Behind the masks: a Confucius Classroom

One day in April, while Texas was still in lockdown amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, students from the International Leadership Texas (ILT) Arlington-Grand Prairie High School and Hainan Middle School in Sanya, China, enjoyed a joint class in Chinese and English through an online platform.

Online classrooms have become the norm for schools around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform can bring students together in ways a traditional classroom can't.

ILT is a chartered public primary school system with about 19,500 students in four Texas cities, including Houston and Dallas. It prepares students for roles in the international community by emphasizing leadership. Students are required to master English, Spanish and Chinese, and they learn subjects in the three languages.

The school system has teamed up with the Beijing-based Confucius Institute to bring Chinese language learning to its campuses. The Confucius Institute, operated by the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), mainly operates on college and university campuses worldwide, but it has also instituted a Confucius Classroom program to bring instructors and teaching materials to high schools like ILT.

The ILT's Confucius Classrooms have more than 120 teachers of Chinese language, according to He Yunchi, the school system's Confucius Classroom director.

"ILT Superintendent Edward Conger immediately instructed all the teachers to train for online teaching as soon as Texas' governor issued shelter-in-place orders (on March 27)," said He.

"After one week of training, all the teachers became online class hosts. The school system also offered Zoom training to parents," He added, referencing the online conferencing software.

He said that ILT Chinese director and two instructional coaches assumed leadership roles to provide online teaching materials and conduct online teaching training.

"The Chinese teachers also employed other software such as Nearpod, Pear Deck, Google Classroom to make the online class more interesting, interactive and rich in content. Other tools are used for homework and quizzes," He said.

On April 4, Chinese teacher Yang Dandan at ILT Arlington-Grand Prairie High School and teacher Wei Hong at Hainan Middle School decided to hold a joint language and culture class across the Pacific Ocean.

"The class lasted two hours. The students introduced themselves to each other in both English and Chinese. As a way to know about each other, they used both languages to ask each other questions, such as school learning materials, online class experiences, hobbies such as volleyball, basketball, dance and such," He said.

The students from both countries also sang songs, played instruments and danced for each other as a way to know each other better. In addition, they taught each other some of the most popular phrases in China and the US.

"The online joint class was concluded with everybody singing a Chinese pop song, The Moon Represents My Heart," He said.

Chinese student Lin Kuan wrote to ILT afterward: "I am very happy to have the opportunity to make exchanges with American students. I learned some popular American buzzwords and what the American students enjoy as hobbies. I hope there will be a next time in the future."

Chinese teacher Shen Chunmei at Ursuline Academy of Dallas incorporated dance into her online class to keep students stimulated.

Sometimes students would lose focus after sitting in front of a screen for a long period of time. To help them focus, Shen invited the students to stand up and dance for a few minutes in the middle of teaching.

"Teacher Shen and students danced together on the screen, and you can hear laughter and singing mixed together. Her students often find the time flies by fast," He said.

Chinese teacher Zhao Wanchen at the Westwood School also emphasizes interaction for online teaching. She even incorporated online games into teaching Chinese to keep her students engaged.

Speaking of her online teaching experience in the past month, Zhao said: "The novel coronavirus changed the way the students learn. However, they are proactive facing this new challenge. The new challenge brings them new stimulus. The new learning environment is like a bowl of sour and spicy soup to stimulate the students to put more of themselves into studying."