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Home » Supplement » Education

The well-rounded approach to education

By Zhao Wen | October 28, 2014, Tuesday | Print Edition

THE International Baccalaureate Diploma Program was postponed at Fudan International School five years ago due to strong opposition from both teachers and parents.

Fast-forward to the present and both local and international students are competing to enter the program. The school opened the international curriculum for Chinese students in September with about 400 seeking one of 20 spots.

Yang Yongzhen, deputy director and IB coordinator at Fudan International School said the switch is due to parents changing their attitude toward education.

“More and m ore parents want their children to be both academically savvy but become an all-around person, which is at the core of IBDP,” she said.

The IBDP was originally designed to teach the children of diplomats. The two-year pre-college curriculum was created to prepare students for higher education and life in a global society.

As globalization affects people in tremendous ways, many schools in China have introduced the IB program. Currently, 63 schools across the country — nearly double from 2009 — offer the curriculum authorized by the International Baccalaureate Organization.

In Shanghai, 15 local and international schools offer IBDP.

Fudan International School, which recruits mainly overseas-passport holders, started to apply for IBDP in 2008, two years after it opened. It was already offering Advanced Placement courses, which are for elite high school students. AP allows such students to study college courses with the results being used toward college credits.

“If a school just wants to have some international courses and let their students earn college credits, then AP is enough. But if it wants to cultivate students into talented all-round individuals, I recommend the IBDP,” Yang said.

Yang said the application period was quite difficult. A few teachers opposed it because they didn’t know how to teach IB courses, while parents thought studying AP would lead to better chances of their kids entering American universities since it originated in the United States.
Yang said the school introduced IBDP because it wants to prepare students for life, not just college.

“The AP examinations are more test based, while IBDP evaluates students research skills, communication skills, thinking skills and time-management skills and even social skills,” Yang said.

She also said about one-third of the world’s IB schools are in the US, which shows the country values the curriculum.

After reaching a common understanding with teachers and parents, Fudan International School began IBDP in 2010, while continuing to provide AP curriculum.

IBDP students study six subjects. They can choose five subjects from the first five groups including language and literature, language acquisition, social sciences, sciences and mathematics. As for the sixth subject, they can choose either an arts subject or a second subject from the first five groups.

Students also need to attend three corecourses including TOK (Theory of Knowledge), CAS (Creative, Action and Service) and EE (Extended Essay) to help students apply knowledge and skills.

“IBDP advocates each school to think globally and act locally.” Yang said.

Yang’s opinions are echoed by Jiang Hao, IB coordinator of Shanghai High School International Division, which became an IB World school in 1995 and has around 3,000 international students.

“We cannot agree more with the goal of the IBDP curriculum to cultivate students into people who are proactive, passionate, caring, and lifelong learners,” Jiang said.

Jiang said another feature of IBDP is that it has both internal and external assessments, which evaluates students not only from test scores but also on research projects, oral tests and lab experiment work.

In April, 21 Shanghai high schools were approved to offer international curriculum such as IBDP, AP and others. The Shanghai Education Commission said the pilot program is aimed to draw upon international experience to help reform the local curriculum.

Compared with international students, Chinese students, though good at taking tests, lag behind in English proficiency, the ability to discuss issues in class and answer broad questions.

“The students remain silent in class and are used to taking notes and asking for the right answers,” Yang said about the students from local schools. “They had no idea they had to give attribution when using information from websites such as Wikipedia.”

Yang said students from local school usually need at least one quarter or semester even one year to get used to different learning styles, diverse type of assignment, such as presentation, essays, project, lab reports, etc.

In terms of using IBDP experience to help with local curriculum reform, Yang said there were so far little outcome as the international curriculum class has just started.

However, she said local curriculum can learn from the IBDP about assessment and activities required.

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