On the morning of October 22, Professor Lin Jincai of the Department of Education of Tainan University, was invited to the 146th Huaxia Curriculum Forum of ICI and gave an academic report entitled “Strategies and Practices for Activating Teaching: from the Perspective of Subject Teaching and the Content of Subject Learning”. The forum was presided over by Professor Zhou Yong. Professor Chen Shuangye, Zhang Wei and Associate professor Wang Tao, as well as more than 40 teachers and students from the relevant departments of the Education Department of ECNU participated in this forum.

▲ Professor Lin Jincai

In the report, Professor Lin first criticized the bad phenomena in the education reform, believed that teachers’ interpretation and understanding of the curriculum reform determine the success or failure of the reform. He also emphasized the importance of changing teachers’ mental life, in order to stimulate teachers’ motivation in teaching design and teaching implementation, thus leading to theoretical thinking on “activating teaching”.

Professor Lin pointed out that the main purpose of activating teaching is not to change their teaching thinking completely, nor to overturn their original teaching design, but through the adjustment of their mental life and the revision of teaching ideas to realize the correction of students’ learning thinking, and then improve the efficiency of teaching and learning. For this reason, teachers must change the teaching mode from the “teacher-centered” paradigm to the “student-centered” paradigm.

Based on the imaginative discussion and learning pyramid of “as-ifing” (Griffith 2007), Professor Lin further clarified the meaning of activating teaching, and illustrated the positive significance of activating teaching to students through vivid cases, emphasized that activating teaching needs to focus on school organization and class ecology, with teachers’ teaching activities and students’ learning activities as the main axis of change. On this basis, he introduced the concepts of PCK and LCK, reminded us to pay attention to the topic of “understanding how students learn”, which is most easily ignored in teaching research.

The later part of the report mainly focused on the practice of activating teaching from the perspective of PCK and LCK. Professor Lin elaborated the five transformations of activation teaching from the perspective of LCK, the components of subject knowledge affecting teachers’ subject teaching methods, and the factors considered in the process of their teaching activation, and on this basis, he introduced four kinds of activation teaching strategies and practices in detail, which are knowledge-centered, student-centered, evaluation-centered and class learning community-centered.

At the end of the report, Professor Lin concluded: “There is still a big gap between change and real change. The social structure and cultural ideology in which we live is the largest mental structure. In order to change ourselves, we must first reflect on our own mental structure.”

After the end of the report, Professor Lin answered the students’ confusion about carrying out the subject teaching research, and suggested that they could start with combing the curriculum history and constructing the curriculum map to make meaningful and contributing research.

In addition to the report, Professor Lin also shared his educational experience and put forward sincere suggestions to the students. He hoped that the students would “get the degree quickly and do the research slowly”, students should be clear about “why they come” and “why they go”. He also taught students to keep enterprising, keep learning and improve their professionalism after becoming teachers.