Flipping the Script—“Flipping Chinese” Puts Students in Charge
Liu Yingfeng / photos Jimmy Lin / tr. by Geof Aberhart
November 2014
At Taipei’s Zhongshan Girls’ High School, one Chinese literature teacher’s new take on the subject has created a stir on campus, and the ripples are being felt across Taiwan’s schools.
Zhang Huicheng’s “Flipping Chinese,” with its encouragement for students to “learn, consider, and communicate,” has met with a rapturous welcome from teachers tired of the staid traditional approach. This bottom-up approach to teaching has sparked a revolution, turning once passive students into the masters of the classroom by inspiring them to take the lead in thinking about and discussing their lessons.
As the bell rings at Zhongshan Girls’ High School signaling the start of the first class of the afternoon—Chinese literature—many of the students are still trying to shake off their noontime naps. At the back of the classroom, teachers from Banqiao, Xindian, and elsewhere around New Taipei City sit lined up, waiting to observe the class.
Teacher Zhang Huicheng distributes a handout in silence, and after taking it the students begin discussing it among themselves. Twenty minutes in, Zhang finally picks up his microphone and calls a student up to the front to speak. As soon as she’s finished, hands shoot up across the classroom.
Over the course of the 50- minute class, Zhang speaks for barely half of the time. Instead, the time is mostly occupied by free-flowing discussions between students, the engaged masters of the classroom.
Seizing a spare moment, Zhang talks to the assembled observers; “Listen to them—they’re not chatting. They’ve been energized through both thought and action instead of just vegetating in the classroom.”
Self-guided learning, in-depth thinking, and communicating ideas are the three core pillars of the innovative Flipping Chinese approach, an approach that is the fruit of 15 years of hard work on the part of Zhang.
On the Flipping Chinese website, an article by Zhang explains his motivations for developing and promoting the approach. “I truly want to change education in Taiwan, and slowly but surely my meager individual efforts have grown and accumulated, ultimately becoming a teaching method that is the flipside of traditional teaching. Why would we want to do this? Because the students really benefit from it!”
Since last September, Zhang has faced criticism for his deviation from the norm, but he has stood firm, throwing open the doors to his classroom and inviting outside observers to see what he is doing. And to help spread his ideas, he has also traveled the island giving seminars. So far, over 2000 observers have visited his classroom, and in the past six months over 20 elementary, junior high, and senior high school teachers have joined the crusade and started a grassroots revolution in Taiwanese teaching.
After chewing over and digesting what they’re learning, students are no longer afraid to speak up in class.
It is late September, and Lin Zijun is at the front of her classroom at Taipei’s Yongji Elementary School, teaching about children’s writer Chen Zhaoyi’s piece “Running Track.” She distributes some picture books from abroad with a variety of questions attached to provoke the students into thinking about the books. When she collects the students’ answers, Lin is astonished—it turns out all the students really needed was the opportunity to express themselves.
Lin first encountered the Flipping Chinese approach in January, and has observed a handful of Zhang’s classes. Feeling stymied and frustrated in her work, when the new semester began this February, she decided to try putting Zhang’s ideas into action. Instead of lecturing the students herself on the ideas and structures in each text, she put the students in the driver’s seat, encouraging them to try and understand the texts themselves. Students who once would burst into tears at the idea of speaking in front of the class started to find their self-confidence, expressing themselves clearly and offering surprising answers and insights.
With what the world demands of us changing rapidly, says Lin, traditional ideas about education need to change too. After graduating from National Pingtung Teachers College (now National Pingtung University) in 1991, Lin took up work as an elementary teacher, but found herself unable to adjust to the school culture. She left education briefly to work as a management consultant, teaching office workers to become better communicators. In that job, Lin found that many of her new students lacked an understanding of good manners, among other problems, and determined that the cause lay in their education. In 1999, she decided to return to formal teaching work.
Since putting the Flipping Chinese approach into action this year, the entire student–teacher relationship has changed. “More importantly, we can come together to share our experiences, meaning we’re no longer fighting for change alone,” she says.
After chewing over and digesting what they’re learning, students are no longer afraid to speak up in class.
But Flipping Chinese is far from the first such effort. Two years before joining the ranks of Flipping Chinese earlier this year, Guo Jincheng, a civics teacher at Kaohsiung’s Yingming Junior High, had already begun experimenting with his teaching. Since January 2013 Guo’s blog has accumulated over 100 posts on his efforts, going into detail on his class design philosophy and the implementation of those ideas. His position is that classes shouldn’t just be about imparting “facts,” but should also lay the foundations for students to become thoughtful, informed, engaged citizens. “This isn’t something that can be done just by focusing on grades and memorization,” he notes.
Guo was first inspired to try something different in 2001, when he attended a workshop by the Humanistic Education Foundation during his teaching practicum. However, it wasn’t until he went to a conference on creative thinking staged by Intel in 2008 that his ideas began taking shape. He began attending all kinds of seminars, volunteering to represent the school at them whenever possible. After four years of thought and study, in 2012 he finally set to putting his innovative approach to education into action.
In addition to the usual textbooks, Guo makes use of tools like news articles and online video to get his students thinking. He also gets the kids excited through puzzles and games, with the higher-level kids leading teams in competition.
Last year Guo met Zhang at a seminar at Providence University, and after discovering that the two were of a similar mind about education in Taiwan, he joined the Flipping Chinese ranks.
Thinking back to his first day teaching a Flipping Chinese class open to observation, Guo laughs that despite being fully prepared, he was still worried about being judged by the observing teachers, a nervous look on his face all through the class. With a semester of it behind him now, Guo has gotten used to having observers drop by, and his efforts are starting to pay off in the students’ results.
“Putting the students at the center of learning is a big shift in the teaching paradigm. It’s not an easy thing,” says Guo, who had previously written off teaching as a career due to the stereotyped image of the job he had in his head.
Looking at the traditional approach to teaching, unchanged for generations, Guo felt frustrated and angry. Once he got onto the front lines himself, he put his money where his mouth was, finding that putting the students first presented opportunities for both sides to learn from one another. He also found that there were many other teachers like himself, trying out their own ideas and working within the current system.
This summer Guo organized a teachers’ conference, and even without government incentives to attract participants, he was able to draw more than a dozen teachers, a demonstration that there are plenty of others like him out there. “That kind of realization, the kind that comes with teachers seeing change in action, can help them regain their dignity,” he remarks. Efforts at change like this are, as Zhang Huicheng says, “something that even just one person can do.”
A civics class at Kaohsiung’s Yingming Junior High School incorporates tabletop games and an MLB-style draft system to spark students’ enthusiasm and inspire discussion.
Husband and wife Shi Xinyuan and Yan Meiwen are both teachers at Sanxia’s Longpu Elementary School. After being inspired by one of Zhang’s seminars in January, the two decided to put to use the ideas of Flipping Chinese just a month later, in the school’s second semester.
At first, Yan had trouble with the change, finding old habits hard to break. In the past she had followed the traditional lecture style, but in the Flipping Chinese approach, classroom time is turned over to the students. “Sometimes I finish class having barely said a word, almost like I wasn’t there at all,” she says. The students, meanwhile, had spent so long sitting silently in class and were so used to the idea of the One Right Answer that at first they would just sit and wait for the answer to any question she posed.
To try to turn things around, Yan stopped offering answers entirely, instead asking more to elicit answers from the students. “Even if it’s something with a clear answer, like ‘What is one plus one,’ they still have to speak up and explain their reasoning. Getting them to speak rather than just calculate is the only way you can really see if they understand,” says Yan.
Seeing a small revolution take place in Yan’s classroom inspired Shi, who had previously just been helping out, to step away from his 13-year job in administration to go onto the front lines himself as a “veteran newbie.” Without his wife’s nine years of experience in teaching, Shi, a graduate of National Taipei Teachers College (now National Taipei University of Education), started briefly as a form teacher before spending the bulk of his career in administration. Now, to get used to the realities of teaching again, he has chosen to once more spend a year as a form teacher.
Shi—with whom students are on a first-name basis—considers himself an anomaly in the teaching world. Always a ball of activity, Shi once got his students together to make a short film during computer class. In class he is prone to letting his emotions show, even jumping on his desk in the middle of a lecture. In parallel to the Flipping Chinese approach, in 2013 Shi and Yan also got involved in the “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) movement after attending a seminar on it.
Trying to innovate in education can be an uncertain thing, but Shi reassures his wife and himself with the belief that “if we fail, we’ll have plenty of evidence that that way doesn’t work, but if we do nothing, nothing will change at all.” He himself considers their approach “Education 1.01,” a small number of likeminded individuals coming together on top of the existing structure. “When enough of those 0.01s come together, we’ll have the strength of a full 1.”
Lin Zijun, Guo Jincheng, Shi Xinyuan, and Yan Meiwen, inspired by the Flipping Chinese approach, are planting the seeds of a revolution in education. By constantly sharing their achievements and frustrations both through seminars and on the Internet, “teachers are inspiring teachers, sparking change from the grassroots and changing the face of the classroom,” says Shi.
Many small revolutions are taking place in classrooms, touching teachers, inspiring students, and changing the face of education. The photo shows Lin Zijun (far left) and her class at Yongji Elementary School in Taipei.
After chewing over and digesting what they’re learning, students are no longer afraid to speak up in class.
After chewing over and digesting what they’re learning, students are no longer afraid to speak up in class.
A civics class at Kaohsiung’s Yingming Junior High School incorporates tabletop games and an MLB-style draft system to spark students’ enthusiasm and inspire discussion.
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