IMPLEMENTING CURRICULAR AND PEDAGOGICAL REFORMS IN CHINESE SCHOOLS: THE CASE OF COLLABORATING PHYSICS TEACHERS

Large-scale educational reforms in China encompassing curricular and pedagogical content in both elementary and secondary levels have been gaining momentum since 2001. Henan province is one of the provinces that have been implementing the reforms since 2008. But due to the teachers’ and school administrators’ lack of knowledge and experience of how to interpret the reform and what to teach, different schools in different jurisdictions have adopted collaborative strategies to help them navigate the reforms. This has been the case for example, physics teaching in Zhengzhou city high schools, Henan province. Thus, the research question that this paper reports about is: What are Zhengzhou senior high school physics teachers’ and administrators’ views about collaborative approaches to understanding and implementing the new curricular and pedagogical reforms?

Using select schools where there were teacher collaborations to implement the reforms, face-to-face semi-structured interviews with the collaborating teachers and their respective administrators, classroom observations in selected classrooms and the teachers personal journal reflections provided the data corpus for analysis.

The data analysis indicated that teachers modified their pedagogy as a result of a collaborative process, the power hierarchy between experienced teachers and novice teachers was reduced because the reform was new to both categories, the College Entrance Examination, students’ feedback, and administrative support were key factors influencing successful teacher collaboration, and the administrators perceived their role as providing and exploring strategies for teacher development. Moreover, they created a supportive climate for teacher collaboration through school-based incentives for systemic change.