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In the fall semester of 2024, new textbooks based on the 2022 version of the compulsory education curriculum plan and the curriculum standards of various disciplines will be put into use, and will be gradually rolled out to become a new generation of textbooks in the compulsory education stage.
Recently, the author has carried out teaching and research activities in Shandong, Guizhou, Hubei, Xinjiang and other places, such as trial teaching of new textbooks, collective lesson preparation, classroom observation and analysis, and conducted interviews with teachers and students, and carried out teacher training on the use of new textbooks as needed.
How to make good use of the new textbooks and better achieve the educational goal of developing students' core literacy based on the new textbooks? The author believes that teachers should make four preparations for the use of the new textbooks:
Through trial teaching and interviews, the author found that most of the interviewed teachers showed a certain degree of fear of using the new teaching materials. The author believes that this is normal and should not be harsh, but should be faced positively.
With the use of new teaching materials, teachers have to put aside some of the successful experiences of the past and step out of the comfort zone of teaching that they are familiar with, and the new teaching materials put forward higher requirements for teachers' ability and literacy, which will inevitably require teachers to make more efforts. To make good use of the new teaching materials, teachers should be prepared to face difficulties head-on and have the courage to overcome them.
First of all, teachers should accurately understand the essence of textbook iteration and update their subject knowledge and education and teaching knowledge. In the trial teaching and interviews, I found that many teachers do not understand why they need to change their teaching materials every ten years or so. Textbooks are fundamental to curriculum implementation and student development, and they need to be constantly updated with the changing times, and UNESCO has made it clear that textbooks should be constantly revised. In today's era, the requirements of knowledge and ability in various fields of human beings are in the process of rapid development and iteration, and the iteration speed of university textbooks, such as professional textbooks for medicine, law, information technology, and artificial intelligence, is very fast, and the iteration cycle of primary and secondary school textbooks is relatively long. Teachers should actively face the new version of the textbook, actively seize the opportunity of the iteration of the textbook, and update and upgrade their subject knowledge and ability in a timely manner, as well as the knowledge and ability of education and teaching.
Secondly, teachers should grasp the content of the textbook and the difficulty of the activities from the perspective of students rather than from the perspective of experience. Teachers surveyed generally believe that compared with the textbooks of 10 or 20 years ago, the new textbooks, especially the English textbooks, are more difficult to learn and more demanding. The increase in the difficulty of textbooks (especially English textbooks) shows that the level of basic education (especially English education) has been significantly improved in the past ten or twenty years, and the students' existing foundation and learning efficiency have been significantly improved. The interviewed students generally reported that the knowledge and ability requirements of the new textbook are closer to their real life, and although the content is large and demanding, it is not difficult to learn. The results of the trial teaching also showed that the difficulty of the students in mastering it was significantly lower than the teacher's expectation. Teachers should evaluate the difficulty of the knowledge and ability requirements of the new textbook based on the students' real life and learning ability, and design the students' core literacy development goals based on the students' recent development area rather than their own existing teaching experience.
Finally, teachers should analyze textbooks from the perspective of what students are likely to learn, rather than from the perspective of the textbook writer. Teachers should understand the intention of the textbook as accurately and comprehensively as possible, but in practice, there are often certain deviations between the understanding of the textbook by the user and the compiler, and the understanding of the same educational concept, the same content in the curriculum standards, and the same activity in classroom practice will be different. This is normal. Teachers should understand the new textbooks from the perspective of school-based and student-based based based on the real situation of students, and carry out teaching and research, teaching design and classroom practice in the use of the new textbooks. This is the work that cannot be replaced by the compilers of curriculum standards, textbooks, examination propositions, and teaching and researchers, and it is also the most basic essential work of teachers.
In the interview, some teachers said that "the new textbook has a lot of content, the activities are difficult, and it is impossible to teach it in the limited class time". The author believes that teachers need to change their concepts, re-understand the function of teaching materials, change the one-sided understanding that "teaching materials are materials for teachers to learn comprehensively and thoroughly with students", establish a new concept, and realize that "teaching materials are materials for teachers to guide different students to learn individually, realize the individualized development of different students, and realize the goal of subject education". Specifically, there are two aspects.
First of all, textbooks are the materials for discipline education, and the core function of using textbooks to carry out teaching is to realize the cultivation of morality through the development of subject knowledge learning and activities, rather than simply learning subject knowledge. The development of students' core literacy is the common curriculum goal of all disciplines under the new curriculum plan, and the teaching of each subject should give full play to the function of discipline education. To make good use of the new teaching materials, teachers must take the cultivation of morality as the most fundamental educational concept, and completely get out of the educational concept of "subject teaching is only to learn the subject textbooks and let students master the knowledge of the subject".
Secondly, it is necessary to construct the awareness of using textbooks to promote students' individualized development with the rich content of textbooks, and get out of the trap of "teaching textbooks" and "teaching incomplete". The new round of curriculum reform requires teachers to step out of the traditional concept of "taking textbooks as the world" and construct a learning field of "using the world as teaching materials". The 2024 edition of the new compulsory education textbook provides richer possibilities for students' broader learning and personalized development, and requires teachers to guide students to carry out personalized learning based on the rich content provided by the textbook to achieve personalized development. It is far more important to promote the individualized development of students based on the textbooks than for teachers to "finish" the textbooks. Just as it is impossible to teach the world to the end when we "take the world as a teaching material", we do not need to emphasize the "finishing" of all the contents of the new teaching materials from the one-way degree of teaching by teachers, but should guide students to carry out personalized learning based on the teaching materials to achieve maximum personalized development.
One of the important aspects of the new textbooks lies in the new teaching concepts of the textbooks, such as the teaching concept of promoting the all-round development of students through interdisciplinary learning, which is reflected in the new textbooks of compulsory education in many disciplines. Because in the face of a complex world, the previous single-subject knowledge learning and ability development can no longer meet the requirements of the times, and it is urgent to transform and upgrade to the interdisciplinary knowledge and ability required to solve complex real problems in real life, which makes the importance of interdisciplinary learning more prominent.
The use of new teaching materials will inevitably require teachers of all disciplines to carry out interdisciplinary teaching activities based on their own disciplines, and also require multidisciplinary teachers to cooperate to jointly design and implement comprehensive learning and practice activities for classroom teaching, and jointly carry out interdisciplinary teaching. Most primary and secondary school teachers receive higher education and in-service training before their service mainly revolve around the cultivation of knowledge and ability in a single subject, and the lack of interdisciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary teaching ability has become a constraint for them to carry out interdisciplinary teaching.
Teachers of various disciplines in primary and secondary schools can start from their own professional disciplines to expand their knowledge of similar or related subjects, so as to improve their ability to carry out interdisciplinary teaching, and they can also carry out interdisciplinary teaching practice through multidisciplinary teacher cooperation, or participate in regional interdisciplinary teaching and research activities, especially interdisciplinary teaching and research activities based on the teaching materials of their own subjects, learn from the experience of other teachers in exchanges and seminars, and improve their interdisciplinary teaching ability.
The novelty of the new teaching materials is also reflected in the requirements of teaching methods and learning methods, such as project learning. Project-based learning helps to improve students' ability to effectively solve real-life problems, so organizing and guiding students to carry out project-based learning has become a common requirement of new textbooks. Project-based learning is also the primary method of interdisciplinary learning.
Regarding project-based learning, the teachers interviewed said that the most urgent need to develop the ability is the insight to discover the essence of the problem through phenomena. Teachers should broaden their horizons, find effective solutions to problems, and improve their leadership in organizing young primary and secondary school students to carry out project-based learning based on existing educational practices at home and abroad and the learning situation of their own schools. All of this requires teachers to be methodologically prepared.
There are new requirements for other teaching methods in the new teaching materials, and teachers should be prepared accordingly.
With the new textbooks about to be launched, textbook compilers, teaching and research departments, and primary and secondary school teachers should work together to make good use of the new textbooks, achieve the goal of promoting the development of students' core literacy set in the new textbooks, take up the mission of promoting the high-quality development of basic education, and cultivate new talents of the times needed by the country and society.
This article comes from China Education News Network, and some of the content has been deleted.
The author is a professor and director of the Foreign Language Informatization Committee of the China Association of Educational Technology, and the deputy editor-in-chief of English textbooks for compulsory education
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Supervisor: Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China Sponsored: Beijing Normal University Publishing: Beijing Normal University Publishing Group Editor: "Chinese Teacher" Editorial Department Submission E-mail: [email protected] Email Subject: Name + Author's Affiliation + Submission Column + Manuscript Title Domestic Unified Serial Number: CN 11-4801/Z International Standard Serial Number: ISSN 1672-2051▌ Cooperative Database