Around this problem, schools all over the country have made many attempts. Apart from these "pre-courses" and various summer camps with the nature of "pre-courses", can we go further and let universities directly help senior high schools with supplementary courses? Where is the entry point? In this regard, the reporter conducted an investigation and interview.
The combination of university and high school mostly stays on the surface.
Many high schools invite university teachers as consultants, but they pay more attention to the subject value, which is far from the real curriculum implementation.
In fact, even if there is no wave of popularization of higher education, there have been many explorations on the connection between universities and high schools from national to local.
Since 2000, Nanjing Normal University has established a team under the leadership of Professor Wang Jian. With the unique advantages of normal university, we began to explore the road of collaborative innovation of "two-way docking, integration, interaction and interactive enjoyment" between middle school education and normal university education, and gradually extended it to more than 20 cities in Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces, and 100 counties and districts.
Starting from 20 13, the Ministry of Education and China Association for Science and Technology jointly launched the "Talents Program" to carry out the pilot work of cultivating middle school students' scientific and technological innovation reserve talents in 20 national key universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University and Fudan University. In recent years, some "local" talent programs have emerged one after another, such as the "Spring Bamboo Shooting Program" implemented by the Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education, which selects outstanding high school students to contact university courses in advance; The Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education decided 14 that ordinary high schools should carry out the pilot training of top-notch innovative talents, strengthen the close cooperation between ordinary high schools and universities and research institutes, and innovate the talent training mode, and so on.
But even this would not be enough As far as the current situation is concerned, the combination of university and high school is still mostly superficial. For example, at an academic conference, middle school teachers and university teachers attending the conference discuss the knowledge of academic frontier together; Some universities often organize middle school teachers to carry out training, and middle schools also invite university teachers as instructors or consultants. In the process of promoting high school curriculum base in Jiangsu in recent years, many high schools will invite university teachers as experts, tutors or consultants, but they pay more attention to the subject value, which is far from the real curriculum implementation.
Someone once compared the relationship between high school education and university education to two circles, which are tangent but not intersecting, and tangent is external rather than internal. The cut-off point between high school education and university education is the college entrance examination. However, this tangent point itself may be an important reason for separating the two. Shi Zhongying, a professor at Beijing Normal University, said that the narrowing of the goal of high school education has led to fierce competition among high school students, shrinking academic system of high school, external evaluation standard of high school quality with college entrance examination as the hero, and the complex of being the champion of college entrance examination. "And this has forgotten the essence and core purpose of high school education, distorted the value of high school education, and even more worrying is that students are not adapted to the study and life of university majors, and their development potential is insufficient." .
"With the popularization of higher education, it is a trend to change from exam-oriented education to quality education. This trend is inevitable, and hard study has little effect." Wang Jian said that in the past, the curriculum of middle schools was relatively tight and there was no time to give lectures. Now the attention to academics has increased, and middle school teachers want to know the frontier of disciplines, which creates basic conditions for curriculum cooperation between universities and ordinary high schools.
In this context, the status of normal university gives Nanjing Normal University a good environment. "If normal universities don't pay attention to basic education, which schools will?" In Wang Jian's view, normal universities bear certain social responsibilities. In the process of transformation to quality education, normal universities should pay attention to the growth of ordinary senior high school teachers, the construction of teaching materials and curriculum reform.
Since 2000, Wang Jian led the team to cooperate with the teaching and research departments in Jiangsu, Shandong and other places to carry out the teaching collaborative innovation practice of benign interaction between normal education and middle school education, explore the "five collaborative" innovation path of "teaching and research collaboration, textbook collaboration, training collaboration, evaluation collaboration and platform collaboration", build a geography comprehensive textbook system that meets the requirements of discipline and social development at the same time, and explore a "two-way docking" between middle school education and normal education. This also means that Nanjing Normal University has made a rare breakthrough in cooperating with high school education in running courses. In 20 14, this achievement, which was jointly completed by universities and middle schools, won the second prize of the national basic education teaching achievement.
"There are five special geography teachers in our city, all of whom graduated from Nanjing Normal University." Zhu Zeng, a Yangzhou teacher who has participated in the project for a long time, described this cooperation as "natural close cooperation". "Later, we went back to Nanjing Normal University in three days, and even took the teaching materials and specific lesson preparation notes to Nanjing Normal University and asked the professor to revise them. As soon as we change them, it will be twenty or thirty opinions. "
Collaborative innovation is the most effective for the deep connection between universities and high schools.
Collaborative innovation can overcome the disadvantages of self-contained system and lack of connection between middle school textbooks and university textbooks.
The connection between universities and high schools has been paid more and more attention, even an international topic, but there are not many practical methods. Many experts call for solving the problem from the sense of responsibility and mission of educational development.
Nowadays, the emergence of various network platforms provides a lot of convenience for middle school students to share university-level courses, participate in university-level courses and obtain online credits. Many colleges and universities also offer leadership training programs for high school students, and jointly carry out curriculum development, textbook compilation, education and teaching research, and hold disciplinary meetings. However, they have long faced institutional obstacles. How to establish a long-term mechanism between universities and middle schools, such as the system of part-time jobs and mutual mobility of university professors and high school teachers, is still a path problem to be faced in the future.
"The most effective way to solve the problems of insufficient integration between middle school education and normal education, lagging docking, and disconnection between pre-service education and post-service education of middle school teachers is collaborative innovation." Wang Jian said, "We have been exploring 14 years how to coordinate innovation, where is the path of collaborative innovation and how to establish the mechanism of collaborative innovation. From 2000 to 2003, collaborative teaching and research and path exploration; From 2004 to 2008, the construction of comprehensive collaborative innovation; 2009-20 13, practice test, perfect demonstration. "
In detail, Wang Jian's collaborative innovation is actually divided into "five collaborations" such as "teaching and research collaboration, teaching materials collaboration, training collaboration, evaluation collaboration and platform collaboration". Among them, the so-called collaborative textbook research and development means that college teachers "go on" and design and compile middle school geography textbooks in an integrated way, overcoming the disadvantages of self-contained system and lack of connection between middle school textbooks and university textbooks, and realizing seamless connection between middle school and university geography textbooks.
"These five synergies can be summarized as" going up ","building a platform "and" building a system ",all of which have played an extremely important role." Wang Jian said, for example, collaborative teaching research and collaborative application teaching research projects have formed a collaborative innovation team and collaborative innovation mechanism between middle schools and normal universities; Collaborative teaching evaluation, in the teaching evaluation of middle school and normal university, teachers of normal university and middle school are experts, which breaks down the barriers of different teaching situations and plays a role in mutual understanding, integration and promotion.
The first is to "go on", not only colleges and universities, but also teachers. Wang Jian believes that middle school teachers welcome university teachers to give lectures and make teaching materials, but not all university teachers are willing to go, so Nanjing Normal University has always advocated university teachers to take the initiative to "go on". But "going on" is easier said than done, but in reality, practical difficulties are often encountered.
As far as teachers are concerned, the concerns of middle schools and universities are only completely different in teaching and scientific research. Middle school teachers mainly study education and teaching, such as focusing on curriculum standards, norms, teaching methods, teaching models and teaching evaluation, aiming at teaching categories; And university teachers face the international frontier to conduct research, such as studying academic problems in mathematics, Chinese, geography and other fields.
"In the field of normal education, university teachers can seize the international frontier, while middle school teachers are based on practice." Wang Jian said that with the development of high school education, people began to pay more attention to the subject value, and many excellent high schools returned to the subject itself to do courses, which brought opportunities for cooperation between the two sides. "What the school is trying to do now is mainly around normal education and basic education. University teachers grasp the international frontier, and middle school teachers are based on practice, forming a collaborative innovation team and collaborative innovation mechanism between middle schools and normal universities."
Out of this understanding, with the help of the advantages of normal university, Wang Jian's team successfully found a middleman-the teaching and research section is the "middleman" connecting universities and middle schools-the teaching and research section of primary and secondary schools. "A university teacher corresponds to a middle school teacher or a university corresponds to a middle school. However, through the teaching and research section, teacher training can transfer the research results and ideas of university teachers' academic frontier to many teachers, even teachers in the whole province. "Wang Jian said that the teaching and research section is the focus and plays the role of a bridge.
Giving full play to the role of the teaching and research section has also brought great benefits to the development of the curriculum. To start the compilation of frontier teaching materials, university teachers need to play a role to ensure that the teaching materials can be "based". Teaching researchers and middle school teachers, as the first line at the grass-roots level, are the people who know students and teaching practice best, and can make the compilation of teaching materials closer to students. From the demand of teaching materials, how to convey the advanced ideas of universities to middle school teachers requires the teaching and research section to carry out training in time and organize teaching and research activities.
With these preconditions, more mechanisms are needed to ensure and promote continuous cooperation. At present, in many colleges and universities, university teachers can calculate the workload by writing articles and publishing monographs, but middle school textbooks are not the workload of university teachers. "Problems in the university system and mechanism lead to the lack of enthusiasm of ordinary university teachers to pay attention to the compilation of middle school textbooks and basic education." Wang Jian said frankly that there is an urgent need to encourage universities and middle schools to jointly declare projects from policies and mechanisms, including joint development of courses that meet the needs of society. The cooperation between teaching and research put forward by Nanjing Normal University is aimed at this point, which is the bottleneck problem of the cooperation between universities and middle schools.
"At present, the cooperation between universities and middle schools is spontaneous, decentralized and unstable, which requires policy support from government departments." Wang Jian suggested that the government or the education department, including the teaching and research section, encourage from the policy, support from the system and mechanism, provide funds, stipulate the proportion of participating university teachers and middle school teachers, set up some joint research projects around the topic, and even establish cooperation bases or centers to create conditions for cooperation between the two sides.
In Nanjing Normal University, Wang Jian specially set up a teaching material research and development center, a teaching demonstration center, a teaching practice base, a teacher training base, a teaching forum, a "geographical ladder" and other cooperation and exchange platforms, forming a normal mechanism of cooperation and interaction. For example, the geography textbook research and development center specially invites excellent teachers and special-grade teachers from ordinary high schools as special researchers of the center to discuss the curriculum and textbook compilation of high schools with university teachers.
Break down the barrier between university and high school teaching.
Breaking down barriers can make middle school students share the spirit of university and pay attention to the improvement of students' personality and the cultivation of citizens.
"Universities actively participate in the production of high school courses, which is different from running' top-notch classes'. Not for students, nor for' picking peaches', but for advocating scientific education and teaching concepts. Although the middle school textbooks we compiled can't be considered as workload, the new concepts and systems serve students and have also produced certain social benefits. " Wang Jian said.
The results of collaborative interaction are obvious. The related teaching and research papers published by the team have been cited more than 200 times and reprinted by the National People's Congress for more than 30 times. The popularity of the course is even more obvious. Research on Middle School Geography Curriculum Standards and Textbooks was rated as an excellent resource course in Jiangsu Province, and Physical Geography and Human Environment was rated as a national excellent video open class, with a broadcast volume of 200,000 times. "This provides a model for comprehensive" process education "in geography teaching in normal universities." Yang Jiuquan, editor-in-chief of Journal of East China Normal University (Education Science Edition), once commented: "This achievement has made a major breakthrough in overcoming the dislocation between middle school education and normal education, which is an example."
In the final analysis, since cooperation is mutual, the benefits must also be mutual. For both sides, it is to explore the integrated design and research and development mechanism of middle school and university textbooks, realize the seamless docking of middle school and university geography textbooks, and the two-way timely docking of textbooks with subject development and social needs.
For the field of basic education, the research and development ability of geography teachers in relevant middle schools has been greatly improved because of their participation in curriculum construction. In Jiangsu province alone, 14 teachers have grown into special-grade teachers in the past five years, and the number has doubled. Zhu also told reporters that this cooperation has effectively promoted the improvement of the teaching and research level of Yangzhou geography teachers. In the past five years, five research projects have won the first and second prizes of provincial teaching and scientific research achievements, and the number is far ahead of the sum of ten years.
For Nanjing Normal University, the barrier between university and middle school teaching has been broken, the professional quality of geography normal students has been improved, and the number of outstanding undergraduate papers in Jiangsu Province, the first prize of the national field survey essay competition for geography undergraduates in colleges and universities, and the first prize of the basic skills competition for normal students in Jiangsu Province have increased. "According to the employer, the post adaptation time of normal students is shortened by 1-2 years." Zhao Yuan, a team member and professor of Nanjing Normal University, told the reporter, "If nothing else, we normal students have learned many vivid teaching cases from middle school teachers."
As an obvious return, Nanjing Normal University has been able to introduce a large number of middle school teachers to teach geography directly in the classroom. "That is to say, we have constructed and practiced the interactive training mode of geography teachers in middle schools, which includes academic and normal schools, theory and practice, pre-service and post-service, and normal colleges and middle schools." Wang Jian said that for normal colleges, this kind of good ecology is valuable for the healthy and sustainable growth of middle school geography teachers.
But the significance of breaking down barriers goes far beyond this. Shi Zhongying believes that the vision of the connection between middle school and university is to "surpass the college entrance examination" and let middle school students share the university spirit in senior three. The training goal is mainly to pay attention to students' academic achievements, personality improvement and citizen training in universities.