The Curriculum

I think the main challenges of Chinese School of Delawre are three parts:

The first part is that there are very few learning activities between the two Sundays. Students come to Sunday and study for 2.5 hours and unless they are self starters or their parents are conscientious about the learning, other students engaged very little learning activities between two Sundays. This is what I called sporadic or “discrete” learning. There has be a way to help our students in their learning between weekends and enhance their skills.

I am a strong believer that a good education comes from three areas: school, family, and the community. Only these three work together than a well balanced education can be provided.

The second challenge is the vertical alignment. Vertical alignment menas the curriculum is continuous. In another words, a teacher receiving his/her fourth grade students, for example, can expect what students have been learning when they were 3rd grade. At this time, our school’s vertical alignment is not perfect. Teachers in each garde level have great freedom and flexiblility in deciding what to cover and how much should be covered. Our new curriculum hopefully can address this issue so students can have a continuous learning. The challenge from the school, though, is that there are times school has to combine classes due to low enrollment. The students affected by this merge are not doubt having some difficulties. This is something the community members of this blog can help to address and propose solutions.

The third challenge is that Chinese School of Delaware no longer has “heritage students” as majority. Heritage students refer to those students who have the opportunity in practicing their Chinese in speaking, listening, some reading and writing at home. We have more and more “non-heritage students” enrolled in our school and most of these students’ parents do not have the advantage to teach them or provide any learning experience. One possible solution for this challenge is to use audio/video or podcasting to provide additional learning activities. This is something worth to discuss and propose solutions.