Designed for Professionals

In Shanghai, even the physical layout of schools is set up to encourage teachers to work together in professional collaboration. In fact, according to NCEE’s Empowered Educators study, the structure of Chinese schools “creates an expectation of joint or collective work and decision making for teachers and establishes a different set of expectations for the daily work of teaching in China when compared to U.S. schools.” Teachers in this system are expected to work with colleagues as teacher-researchers who are constantly improving their collective teaching practices.