Education in China

Thank you for your support of the Rural China Education Foundation (RCEF). We greatly appreciate your interest in helping to promote quality education in rural China! The new school year began at our program site, Guan Ai Primary School, on August 20. You can read on our blog about how RCEF Teaching Coaches helped Guan Ai teachers analyze textbooks and create lesson plans for the semester. Teachers also decorated their classrooms to make them more warm and inviting--something that is very rare in rural Chinese schools.

This school year RCEF staff and Teaching Coaches will build on the foundation from last year to take our innovative curriculum design to the next level. We spent last school year helping Guan Ai teachers become more proficient at teaching and coaching each other. We also helped the Guan Ai principal set up an in-school professional development system.

This year, RCEF staff will focus on the areas of greatest strength and value added. Given our track record from last year, we feel that RCEF's strongest suit is in creating lesson plans that help students experience and learn about issues in their environment. This includes teaching textbook concepts in ways that make use of rural cultural and natural resources to help students learn more effectively. It also includes extracurricular activities like service-learning projects.

Service-learning is a concept that is very new to China and RCEF has already piloted some service learning projects at Guan Ai which we want to deepen and broaden this year. An example, the Anti-smoking Project, is described below. We will collect baseline data for evaluation, along with basic quantitative evaluation data and anecdotal qualitative evaluation data to track our progress.

We would love to hear your feedback and pass it along to our hardworking teachers and staff in the field!

Links:

• Video: Students describe their village campaign against smoking