Guest
Du Linlin
Interview Background
The 24-year Party standing and more than 20 years of school-level management experience have made Du Linlin who she is, who was born in 1972, a well-known “young sophisticated principal” in Shanghai’s general education system. Over the past 20 years, she has obtained nearly 100 honors and awards by virtue of her outstanding achievements in education and teaching management, such as the special-grade principal of Shanghai, the host of the fourth phase of Shanghai Double-famous (famous principal and famous teacher) Project, and the Deputy Director of the Junior High School Education Management Specialized Committee of Shanghai Education Society. “There must be a difference among different children, but children have their own natural endowment. As an educator, do we need to shape all children into the same model?” This is Du Linlin’s deep thinking and questioning after her 20-year work as a principal to observe and understand different needs in children’s growth.
Host:
Hello, welcome to “The Headmaster”. “The Headmaster” is a large interview program planned, produced and broadcast by Shanghai Education TV. Based on the current situation and facing the future of education, this program focuses on the new ideas, new measures and new experiences of Shanghai’s education reform. It has recorded the school management, curriculum exploration, school culture shaping and other practice of outstanding principals. Their thoughts, words, deeds and gains provide references for the high-level, high-quality and balanced development of education and for running every school in Shanghai.
Host:
Today, we have invited Du Linlin, Principal of Fenghua Junior Middle School. Welcome.
Du Linlin:
Hello, everyone. I’m Du Linlin, Principal of Fenghua Junior Middle School (hereinafter referred to as Fenghua School).
Host:
Principal Du Linlin is a special-grade principal, a senior teacher and an educational inspector in Shanghai. She was awarded the Shanghai May 1st Labor Medal, the Shanghai March 8 Red-Banner Holders, and the Shanghai Excellent Communist Party Member. Besides, she was also the host of the fourth phase of Shanghai Double-famous Project Research Base and the outstanding representative of the principal of Shanghai Junior High School. Over the past 20 years, she has pursued the educational value of “respecting differences and promoting growth”. Thereinto, she has made the best of professional and creative courses to explore the integration of national curriculum and school-based characteristic curriculum, which aims to implement the educational requirements of the national curriculum and promote the healthy growth of students with abundant school-based curriculum for greatly improving the quality of education. Fenghua School has become an influential demonstration group school in the junior-high-school education of Shanghai.
Host:
The 24-year Party standing and more than 20 years of school-level management experience have made Du Linlin who she is, who was born in 1972, a well-known “young sophisticated principal” in Shanghai’s general education system. Over the past 20 years, she has obtained nearly 100 honors and awards by virtue of her outstanding achievements in education and teaching management, such as the special-grade principal of Shanghai, the host of the fourth phase of Shanghai Double-famous (famous principal and famous teacher) Project, and the Deputy Director of the Junior High School Education Management Specialized Committee of Shanghai Education Society.
Du Linlin:
“There must be a difference among different children, but every child has their own natural endowment. As an educator, do we need to shape all children into the same model?” This is my deep thinking and questioning after 20-year work as a principal to observe and understand different needs in children’s growth.
Host:
For you, Fenghua School is the base where you practice your educational concepts and reflect on the true meaning of education. Could you share something with us?
Du Linlin:
Fenghua School is a public school with a good reputation among people. When I first came here as the principal, I was indeed under great pressure. I’ve been thinking about how to develop the school to a new level. Due to the relatively mature routine management of the school, for me, the challenge was how to transform tangible institutional management into cultural cultivation.
Host:
As I learned, you are in such a position busy in school management, but as long as you are free, you will go down to the front line of teaching to explore ways of teaching reform with teachers. What’s more, under your influence, more and more school-level leaders and middle-level officials walk into classrooms and lesson preparation rooms where they, together with teachers, prepare lessons, study teaching, and solve real problems in classes.
Du Linlin:
That’s true. The “downward” management culture has seen “upward” development in the teachers’ profession. Thereinto, increasingly professional lesson preparation activities and further condensed cultural traits of the teaching research group allow a large number of famous teachers and teaching backbones in urban areas to emerge in “big” disciplines with more people and more strength. Besides, in some small disciplines with fewer people, such as geography, life science and art, the teaching research groups have been built into excellent ones and the teachers have made a figure time and again in various evaluations of teachers’ profession. There are no big or small disciplines and no order in cultivating people, but a must for the school to control the direction of the development of “comprehensiveness, quality, and balance”.
Host:
During the last decade in Fenghua School, especially after the merger between old Jing’an and old Zhabei, the new Jing’an District People’s Government proposed that high-quality education shall further benefit the people. Thanks to this requirement, Fenghua School has made a qualitative leap in both school capacity and the number of students.
Du Linlin:
That’s right. Especially in 2016, the school started operation by means of collectivization, which saw 3,800 students, basically tripling its student number. Actually, it’s a great challenge for the school management members, teachers, and even the whole community. We have considered if our school can remain at a high level after extending high-quality educational resources, although Fenghua School is a well-founded and well-equipped junior high school. What we have seen is not just a dramatic increase in the number of students, but a fact behind this — considerable changes in our faculty, our curriculum, and the management and governance of the school.
Du Linlin:
On the basis of “comprehensiveness, quality and balance”, we have proposed a cultural “value” of group management, with which we have established a group-based quality management and guarantee system of education in five horizontal and five vertical dimensions: the five horizontal dimensions are tangible schools, courses, disciplines, teachers, and students; the five vertical dimensions are intangible decision-making command, quality generation, supervision and control, resource construction and support services. I took the quality assessment for course implementation and quality management for daily teaching as two important management aspects to promote the double improvement of the group’s education quality and teaching quality.
Host:
Six years have witnessed undoubtedly satisfying results for you and your team and people have affirmed the school’s management with their choices.
Du Linlin:
In fact, people’s greatest expectation for education is how to help different children get the maximum development they deserve in school. Therefore, in this process, what I care about most is that the cultural cultivation of our school continuously penetrates every link of education.
Host:
Considering the huge size of Fenghua School and its large number of students, have you ever considered the differences among students?
Du Linlin:
Of course. Our school enjoys wide differences in the source of students for whom families have different educational expectations. On this account, we should particularly respect the differences among children and educate them to realize maximum growth on the original basis. To put it simply, we should respect their differences and promote their growth.
Host:
Distilling the concept of education is the beginning, and there’s still a process for transforming it into teachers’ classroom behavior and educational behavior. How can the educational concept be rooted in the mind of every faculty member? In the process of education, how to transform the educational concept into teachers’ practical behavior through curriculum setting, evaluation system, and teacher training?
Du Linlin:
In the process, I gradually accept the educational concept of “differentiated education”. Every child is different in their own way, so the school and classroom should not be regarded as the only standard and outsight for such different children. What we should do is allow children with different endowments, different specialties, and even children with different backgrounds to study happily, love to study, and be willing to study. Certainly, the most important is to encourage them to continuously achieve progress, grow up and be self-determinate.
Du Linlin:
Thereinto, it is the “differentiated curriculum system” that embodies the educational object of respecting differences and encouraging growth. Here, we have deconstructed it into four dimensions: international vision, master style, scientific spirit, and humanistic literacy. What’s more, we have developed three different types of curricula in the four dimensions, such as the national curriculum, extended curriculum, inquiry curriculum, and other school-based supporting curricula, all of which have become important curriculum resources for students to grow up in the school.
Host:
Children with differences, driven by abundant curriculum systems and the promotion of individual characteristics, have developed in an all-around way. Today, Fenghua Junior Middle School Education Group has developed 96 school-based curricula, including culture and sports, science and technology, humanities and arts, biology, etc. Both students and teachers show great enthusiasm in participation, fully showing the idiom of teaching is learning.
Du Linlin:
We believe that every child is different, and they are no good or bad for us, but different in personalities. If we show complete respect for their differences and allow them to develop their advantages, then they will “become their best selves”.
Du Linlin:
The curriculum system as well as an improved comprehensive quality evaluation system for students is an important way for me to practice “respecting differences and encouraging growth”. Since 2010, we have already started to study the comprehensive quality evaluation system. We have found that on top of needing the learning results, students also need encouragement and discovery evaluation given by teachers in their learning process. Therefore, we have brought learning habits, learning methods, and students’ participation in various activities at all levels in their learning process into the comprehensive evaluation of the subjects. To this day, we have established a very mature comprehensive evaluation platform of “My Growth Sail”, which is identical to the comprehensive evaluation system of Shanghai’s 2022 Senior High School Entrance Examination.
Du Linlin:
“My Growth Sail” helps children build positive self-cognition and realize that there is no good result unless they make an effort. Only if children gain much subject experience exclusive to themselves in subject learning, will they put more persistent interests and motivation into this subject, which is the lifelong learning ability and the most important part of children’s growth.
Host:
As you said, the score is only one dimension for evaluating students’ learning outcomes. But as we know, Fenghua School shows great value in children’s differences. On top of focusing on tangible scores, the school focuses more on intangible literacy. Could you share something with us?
Du Linlin:
What is the exact state of our children behind the scores? Actually, tangible scores are very important for high-quality schools, which is the most obvious evaluation standard of education for the people in the whole education process. Education without excellent scores cannot be described as high-quality education. But as professional educators, we should shoulder the responsibility of education behind the scores, that is the cultivation of children’s literacy and qualification.
Du Linlin:
Therefore, in our school, besides “tangible scores”, the evaluation for students also includes five dimensions of “intangible literacy” consisting of advocating morality and etiquette, boasting a positive body and mind, promoting mutual improvement, developing innovation and practice and holding openness and respect. Achieving great academic performance is one side, what we care about more is that children get more happiness and high-quality growth in their rich learning experience.
Host:
The cultivation of students’ literacy has become a requirement for today’s education. The global education circles have taken steps to carry out related exploration, besides, there has been a wave of learning from STEM and phenomena-based teaching methods in China. Then how did we go about that?
Du Linlin:
We’ve been devoting continuous efforts and repeatedly studying the new national policy documents on education to seek a desirable way. In the end, we took advantage of the past experience of the school and finally proposed “practical learning activities” as the main carrier of literacy cultivation. As I always said, China’s educational innovation does have to fully draw on international advanced educational concepts and technical means, but we should implement the premise that is to be rooted in China’s educational practice and reflect China’s educational characteristics.
Du Linlin:
Therefore, on the premise of closely following the national curriculum standards and seamless transition for daily teaching, our school integrated classroom teaching and extracurricular learning time and space to create real situations, where students are guided to comprehensively apply what they have learned to solve problems, continuously explore, and realize the integration of discipline learning, life experience, and individual practice.
Host:
Thanks to the arrangement of common fragmentary classroom practice activities, years of exploration have witnessed a parallel and spiral activity sequence accompanied by literacy development and whole-process evaluation. The activity sequence covers all 17 courses in junior high school and learning experiences inside and outside the classroom. Up to now, there are 128 cases of practical learning activities in the school, and 12 to 18 practical learning activities are available for all students to choose from on their own interests each semester. All previous green indicator tracking feedback on the academic quality of primary and secondary school students in Shanghai have shown that the comprehensive academic performance of our students has been significantly improved, the learning burden has been reduced, and there was a notable improvement in the student’s cognitive ability, cooperation ability, innovation ability, and other literacy.
Host:
Real knowledge comes from practice. The cultivation of literacy comes from practice and in turn guides students’ practice. This is also in line with the new requirements of “adhering to quality orientation, strengthening discipline practice, promoting comprehensive learning and implementing individualized teaching” emphasized in the 2022 compulsory education curriculum plan and curriculum standards.
Du Linlin:
Over the past 20 years, although I have had to face trivial educational routines every day, I have never forgotten to find self-value in the complexities so as to allow my love for education to reflect in every ordinary day. I expect every child in Fenghua to be appreciated. It’s the educators’ responsibility that they make every effort to grow up and help each child live a brilliant life.
Host:
Thanks for your sharing today, Principal Du. It has been beneficial and thought-provoking. That’s all for today. See you next time.