Welcome Principal Jon Fei to DHSZ
We are very excited to welcome Principal Jon Fei to Dulwich International High School Suzhou in August！
Mr. Fei is the Founding Principal at Dehong International Chinese School Shanghai, the deputy Principal of Suzhou High School of Jiangsu Province and Principal of Suzhou Lida Middle School. He also helped found Suzhou High School-SIP.
His experiences of teaching and school management training home and abroad have helped him establish his views on school management, international education and basic education reform. He believes children are like seeds and education is the power to help them grow. School is the place where minds are inspired.
We were delighted to spend some time with Mr. Fei, who shared many stunning insights and opinions on education.
What do we want our children to achieve through education?
Parents always have various questions about their children's education, for example, do they want to earn a high salary by studying abroad or do they want to broaden their horizons and increase their abilities?
According to Mr. Fei, parents who think this way have a misconception about international education: "If we send our children to receive international education just to go overseas to get a good degree and a high-earning job, I'm afraid the 'value for money' is very low, so parents should think twice."
"But if you choose international education to give your child a more diverse pathway to higher education, a broader perspective, the ability to face complex environments, and ultimately become a more positive and complete person. Then these cannot be measured in terms of utilitarian 'value for money'." Mr. Fei said.
In Mr. Fei's opinion, the so-called "pure" education is the education that adheres to the origin of education and conforms to the laws of education and children's growth.
DHSZ has established a complete learning ecology and learning system. The "learning" here does not only refer to training students to pass various exams to acquire knowledge. In addition to classroom learning, research and discussion, and homework assignments, the school also offers a wide range of challenging inquiry activities and life experiences.
At DHSZ, there are more than 80 CCAs in different fields alone. Students from different regions and backgrounds in more than 10 sister schools throughout the group can participate in a variety of original activities and share their experiences with each other.
For example, the Shakespeare Festival with rehearsals by directors and actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Olympia Games at the Olympic Centre in London, practical training in finance and business with tutors from Ivy League schools, the highly prestigious IT competition, eco-camp training, etc.
Through a wide range of CCAs, students can discover and explore their own interests and talents while developing Dulwich's values and abilities, as well as preparing themselves to respond to the rapid changes in the world.
This is what Mr. Fei says: "The essence of education is to allow children to become the person they are meant to be. To continually challenge themselves, discover their talents, build on their strengths and develop their loves."
According to Fei, the purity of education at DHSZ is also reflected in the school's adherence to Dulwich College's tradition of quality education and academic standards.
All teachers entering DHSZ to teach must have top international teacher teaching qualifications and receive annual academic supervision and teaching assessments from the group.
"Education is a subtle infection, not a directed instruction." According to Mr. Fei, teachers who only lecture but do not learn can only be called "trainers". Their job is to study question ideas, problem-solving techniques, test preferences and so on. A real "tutor" needs to study and research the psychology of students, and know how to teach according to their needs.
At DHSZ, an important part of the work of all course teachers is to participate in various types of professional training. Every teacher has a long-term goal of improving themselves, understanding their students, and becoming role models for them.
What is the core of education?
What is education?
At Suzhou High School, where Mr. Fei worked, Mr. Wang Mao-zu, the founder of the Centennial New School, laid down the spirit of education: "To have the ability to shift circumstances without being bound by undesirable ones." The most famous educational philosophy of John Dewey, Columbia University's mentor, was "education as growth," believing that "education has no purpose, but is given purpose by people and society."
According to Mr. Fei, he was confused about this too. But as he has been in the field for a long time, he has witnessed the process of students learning, growing and becoming successful at home and abroad. He is more and more convinced that the core of education is people and their growth is most important. The key to education is to "help children become the person they should be.
Because there are often ready-made selection criteria for choosing what kind of school to attend; while there is never a standard answer for what kind of life path to follow.
In Mr. Fei's opinion, the current educational anxiety that overflows the screen and floods around is precisely the result of not studying children, understanding them and discovering them.
"Every child has its own strengths, talents and shining points, and if you can't find them, it's not that they don't exist, but that you haven't made the effort to discover them. When there are more and more dimensions to evaluate a child, and it is no longer limited to a test paper, the more we can discover the child's strengths." If we only look at test scores, then children who are not naturally good at tests are placed low on the competitive ladder from the start, according to Mr. Fei.
In international education, how to realize the educational core of "cultivating people"?
When it comes to international schools and international education, the first thing many parents aim for is the curriculum; IB-DP, A-Level, AP and so on, all kinds of courses are so familiar that it is more than enough to be a "research expert" on the curriculum.
But in the view of the Mr. Fei, the core of international education is also the people, not the curriculum. This is a concept that needs to be changed for parents who are interested in international education.
According to Mr. Fei, most of the schools for children of expatriates opened by the group in China adopt the IBDP curriculum for teaching, while DHSZ has chosen a combination of IGCSE and A-Level curriculum in its curriculum.
"The vast majority of our students have studied the Chinese National Curriculum during their compulsory education years. In terms of curriculum adaptability, IGCSE and A-Level are the most articulated for Chinese students. They are more accessible and more likely to achieve results. Such "localization" can help students build up their self-confidence as soon as possible, which is good for motivating them to learn and develop internal motivation."
At the same time, considering the flexibility of the academic system and the gap in students' English proficiency, DHSZ also offers EAL (English as an Additional Language) enhancement courses, which are specially designed for non-native English speakers, with different 3/4 year programs.
"In my understanding, an international curriculum for Chinese students is really just a program. A transitional curriculum program to help students build on their national curriculum studies and better adapt to purely international studies." According to Mr. Fei, international education aims to help students improve their learning and language skills in order to gain the ability to adapt to future overseas campuses, workplaces at home and abroad, and even long life development scenarios.
Whether a student truly possesses academic language skills cannot be measured by a single exam. He needs to have the ability to read texts bilingually, to ask questions, to receive, to communicate, to speak, to debate, to collaborate, and even to think deeply in bilingual terms. As a special English teacher for many years, Mr. Fei has also studied language teaching and learning in depth. He believes that the average foreign language text reading that high school students do in Suzhou Dewey is around 5,000-10,000 words per day, an intensity of learning and reading gains that cannot be compared to a single test paper.
Starting from today, Mr. Fei will bring his valuable experience and insights in the field of education and teaching with the teachers and students of Dulwich International High School Suzhou to enter our new decade together!