What kind of new outlook should there be in the first new semester after the "double reduction"?
Xiong Bingqi
This fall semester is the first semester for primary and secondary schools to fully implement the "double reduction" deployment requirements.
On August 30, the Ministry of Education held a press conference to put forward a request to make great efforts to strengthen and improve the school education, so as to ensure that teachers should teach well and students learn well.
It was announced at the meeting that after the beginning of the new semester, compulsory education schools must strictly implement the legal provisions of balanced class arrangement, and must not set up key classes in any name, and ensure a balanced allocation of teachers.
Strictly implement the examination management regulations, do not organize examinations in violation of regulations, the examination results are not ranked or announced, and parents and students are notified in an appropriate manner. Students are not allowed to adjust the class, arrange seats, or "label" according to the examination results.
In the new semester under the "double reduction", new changes will inevitably occur.
In order for the "double reduction" to effectively reduce the burden of students' homework and off-campus training, school education, family education, and social education need to form a joint force to build a healthy education ecology for students' growth.
Compulsory education schools do not set up key classes and non-key classes. This is a clear stipulation in my country's "Compulsory Education Law".
But in reality, in many compulsory education schools, there are still key classes in disguise, such as innovation classes, teaching reform experimental classes, etc.
There are also schools that promote hierarchical teaching under the name of "teach students in accordance with their aptitude", and the basis of stratification is the student's test scores. Such stratified teaching is the traditional fast, middle and slow classes.
Cancel key classes and arrange balanced classes. This is to allow all students to have equal educational resources, and no longer treat them as "good students" and "poor students".
However, this will also make some parents more anxious: How can a balanced resource allocation and a "one size fits all" teaching model meet the differentiated needs of students?
This is a question that school education must respond to.
If an effective response cannot be made, then parents who are dissatisfied with the quality of school education will still choose to send their children to off-campus training institutions.
According to media reports, after banning subject training on holidays, weekends, winter and summer vacations, many training institutions have transferred subject training to midweek (Monday to Friday) evenings, and many midweek classes for subject training have already Was reported full.
Some people have predicted that with the advancement of "double reduction", there may be two trends in out-of-school training.
First, the subject training from Monday to Friday has become very popular. Students study at school before 15:30 (or 16:00, depending on the end of school time in each place), and are sent by their parents after 15:30 (or 16:00) Go to an off-campus training institution and learn until 20:30.
The second is that parents ask their children for private tutoring, and subject training has shifted from being legal and open to underground and family.
If these two trends appear, it shows that the "double reduction" has not achieved the actual effect of reducing the burden on students and the anxiety of parents.
This requires improving the quality and efficiency of school education.
In the absence of key classes, in order to teach students in accordance with their aptitude, it is necessary to carry out personalized education and diversified education in classroom teaching.
The "Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Deepening Education and Teaching Reform and Comprehensively Improving the Quality of Compulsory Education" issued in 2019 proposes to strengthen the role of the main position of the classroom, effectively improve the quality of classroom teaching, accurately analyze the academic situation, and attach importance to differentiated teaching and individualized guidance.
Coordinate and control the number of homework and homework time of different grades and different subjects, promote students to complete basic homework, strengthen practical homework, explore flexible homework and interdisciplinary homework, and continuously improve the quality of homework design.
Teachers should carefully mark and correct homework, strengthen face-to-face explanations, and provide timely feedback.
To achieve differentiated teaching and individualized guidance, on the one hand, it is necessary to implement and expand the school’s autonomy in running schools, especially teachers’ autonomy in education and teaching, to effectively reduce the burden on teachers, reduce teachers’ non-teaching burdens, and enable teachers to be fully equipped Dedicated heart to teaching, to "Teach what should be taught."
On the other hand, to promote the reform of education evaluation, we must reform the method of evaluating students and teachers with a single test score, strengthen process evaluation, explore value-added evaluation, improve comprehensive evaluation, and pay attention to the impact of teacher education and teaching on the growth and change of students.
In the previous evaluation system, a teacher who taught a class with an average score of 98 was better than a teacher who taught a class with a score of 90, regardless of the starting point and composition of the students in the class; because only the score evaluation was used, the teacher would use a “one size fits all” approach. The standard requires students to be unwilling to invest time in students whose academic performance is lagging behind.
At the press conference of the Ministry of Education at the beginning of this year, Lu Yugang, the director of the Department of Basic Education of the Ministry of Education, requested that “we must pay attention to differentiated teaching, especially for students with learning difficulties, and strengthen individual tutoring and assistance.” Obviously, we must let him. When teachers pay attention to students with learning difficulties, they need to promote value-added evaluation and pay attention to teachers' contributions.
For parents, in the context of "double reduction", it is also necessary to change the concept of parenting.
The core of family education is to educate children about life. Children's life education, life education and survival education should be paid attention to. However, current family education mainly focuses on knowledge education, and the parent-child relationship is alienated into the relationship between scores and performance.
At the beginning of the new semester, the Ministry of Education once again reiterated that it is strictly forbidden to assign or disguise assignments to parents, and it is strictly forbidden to ask parents to check and correct homework. Education".
For parents to have a scientific concept of parenting, schools, communities, and social welfare organizations need to work together to carry out public welfare family education and guidance, so that every parent can become a qualified parent who values the physical and mental health of their children.
(The author is an educational scholar and the dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute)