1) CCD5F is a female teacher in a junior high school located in a city, she teaches 2 classes in Grade 8, 112 students in all, and has been a physics teacher for 5 years. She believes successful education is that teachers can make students interested and happy in study, and help them learn the knowledge and the problem-solving method. In her opinion, a good mood is important for students’ development in body and mind, if students are not happy at school, their school life will be very suffering. As to physics, the knowledge in textbooks is about 100 years ago, which she thinks is basic to learn but not more important for nowadays students than to learn the methods about research and problem solving, and to apply the knowledge into the real life.
She believes self-confident students are the successful students who are not necessary to be very smart, but should reach the basic goals on knowledge and abilities mentioned in the curriculum outline, and should be healthy in body and mind. It’s not always that students good at exams are successful, e.g. if an exam is about basic knowledge, a high score only tells that a student studies very hard. Even if a student got a high score in a comprehensive exam, he/she would not certainly be successful later in the society, because success depends on many factors, and the abilities like social communication and self-management on emotions for example, which can be much more important than working ability.
It’s her own study experience forming her belief, since personally she had very happy study experience and had several good teachers who could make students learn more knowledge with a happy mood and became her role models. She doesn’t think her belief has changed, for she always tries to have close relationship with students, which
she believes is very important for a high teaching efficiency, and when students like her, they can like her teaching subject too. She often gives students chances to stand before the whole class to express their own opinions or answer questions, so as to cultivate their self-confidence. During the break time of classes, she often makes some communication with students and tutors them individually on study.
She does try to make students interested in her lessons, to make some fun in class by showing them some cartoon fragments involved in physical knowledge or some videos of physical experiments to help them in better understanding. However, the reality she has to face is none of the students in the classes like study and only perhaps about 20%
has the willingness to think about and explore the unknown, all the others are very passive on study, and it’s also very hard to get them interested, which, unfortunately, happens most of the time, so she doesn’t think her belief directs her teaching all the time.
Sometimes she has to push her students to study with a little bit punishment, because she, like all other teachers, bears too much pressure from the teaching objective on improving students’ study performance, which makes teachers eager for quick success and instant benefit, not the long-term development of students, for “our system is exam-oriented, and 70%-80% in the exams are about basic knowledge, which leads our teaching to focus on passing knowledge onto students and have very few chances to develop their other abilities” (translated).
In her opinion, the fact is, if teachers don’t spend all of the time on the knowledge’s exercise and consolidation, students cannot get high scores in the examination for the admission to senior high school. For students, they also think high scores are very important and are the most useful to guarantee them to go to the top or key senior high school. So she believes her first and foremost teaching goal is to help students get good scores in the examination of Zhongkao, also because Zhongkao is the main measurement not only for students, but also for a school to assess a teacher and for the society to evaluate a school.
There’s always some difference between her belief and the reality, e.g. she would like her students to be happy in the study, but actually students are not happy in the school.
However, on the other hand, she believes that simply being happy in class could be also
an inefficient teaching, mainly because the Chinese students have been subdued since the childhood and never learned how to act in a freely communicative atmosphere of class, once they were in a relaxed class, the classroom would be in an uproar and they would learn nothing. Each time when her teaching doesn’t reach her expectation, she always reflects herself to see if some steps of her lecture have problems or her lesson design is not interesting enough to attract students.
Besides, she continually improves her own teaching ability and strengthens her management ability on students, for she believes treating students is the same as treating her own child, she shouldn’t be always nice to them, but can get angry sometimes to make them have a little bit fear on her so that they could do better in study.
She thinks she has had enough support on her teaching, and the school environment now is much better than the time when she started her teaching job, for example, the teaching research of her subject physics among teachers is much more frequent than before, and her school leadership encourages teachers a lot to try their own styles in their teaching.
2) CCD6M is a male teacher with 6-year teaching in a junior high school of a city, and he teaches Chinese in 2 classes of Grade 9 with 80 students totally. He thinks the aim of education is teaching students how to adjust to the society, how to continually improve their self-cultivation and promote themselves onto a higher level. Therefore, successful education in his belief is to guide students to develop their potentials into full, and help them grow up continually, and cultivate them in good and positive personality, e.g. they are curious and have interest in things around, they love life and love this society, they are positive and have no anti-social or dark thinking, they actively participate social activities to integrate into the society and make their contribution.
He believes successful students are those who are optimistic and self-confident; who are not afraid of difficulties but able to bravely and self-confidently face any problem; who have rich knowledge and good learning abilities with their own learning methods; who have good abilities of communication and get along well with teachers and classmates, and are easy to integrate in class collective; who have high EQ and abilities to improve themselves constantly; and who can make a speech or express their own opinions in public. It would be better if they also have the organizing and management ability, and are able to organize activities in the class or at school. He doesn’t think students only
good at study are successful, because there’re some students who can get almost full scores in exams, but their characters are unsocial and have few friends.
He, as a class teacher, has more chances of teacher trainings, which have a big influence on his belief, and he has learned a lot of teaching theories including teaching cases in the lectures of famous professors. Each time after the training, he always reflects his own teaching behaviors, tries to put what he learned into practice, and proves some of the theories work very well on the students and class management. Besides, personally he often thinks back his own study experience, and writes down what had big effects on him as teaching cases. Through continual self-reflection he has been changing his teaching belief little by little.
Therefore, his belief changed after he became a teacher. In the beginning two or three years, he focused mainly on teaching students knowledge and methods about how to get higher scores of exams. But recent years, he started to care about students’ mentality, for he realized that to enter into their hearts, inspire their learning motivation and build a healthy relationship with them, is more important than teaching knowledge. So during the break time of lessons, he often goes to his class to talk with students individually about their study or families, or share with them something new or interesting, for he believes small talk makes students feel teacher’s attention and care on them personally.
He always tries to make his teaching interesting, for which he prepares lessons very well, so that students can be active in class, like him, put trust on him and follow his teaching way.
He doesn’t think his belief exactly directs his teaching, but only affects in some way because of the limitation from the reality. What he can do is that he doesn’t look at students with colored glasses, but always keeps a tolerant heart to see their good sides, and constantly encourages and praises them. In his teaching subject of Chinese, the textbooks have many texts about good personality, like sincerity, honesty, goodness, virtue, cooperation, etc., so in the teaching he always leads students to discover the good meanings of the texts and explains how they can practice in their daily life.
However, he also finds that sometimes it’s not realistic to only rely on professors’
theories, for example, encouragement and praise cannot work well on some students, especially those who give up themselves. When it’s really hard to push them forward,
he has to give up on them too. So there’s a big gap between his belief and the reality.
He wants to practice the belief more, but when there’s no effect or improvement on students, he has to turn to like punishment or discipline, but tries not to hurt students’
self-respect or physical and psychological health.
In his classes, the situation is very few students have interest in learning, most of them are forced to study under the big pressure from teachers, parents, the exams and competition in the enrollment to senior high school. Therefore, what he wishes is that students could open their hearts to him, agree with and accept the values he tells them, they could keep curious to knowledge and their surroundings, and work hard on study with more motivation, then he thinks for sure his belief would be fulfilled in the reality.
3) CCD14F is a female teacher having 14-year teaching experience in a junior high school located in a city, and she teaches Chinese in Grade 7, 2 classes and 71 students in all.
She believes successful education is to cultivate students into wholesome persons with noble character and good personality, especially they can be kind-hearted and positive, are able to restrain their behaviors well, at least break no laws or do no harm to the society, and are able to handle all kinds of livelihood on their own. It would be perfect when their study performance could be also good enough to go on to senior high school.
In her viewpoint, high exam scores doesn’t mean success, because “education in China is kind of malformed, usually those with very good study performance show no concern to the world, but only focus on their own study, then they can get good scores and enter into very good universities in the end” (translated), but they might have very poor abilities in practice and communication, or have some defect in the character with low morality. She thinks there’re many cases like that in the reality, so successful students in her belief are those who have good and positive attitude to life, and who are happy and able to do what they like, which for her are more important than study.
It’s her own experience, including what she saw and heard, that built up her belief, and there’s nothing special or particular person to affect her. Since she became a teacher, she thinks her belief has changed. In the beginning 2 years, she didn’t think much about education, what she did in class was just to make students happy and she was always full of passion on her lessons. After 5-6 years of teaching, she had a clear mind on what she should cultivate students, and the experience of being a class teacher helped her
learn to be strict with students. So instead of making fun with students, she started to have more discipline on them, sometimes she also punishes them, e.g. call the parents, put a bad record in their files, or make them stand a whole day but not often.
She thinks that her belief directs her teaching. In her point of view, Chinese is an educational subject, for every text either tells a life principle or covers human’s good affections, which can guide students to learn good personality and shape their outlook on life and values, so she always tries to connect those topics with students’ real life to teach them better behaviors. In her own class as a class teacher, she makes everyone take part in the class management with different duty or role, so they can learn to be responsible and to communicate with other classmates, which she thinks is very helpful for them to develop in other abilities besides study.
she’s sure that there’s difference between her belief and the reality, in an idealized way, education should provide a lot of different activities for students to develop more abilities, but actually they don’t have time, because they have heavy burden and big pressure from the study and exams, and they have to fight for good scores in the examination for senior high school. But personally she is quite content with things as they are, and tries to do what she can do. When there’s something she cannot handle or solve, she just leave it alone, because she believes it’s very hard to promote something by one single person in her teaching situation, the system needs a top-down reform and the school environment needs continually creative changes.
4) CCD19F is a female teacher teaching English in two classes of Grade 9, 70 students altogether, in a junior high school located in a city, and she has been a teacher for 19 years. She believes education is successful when students have good study performance and can be admitted to their wished senior high schools, which is also a success for teachers in their teaching career. She thinks her opinion is the same as the society who measures the success of a junior high school according to how many percent of students enrolled in top senior high schools. Therefore, those, who cannot go to senior high schools, she thinks, are not successful at study, at least not successful in this period of life no matter how good their personality is, but in a long run, it doesn’t mean they will be unsuccessful in the future after they enter into the society.
She believes, when students can get high exam scores, it really means they have very good perseverance, they are able to conquer themselves and overcome a lot of difficulties, and they can keep themselves going forward to their goals. If their personality is not bad, they are also good at interpersonal communication, and have some special talents or develop themselves in other aspects, they are really successful and excellent students. However, she also admits that there’re some students who only focus on study but have bad relationship with teachers and classmates, or have some kind of psychological problems, maybe they are successful on study, but are not successful persons. So success in exams doesn’t tell a student can be also successful in other areas.
She doesn’t think she has some specific belief, all the time she just tries to do a good job. In the beginning she wanted to pay attention to every student, later on she became somewhat utilitarian by giving up the difficult students and putting her limited energy on those who can improve themselves on study, because the school assessed her teaching performance according to the exam scores of target students who don’t include several very difficult students at the bottom of ranking in one class. With time going, she realizes that she still has to care for and educate those difficult ones, because they really need teachers’ help. So every day she just works hard on improving her students’
study performance, and doesn’t forget difficult students.
There’s no specific thing or person to change her opinions, which she thinks is a long-term teaching experience accumulation and a kind of educational rules that she found after having deeper understanding on teaching little by little. Although she denied she has a belief that directs her teaching, her teaching behavior is highly consistent with what she believes. She even thinks that students have no much interest in study is because they can’t learn what they are studying. So she tries to help them learn by testing them again and again in different ways, until they bear the knowledge in mind.
Moreover, tutoring students individually or in a small group is what she does every day in class and after class.
In her opinion, it is a pity that it’s written in the education outline that schools should pay attention to the students’ all-round development, and organize all kinds of activities for students’ ability development, but superior departments of schools prefer to see high enrollment rate of school on the strength of good study performance of students, and
unfortunately, there’s no positive correlation between study performance and participation in activities. So students’ activities are very rare in the schools, and the time has to be saved and spent in more lessons and more training of exam skills, even so, still most of students will not be enrolled in senior high school, and some even have no proper schools to go on with study.
So she feels the big pressure the students have to bear, and that’s the reason that she tries her best to help them in study and to keep a positive mood at work. She doesn’t agree with some teachers who are very harsh to students, and make students scared so that they have to study very hard on their teaching subjects. She’s of a gentle temper, and seldom gets angry with students even when they make mistakes or do things wrong, she never rebukes or humiliates them, but often encourages them, so students like her
So she feels the big pressure the students have to bear, and that’s the reason that she tries her best to help them in study and to keep a positive mood at work. She doesn’t agree with some teachers who are very harsh to students, and make students scared so that they have to study very hard on their teaching subjects. She’s of a gentle temper, and seldom gets angry with students even when they make mistakes or do things wrong, she never rebukes or humiliates them, but often encourages them, so students like her