Guo Jinhua, principal of Shanghai Datong Middle School: From "three huts" to "cloud" on the CIE curriculum, let students learn in creation

There is a unique CIE curriculum in Shanghai Datong Middle School. The curriculum draws on the interdisciplinary teaching concept of the "Three Huts" in Denmark, allowing students to fully experience the interdisciplinary learning of the "creativity-creation-entrepreneurship" process, so that students can learn in creation.

While such a curriculum and teaching model is exciting, it is not so easy to really start developing. Guo Jinhua, principal of Shanghai Datong Middle School, introduced in detail the formation process of the school's CIE curriculum model in the form of "cloud".

This article was originally published in the December 2021 issue of Shanghai Education Global Education Times, and more highlights can be found in the magazine.

Guo Jinhua, principal of Shanghai Datong Middle School

The following is the original text:

Lu Dengting, a former president of Harvard University, said: "In the process of moving toward the new century, one of the best kinds of education is to help people be innovative, so that people become more good at thinking, more ideals and insights to pursue, and become more perfect and successful people." ”

Cultivating students' creativity and innovation literacy has always been the unswerving pursuit of Datong Middle School. We hope to create a holistic and innovative learning experience and experience for students through the creation of students and high-quality resources in the school-based curriculum.

In 2010, Danish teaching process experts brought the "Three Huts" – the Creative House, the House of Creation and the House of Entrepreneurship – to our school, and while this curriculum and teaching model is exciting, it is not so easy to start developing.

Teachers are also worried: since it is a course, how should the curriculum objectives be set? How is the course content organized? How to improve students' interest in learning? What should students do if they lack relevant knowledge reserves? What if the teacher's knowledge reserve is not enough to answer the student's questions?

At that time, I felt that in order to develop such a curriculum, we should first change the teacher's curriculum teaching concept, and the teaching concept should not change, although it is a new bottle, it can only contain old wine.

So, I shared with you a few views that have been brewing for a long time:

First of all, I define this course as "cultivating interested students, not just cultivating students' interests";

Secondly, this course does not take the learning of knowledge as the main goal, the teacher is here to teach, but not to teach knowledge;

Third, the acquisition of students' knowledge and skills is constructed through project-driven in the course of curriculum learning, and is acquired in the process of creation;

In addition, the knowledge of teachers is limited, and it is not shameful that they cannot answer students' questions, the key is that teachers must know what ways to help students solve problems.

These views of mine have been endorsed by the teachers. The ideas, goals, and audiences are clarified, concerns are removed, and the next thing to do is how to take concrete action to make this creative, innovative literacy curriculum group taking shape and implemented.

From the concerns of the teachers mentioned above, it is not difficult to conclude that what is most lacking in the innovation literacy curriculum rooted in constructivist concepts is a variety of resources, including curriculum, teachers and teaching resources. I believe that as long as all kinds of resources are available and through optimized combinations, we will be able to create an optimized learning experience for students, thereby enhancing their interest and enthusiasm for participating in the curriculum, and ensuring the effectiveness of creativity cultivation.

How to solve the problem of resource scarcity? Vice Principal (assistant to the principal at the time) Ms. Wang Fei, a master's student majoring in computer science, thought of the concept of "cloud computing" in the field of computer research.

The so-called "cloud computing" is to unify the management and scheduling of a large number of computing resources connected by the network, forming a pool of computing resources to provide on-demand services to users. The network that provides resources is called "cloud", and the resources in the "cloud" can be infinitely expanded, and can be obtained at any time and used on demand.

The concept of "cloud computing" is very compatible with the cie course (Creativity, Innovation, Entrepreneurship) in our minds: on-demand services, and expansion at any time. Our CIE curriculum should also move with the "heart", and this "heart" is the need for students' innovative literacy development.

Therefore, with the goal of cultivating students' sense of innovation and cultivating students' innovative literacy, driven by the projects independently developed and participated in by students, and taking "cloud" as the composition of curriculum, teachers and teaching resources, we have integrated and formed the CIE innovation literacy cultivation curriculum, and tried to carry out courses around the themes of "architectural design and construction", "electronic doorbell production", "student TV station operation" and "mobile phone software design".

First of all, we have built a "literacy framework" for students, with "professional knowledge", "operational skills" and "communication ability" as the coordinate axis of the literacy framework, and extracted the literacy cultivation goals on each coordinate, such as "learning to make architectural design schemes", "learning to design architectural drawings", "mastering various skills in building construction", etc.

Subsequently, the necessary courses are grafted on the "literacy framework", such as architectural design involving architectural and materials science knowledge; floor drawing and three-dimensional production to be learned in architectural drawing design. These courses change as the "literacy framework" changes, creating a "curriculum cloud.".

With the curriculum, we need quality teachers, and we use the "teacher cloud" to solve the problem of insufficient teachers in the school. The core research group of the CIE curriculum is composed of key teachers from various disciplines, who are the "cloud core" of the "teacher cloud", and then absorb project teachers according to the needs of different projects. For example, "Electronic Doorbell Production" is used by the physics teacher of our school as the "cloud core", and the professor of the Department of Electronics of East China Normal University is absorbed as the project teacher; the project teacher of "Architectural Design and Construction" is a Datong alumnus of the Tongji Department of Architecture.

As the core team of the "cloud core", the backbone teachers of our school can continuously obtain information, knowledge and methods from the "teacher cloud", continuously grow, optimize, enhance their research ability and organizational ability, and radiate outward, constantly instilling their ideas into other teachers connected to the cloud, and improving their innovation and cultivation ability.

Like teachers, teaching resources are also related to the success or failure of curriculum implementation. As an ordinary high school, the resources available to our school are still relatively limited, and going it alone is obviously not the best choice. Establishing long-term cooperative relations with relevant institutions or organizations is a way, but there are also certain deficiencies, such as relatively narrow cooperation and lack of close cooperation. Therefore, we put forward the idea of "resource cloud", and the school serves as a bridge for the "resource cloud", docking suitable resources, refining useful resources, and integrating these resources as needed for my use.

At present, the university resources we have accumulated include Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University (Department of Electronics), Tongji University, Fudan University; the "Architectural Design and Construction" project has helped us gather a number of valuable alumni resources; the "Microsoft Engineer" project has helped us connect to the Shanghai Youth Activity Center; and the "China-Japan Joint Research Project" has allowed us to find a new source of living water in the international friendship school. In addition, we also advocate that students independently find resources, learn to "find sources", improve their problem-solving skills, and achieve the goal of "teaching people to fish".

At present, the CIE curriculum model in the form of "cloud" in Datong Middle School has been basically formed, and the main teaching content of the course group is mainly engineering disciplines, involving various disciplines or knowledge fields such as biology, materials, information, environment, etc., with practical significance and practical production and life examples as teaching carriers, with obvious attributes of interdisciplinary integrated education.

In the CIE on the "cloud", students are the only and true center, and group activities with them as the main body are the main form of teaching. With the help of various high-quality resources, in the carefully constructed interdisciplinary project-based learning, students independently carry out academic special topic research, participation and project investigation that closely combines social practice. CIE course for all students of our school's first and second years of high school, with engineering projects as the carrier, according to the different content and requirements of each project, the use of a more flexible class cycle, generally each project is 10 to 15 class hours.

From the perspective of curriculum reform, ciE on the "cloud" is by no means covered by the traditional curriculum concept, it has no curriculum form but has the reality of the curriculum, it has flexible content, class hours, teachers, not obsessed with the systematic learning of a certain professional field, but emphasizes the experience and experience of students, so it can provide students with personalized opportunities for the development of innovative literacy. From the perspective of educational innovation, CIE on the "cloud" condenses the core elements of interdisciplinary integrated education, embodied cognition, learning science and information science, and is the integrator of learner-centered learning experience design.