St. Albert got a little closer to China this week after a delegation of Chinese educators toured three local schools.
Four principals and a school board member from China’s Beibei School District toured St. Albert’s Sir George Simpson, Ronald Harvey and Paul Kane this week. The five delegates were in the city as part of a fact-finding tour about the province’s school system.
School mascot Harvey Hooter (a large, educated owl) and a small mob of kindergarten students greeted the guests when they arrived at Ronald Harvey Elementary Monday morning by waving tiny Canadian flags. The delegates checked out the school’s hockey academy, music classes and computer lab before moving on to tour the Alberta Legislature, Jasper and Grande Prairie.
The tour was part of an exchange program between the Beibei, St. Albert Public, Grande Prairie and Grande Yellowhead school districts that started in 2009, said St. Albert Public superintendent Barry Wowk.
The program has Albertan and Chinese instructors visit schools in each other’s countries to learn different approaches to student instruction, said Wowk, who has been on the exchange twice. They’ve only sent over administrators so far, but the plan is to eventually pair up teachers and possibly students for exchanges.
“China has been somewhat of a mystery to us on this side of the world,” Wowk said, yet it’s also one of the fastest growing economies on the planet. St. Albert Public is using this exchange to look into offering courses in Mandarin to its students.
Ronald Harvey principal Janet Tripp visited seven schools in the Beibei district last May as part of the tour. Beibei is a region in Chongqing, a municipality of about 34 million.
One of the biggest differences she saw between schools here and there was size. “One of the high schools we visited last May had 6,000 students,” she said — about the same number that are in all of St. Albert’s public board schools combined. Class sizes were also much larger, averaging 60 students each.
“The schools didn’t have gymnasiums,” she continued — students could exercise year-round outdoors due to the weather — but many did have student dorms. Students would sleep eight per room in these dorms on weekdays and go home on the weekends.
The kids were the same as they were over here, Tripp said — casual dress, few uniforms, enthusiastic about visitors — but usually had stacks of workbooks on their desks. There were more blackboards than smartboards in the classrooms, and more lectures than student-teacher interactions in the lessons.
Students in China were well-disciplined and hard learners, Wowk said. “Any kid who takes English gets an English name,” he noted, and is usually proud of it. But students also told him they felt a lot of pressure at test time, as China’s one-child-per-family policy placed great expectations on them.
Alberta’s education system was much more student-focused than China’s, said He Jianquiang, vice-principal of Chaoyang Elementary School, speaking through a translator. “The teachers let the students do teamwork, and they can study with their peers,” he noted — tasks teachers at his school can’t do due to class sizes. Teachers here also know their kids well enough to group those with common interests together.
China has lots to learn from Alberta when it comes to education, Jianquiang said. He planned to encourage his government to better support its schools and to let teachers be more flexible in their teaching methods based on what he’d seen here. “I feel the kids (here) are more sunny and creative than my kids.”
Wowk said his visit to China showed him that Alberta’s schools were on the right track. “They’re working as hard on teaching as we are, trying to prepare kids for the future,” he said. “Technology helps, but it’s the teaching that counts.”
