Teach for the Future [Homage Translate]

[Intro]

The story began since the "Flip the Classroom" workshop in NTU on the 20th of August, 2013, which was initially designed for the faculty members from NTU as well as those from other campuses to share my first-hand experience on the subject. What took me by surprise was that there were more than 200 teachers of various fields participating which far exceeded my expectation. Who would have thought that the workshop then created a new tone for education in Taiwan?

At the end of "Flip the Classroom", a special guest came for a conversation. It turned out to be the founder of KIST(ChengZhi Education) and Junyi Academy. Fang established ChengZhi Technology. With success in business, he decided to turn to education at the age of 60 and is determined to contribute more to Taiwan. In particular, Fang shows great interest in rural education.

Having spent a well half of his life in tech industries, Fang has deeply recognized the importance of future talents of Taiwan. As a result of decreasing birth rates, every child plays a great role as a human resource. Depending merely on urbanites to carry the whole development is far from enough. However, it is imperative not to neglect the gap between rural education and that in the cities; a change of the status quo is needed. That being said, the only way Fang believes to narrow the differences under such little resource is "Flip the Classroom". Hence, without hesitation, he created an NPO called Junyi Educational Platform with thousands of learning videos, aiming to change the education in Taiwan.

The reasons Fang came to me is one, offering me the opportunity to join the foundation as the director for the prosperity of "Flip the Classroom" in Taiwan. The other is that he wishes to see me keep cooperating with NTU and create more workshops like this one for other teachers in primary schools. I was profoundly moved by Fang's dedication to education and agreed to both because I know how important they are. Since then, we started organizing and held our first large-scale workshop for primary school teachers on the 25th of January, 2014. Due to the limited space from the venue, we could only enroll 250 of more than 800 teachers. Many of the participants were even from Kinmen, Mazu, and Lyudao. They flew here early in the morning. The passion of Taiwanese teachers was something I didn't expect.

Using the success from workshops in the north, Junyi later held several "Flip the Classroom" workshops in eastern, central, southern, and other rural areas. Because of it, I got to know many passionate and prestigious teachers which later became partners in propelling our goal everywhere in Taiwan. In these couple of years, I have had more than 200 speeches in the name of "flipping". Due to constant traveling, I often had my lunchboxes and dinners boxes on the HSR.

[Counter-strike: From its root, bottom-up]

Why would a college professor be so interested in primary education? I've given lectures for 15 years, 10 of which in Taiwan taught me the cause of issues college students have. It comes from the excessive focus on the pursuit of entering college during primary education. For instance, students are not keen on delivering ideas in discussions or feeling difficult not to have a standardized answer. No matter how hard we try to change that in their college years, it is improbable to completely make up the loss back then. Furthermore, what we are encountering is the global competitions, high-paced world which our students' aren't prepared for. Change is inevitable. This is why we need to start not from advanced education but from teachers in primary schools in order to have an solid impact in Taiwan's education.

It isn't easy trying to change the system. For more than 20 years in the past, there weren't many who attempted and none made it. Should we be the first to succeed, we must use a new approach to win. What should we do though?

To look closely at previous reforms, they seemed to all come from government orders in a top-down fashion. The government pushed for new methodologies and policies which did involve teachers to participate but only for the short-term because they did it to keep their jobs, filling all kinds of forms for the evaluation that eventually made teachers hate it for reasons namely, waste of time, lack of rest, unable to prepare lessons. What teachers really want is to spend quality class time for their students, not finishing more than 200 pages of forms a year for show, counted by a school principal once.

Changing the education requires teachers; changing a teacher must reach deeply in the heart, not by force. Suppression will gain nothing but obedience on the surface, not the core. To be a good teacher, we need to use our heart; if you cannot change a teacher's heart, filling with pride and joy for the job, how do we expect them to do so to students?

Often times, we hear "compliment instead of blame" is the way to teach children. Isn't it strange how that's the way for students and we give our teachers such negativity? We see the media, society taking a few bad examples from some teachers, and exaggerate the story into the norm and blame all the teachers. Honesty, that's not going to help.

The present system needs those who believe in change and betterment for education, not fighting over some bad cases because no one wins, let along being productive.

This time, we decided to walk a whole new path in "flipping". We're using the bottom-up approach. Inspire, relate, and through communities, we will help teachers do what they truly want. Anyone can make data but to have a brand-new class, that's something only a motivated teacher can do.

With these beloved "Flippers", we began to set fires. One of the biggest problems in the education in Taiwan is the refusal of teachers to share a good lesson they made. They worry the label of "high-profiling" thus t teachers kept all the skills and innovations and retire with them which is a great pity. We have started to see the change though, after two years of inspiring speeches, workshops, and seminars, teachers really become more prone to share their ideas without the fear of that label!

[Make Change: Light up Taiwan, Power Sharing]

Even by the slight difference in not being too afraid, the new atmosphere is something worth cheering for. We need more and more teachers to share their hard work in order to have much better lessons. It is an unstoppable trend in which teachers are willingly making improvements, not by authority or the pressure of evaluations. On Teacher's Day in 2014, we held a speech about "Flipping" in Minde Junior High School in Taichung and came 2,236 teachers voluntarily for the whole weekend. This set the record of participants and gave me a shock. There are so many teachers who are self-motivated in helping students! Pay attention to this trend, everyone, and those in the government because while you still at ways of enrollment for schools, there are many teachers going far beyond your puny concerns. While you are treading on a system that has no way of satisfying all parties, these teachers have put their thoughts on real education. Isn't that the real question, how to teach better? If in society, we care only on how to choose schools rather than how to be schooled, there's no school at all. The future of education in Taiwan lies in the efforts and progress of great teachers.

I am delighted to know that after years of "the fire", we see a growing number of teachers coming out to share what they have. It is at this time that I started thinking about the next phase for me. What's something only I can do? And after careful thinking, I realized that I need to provide deeper structure in the theory and real cases to support their lessons. In the past speeches which usually took 3.5 hours, participants usually felt fired up at the moment but soon fell back to confusion, not knowing how to apply new ideas into their own lessons due to lack of actual methods. Using only imagination, teachers failed to flip the class and down goes their fire.

Hoping to change that, I decided to provide detailed and complete discussions and turn all my 15 years of experience in innovative education, the techniques developed from "Flip the Classroom" and my concepts for teaching people for the future, all into one book. I'd like this book to offer some insights for those who want to teach students better and those who want to raise their children better and maybe even, for some people to have a "taste(sense)" of education.

With all my 15 years of experience in this book, let's first discuss how we, as educators, make our lives meaningful. After that, we will continue deeper on what kinds of key talents we should help develop in this globalized and competitive world. At last, we focus on innovations in education along with concepts and methods in accordance with BTS teachings-For the students! By the students! Of the students.

Due to the fact that most discussions on "Flip the Classroom" in the world usually stay under just talks of principles and lack details on practice, allow me to introduce my BTS teachings in the following chapters to my fellow teachers and parents. With BTS, we make learning more thorough, and even without homework and grading. It does sound like a pitch in direct sales but it is absolutely something we can achieve.

At the end of the book, we will come back to the issue of how to create motivation for students in learning, which is the most important aspect of teachers and our life's work. I find that appropriate to read before you finish. Afterward, I hope teachers would start pondering on how to create learning motives for students instead of just telling them that they need to learn "because it's important" or "you'll see in the future".

I hereby dedicate my work to all the passionate teachers in Taiwan, to the teachers that taught me, to my father, who made me want to be a teacher and of course to my wife and Mom, who bear the stress and burden because of my dream to change the education in Taiwan.

Finally, here's a quote that I really like:

"A good teacher is like a candle- it consumes itself to light the way for others."

Let's encourage one another and light up the education in Taiwan.

Ben

#translation