and encouragement of the policy system.
Children's mental health care has been elevated to a national strategy. In May 2023, the Ministry of Education and 17 other departments jointly issued the Special Action Plan for Comprehensively Strengthening and Improving Student Mental Health in the New Era (2023-2025); In October, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, together with multiple departments, jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Strengthening Mental Health Care Services for Children in Difficult Situations", extending mental health care services from students to children in difficulty. In December, the "Three-year Action Plan for Improving the Quality of Care Services for Left-behind Children and Children in Difficult Situations in Rural Areas" proposed that by 2026, social forces should be actively guided to participate in and carry out children's needs-oriented care services in a precise and efficient manner.
In 2021, a non-profit organization conducted an industry scan in the public welfare field of children's mental health education, and listed 16 public welfare organizations and 19 projects in Beijing, Guangdong Province and other places as "direct promotion projects" for children's mental health education. Their programs are designed to directly promote children's mental health, with the primary goal of improving psychological abilities such as social-emotional or alleviating psychological and behavioral problems such as depression and anxiety.
However, even if the state attaches importance to it and the industry responds, the scientific nature of public welfare undertakings is still lacking.
Zeng Xiaodong said that when society talks about paying attention to a group of disadvantaged groups, it should first come from empirical research by educators or non-profit organizations, relying on facts and experiments to explore feasible models in different contexts. However, from the current point of view, the pilot research is still insufficient, which leads to a relatively weak composition of national strategies, and most of them rely on the resource investment under the logic of "what is lacking and what is given". "Since there is no suitable model, it becomes a question of what to do after that. Zeng Xiaodong said.
On the other hand, precaution should be the basic judgment for dealing with mental health issues. At present, some educators believe that mental health education is only needed when students have problems, and many school teachers only focus on the counseling and treatment of mental illness for a small number of individual students, ignoring the need for most students to receive mental health education and mental illness prevention. For the Happiness Class, it focuses on improving the cognition and behavior of rural children, and is committed to building a healthy psychological environment that avoids triggering adverse consequences.
Zeng Xiaodong believes that in the education public welfare undertakings, the industry has not yet surpassed the shackles brought by "narcissism", and it is difficult to move towards scientific observation of projects. "Feelings are the foundation of public welfare, but once you get involved too deeply, it will affect your thinking about other aspects. "The real progress of society is to see the rescued, to hear their voices, and to serve their needs. And "feelings" are easy to make public welfare people fall into self-logic and move themselves.
Social work is not a gathering of responders, but an interaction and a gradual evolution.
Care for disadvantaged and disadvantaged children will undeniably continue to require support from the system, but this support should leave room for innovation and strike a balance between openness and risk management. Zeng Xiaodong said. The development of rural education is a problem that the society needs to solve systematically, and it is the deep fit and benign interaction between the national strategy and the whole public. Only with the openness of social thinking can more people be involved in this work and release goodwill to the disadvantaged groups. On the one hand, the education system must be open and provide educational practitioners with the possibility of deep and broad exploration. On the other hand, the public should be more tolerant of educational exploration, especially for the poor, and not limit the goal of education to the improvement of these children's grades.
Talking about her future plans, Wang Tingfang has been thinking about the future development direction of the studio and how to inject fresh things into rural education. She also hopes to go into the county through her own teaching efforts, "At least I don't want my daughter to become a left-behind child." ”
I think I'm going to stick to this program," Shi Xiaoyan admitted, "I'm going to graduate this year, and I'm going to start all over again." I hope that every happiness class can give an explanation to students and myself. They are like little seedlings, I nurture them and see them grow. She also told reporters that she is also looking forward to the studio she is about to set up, and the concept of social and emotional development of rural children accumulated in the happiness class will go deeper and farther.
Editor-in-charge: Zhou Nan Editor-in-chief: Wang Xiaohui.