Lessons From China
Jessica Shyu was the head of training with Teach For China, a part of the Teach For All global network. In this role, she managed a team that supported about 208 first-and second-year teachers working to close the achievement gap in under-served communities in China. Prior to joining Teach For China, she was a special education teacher and staff member with Teach For America. This blog is no longer being updated.
Education
Opinion
What Jenny, 16, Wants You to Know About the Power of Teachers
It is a known fact among those of us who make a living from teacher professional development that educators of all stripes, new or veteran, listen exponentially more to what kids say than they do adults. And so with that science in mind, we put our secret weapon in front of our newest teachers on Day 1 of our Summer Institute training.
Meet Jenny, a 16-year-old student from Lincang, Yunnan, a small town perched by the mountains in rural China. Jenny is about to start high school soon and spent this past summer as an intern at our Summer Institute and attend our summer school classes. Her speech was one of the first that our new teachers heard on their first day with Teach For China to help illustrate why it is that we Teach For China.
Although Jenny's official job was to manage our resource inventory, the truth is, her day-to-day conversations with our teachers and staff about what is possible for kids were far more powerful than any of the PowerPoint presentations and resource toolkits us adults had spent countless hours put together...
Education
Opinion
New Teachers, New Reasons for Why I Teach For China
If only I had done the math a little sooner, it wouldn't have come as quite the shock. This is the year where the newest group of Teach For China teachers were just 13 years old when I started as a middle school teacher. I could have chaperoned their junior high dance. Think about it.
This is also the year that the eighth graders I taught eight years ago on the Navajo Nation would have graduated from college and could have applied to Teach For America and other programs that I did as a 22-year-old.
I'm endlessly proud of the students I taught nearly a decade ago. Yet, as I excitedly welcomed 175 of our newest Teach For China Teaching Fellows four weeks ago to Changning County in Yunnan Province--64 Americans and 137 Chinese-- to attend our Summer teacher training program, I couldn't help but look around the auditorium on the first day bitter-sweetly and wonder to myself what it would have meant if the students I taught eight years ago had a shot at being there doing what our Teaching Fellows are doing today.
Education
Opinion
How I feel about Long Term Planning...
"Long Term Planning has been known to addicting and extremely impactful. Prolonged exposure to long-term planning is known to increase heart rate, increase risk of motivation, increase investment on day-to-day lesson plans, lead to extreme shifts in happiness and inexplicable jumps in academic success, and in many cases may cause suddens bolts of irritable excitement."
This is how I feel about backwards planning. I still remember the magical moment more than seven years ago in my first year teaching when I really learned and finally appreciated the beauty of Understanding by Design and long term planning in general. Since then, I've been addicted and it's my personal and professional mission to ensure all teachers (at least the ones I work with) also learn to embrace the glories of backwards planning in all aspects of work and life. So imagine my delight and overwhelming pride when one of our rising second-year teachers designed these slides for an upcoming session on long term planning to be presented to our first-year Fellows.
Education
Opinion
Meet Cherry: One More Reason Why I Teach For China
I met Cherry at a low point. In Teach For China, we were facing placement challenges, our classroom impact measures were unclear, morale was at an all-time low among Fellows and Staff, and news reports were coming out about the 70 percent unemployment rates among recent college graduates in China. After eight years, I was starting to doubt myself, my work and our mission.
And then I met Cherry. After 10 minutes of hearing her story, I not only remembered what it means to have a transformed life path, but I saw what our elementary and middle school students right now can and must become one day.
Education
Opinion
#TearsInChina
As an American living overseas, I often think about the countless privileges we have as Americans.
But today, my heart breaks for my country.
Sending lots of hugs and love to all of the families of black boys in the world, including the ones I used to work with in DC, and remembering some wise words:
"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Education
Opinion
Eyesight and Education: Answers Are Everywhere, Even in Rural China
How can you learn if you can't see?
During my time as an inner-city teacher with Teach for America, this wasn't the big question. The barriers we faced there had more to do with second-language education, unstable environments, and students' limited sense of possibility. That's why when I joined Teach for China two years later, I sort of overlooked eyesight as a problem.
You see, in Houston, there was an annual vision screening for our students, and if the student couldn't afford glasses, they could still get them with insurance; we didn't really have to question their vision. That's not the case in 六合 (Liuhe), the small village in 云南 (Yunnan) where I teach. Here, a student might never know they need glasses, and if they do know, the money it would cost them to get a pair might be equal to a quarter-year salary for their parents, or more. In places with no comprehensive healthcare and where families struggle just to get the basics, glasses are simply not an option.
Education
Opinion
Not Just a Job: A Lifelong Commitment to Children
In Teach For China, we falsely advertise ourselves as a two-year teaching program. Because, honestly, after you meet your amazing children and see what they're capable of with great teachers and advocates, this is a lifetime commitment where you do whatever you can from any direction to serve the students you love.
As we close out the school year around the world, it's a time for looking back on how far we've come. Below is a speech that one of our senior program managers, Ralph Legg, shared with our second-year Teaching Fellows as they become alumni of our program and transition to continue teaching, attend grad school or start non-profits of their own.
Although it's written for teachers in a small industrial town in rural China, the reality is, it's for every teacher I've ever met around the world. Because no matter who and where we are, once we fall in love with our students, it's no longer a work contract and a paycheck. This is a lifelong mission. Happy Summer and thank you for all you do.
Education
Opinion
Technology Outside the Classroom
I don't know if this is a call for more technology in schools, or proof that you can practice English skills in and out of the classroom, or just plain fun. I'm voting for Option C.
This is me practicing oral English skills with a group of our Teach For China Fellow's students. I might be working in my office in Shantou, Guangdong Province, while they're at their school in the mountains of Shuangjiang, Yunnan Province thousands of miles away, but we're sending voice messages back and forth in English and talking about our favorite fruit, animals and future jobs when we grow up.
Thank goodness for technology (and fun).
Education
Opinion
Serving Students with Special Needs Worldwide
They say you never forget your first love and isn't that the truth.
And so it feels a bit like I've cheated on my lover when I admit that we're not doing much in Teach For China to serve our children with different learning needs.
But the reality is, students with special needs are the gap within the achievement gap anywhere in the world--whether it's in the United States States, China, Pakistan or Chile. What keeps me up at night is knowing that until something changes, it's these children who are most at-risk of staying illiterate and stigmatized, most likely to being homeless and jobless, and most likely to have few resources, independence, friendships or opportunities in the world. This isn't true everywhere or for everyone, but in the most under-resourced communities such as tiny mountainous towns in China, this is undoubtedly the case.
Let's change that.
Education
Opinion
Room to Read, or Happy Belated Navajo Sovereignty Day!
While our American school system's history books, teaching curricula and role models are still spectacularly under-representing the stories of our Native communities, I'd like you to know that in a little school in the outskirts of a small town in the mountains of Yunnan Province, China, the children are reading at least one book about Native Americans.
Our Teaching Fellows there had set up a beautiful library by writing grants for book donations, lobbying their school to use the spare room that's smaller than my walk-in closet in DC (really), and setting up a comfortable, safe space for students to browse and read. The kids manage the sunny little library on their own, there's poetry on the walls and wooden benches to sit on.
Education
Opinion
Happy Mother's Day to all the Teachers Who Adopted Me Along the Way
Like many others out there, I've been blessed with an incredible set of surrogate mothers in teaching. It doesn't matter if you teach in inner-city DC or in the mountains of China where you don't understand the local dialect. We all have them. These are the women who may not have given birth to you, but nurtured you as a young educator, checked to make sure you ate breakfast and lunch, gave you stern lectures/pep talks in the teacher's lounge, and believed in you even after particularly humiliating days.
Education
Opinion
Teacher Appreciation Day - 10 Reasons Why You Rock
As we gear up for Teacher Appreciation Day today, I would like to take a moment to share my deepest gratitude to all of the amazing teachers I've had a chance to work with over the past eight years both in and out of Teach For China and Teach For America. As someone who makes my living off of teacher development, I'm still obsessed with you all.
Here are just 10 reasons why you guys rock.
Education
Opinion
What Fuels Your Fire? First-Year Teacher in China Shares
This week, I've invited a guest blogger, Huang Songbin, a first-year teacher who grew up just down the street from one of our current placement schools, to share with us what fuels his fire. I had the chance to hang out with Songbin a couple weeks ago and a quick dinner turned into 2+ hours of conversation. The reality is, if Songbin was a kid right now, his teachers would likely be Teach For China teachers-- he grew up just down the street from one of our schools in Guangdong Province. Neither of his parents received much schooling and his three brothers all dropped out early as well. There were times when he lost motivation to move on, but it was because of encouraging teachers who ensured he stayed on track to go on to one of the top colleges in the the country.
Education
Opinion
Learning to Defy the Odds: My Father and Our Students in China
It took me moving more than 8,000 miles to China 2 years ago to realize that, statistically, there is no reason I should be doing what I do today.
It was entirely by chance that my grandparents left mainland China to Taiwan before the revolution. And it was entirely by sheer will that my father became the first person in his family to attend college, despite failing his high school entrance exam. If the statistics played out in any other way, I should be working in factories like my second-cousins in China or working at a store like my family in Taiwan. While these jobs are perfectly respectable, the reality is, I really like being able to do what I do--coaching and supporting teachers in under-resourced communities around the world and empowering them to be the future leaders for this movement to provide an excellent education for all kids--no matter where they're from.