5-Day Hangzhou Teacher Workshop: Language Teaching & Curriculum Design

Afternoon — Arrival
Your guide meets you at Hangzhou Xiaoshan airport or at Hangzhou East railway station. Groups arriving through Shanghai take the high-speed train from Hongqiao, which covers the distance to Hangzhou in about forty-five minutes. Hotel check-in, then a short walk or drive to the seminar room.

Late Afternoon — Programme Opening
An opening session sets out what the week looks at and what it does not. The programme is about classroom practice rather than the school system as a whole: how a language lesson is planned and paced, how progress is assessed and recorded, how much of the timetable goes to reading against speaking and listening, and what a department does with the results. Participants introduce what they teach and the level they teach it at, so that the school visit the next morning can be matched to the group rather than to a fixed itinerary.

Evening — Welcome Dinner
Dinner with the group and your guide, with a short briefing on the school visit: timing, dress, what is expected of visitors, and how to keep notes that will be useful for the written reflection at the end of the week.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Hangzhou city centre (4-star international brand or equivalent).

Morning — Classroom Observation
A Hangzhou secondary school receives the group. Two lessons are observed, at least one of them a language lesson at lower secondary level, and participants are given the materials beforehand so that the observation is not guesswork. What to watch: how the lesson is staged and how much time each stage is given; how much of it is teacher talk against student talk; how errors are corrected, and whether that correction is immediate or deferred; how the textbook is used and where the teacher departs from it; and how the weakest third of the class is kept inside the lesson.

Late Morning — Debrief with the Teaching Staff
The teachers who taught the lessons sit down with the group and answer questions on their planning. Ask to see the lesson plan itself and ask what they would change next time. This is usually the hour that shifts visitors' assumptions, because the constraints are concrete: class size, timetable, the terminal examination, and the teaching-research group that meets weekly and observes its own members.

Afternoon — School Grounds or Free Time
The afternoon is free, or - if the school is able to receive you - a walk through its facilities with the department. Your guide can arrange interpretation throughout.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is free.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Hangzhou city centre (4-star international brand or equivalent).

Morning — How the Sequence Is Built
The session starts with the framework rather than the lesson: what is fixed nationally and what the school decides for itself. The department heads walk through how language learning is sequenced from age six - the hours given to the subject at each year, the order in which grammar and vocabulary are introduced, when reading moves from characters to continuous text, and where the terminal examination begins to shape the timetable. It is worth asking which of these decisions are actually made in the school and which arrive from the district or the province.

Late Morning — the Materials Comparison
Both sides bring what they teach from. Each participant presents one unit from their own course, in the order they would teach it, and the host department presents the equivalent unit from theirs. The differences are consistent and worth writing down: how much vocabulary is introduced per unit and how it is recycled, whether translation is used and for what purpose, how much cultural content each unit carries, and how the exercises are pitched.

Afternoon — Working Session and Notes
A working session with the department heads to consolidate the comparison and agree what each side would take from the other. Participants begin the notes for the written reflection they are asked to submit after the programme.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is free.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Hangzhou city centre (4-star international brand or equivalent).

Morning — Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language
The morning belongs to a university school of international Chinese education, or a long-established Mandarin teaching institution, receiving the group for a candid session rather than a presentation. The subject is the first year: how characters are introduced against pinyin, how much vocabulary a beginner is expected to hold by the end of it, how tones are corrected without stopping the class dead, and how a teacher holds together a group whose first languages and prior exposure are nothing alike.

Late Morning — the Materials in Use
The institution's own first-year materials go on the table next to what participants brought. The comparison is the point: how a unit is structured, how much listening is built into it, what the exercises ask the learner to do, and how much of the material assumes a classroom in China rather than one abroad.

Afternoon — the Assessment Centre
The assessment centre takes the group through how learners are placed and tracked: the placement test at entry, the structure of the standard proficiency tests, how speaking in particular is assessed and by how many assessors, and what the institution does with the data afterwards. Ask how much of the teaching has actually changed because of what the results showed.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is free.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Hangzhou city centre (4-star international brand or equivalent).

Morning — West Lake
West Lake is a managed object rather than a natural one: dredged repeatedly since the Tang dynasty, ringed by causeways built by two poets who were also officials, and now the setting for a city of twelve million people. Walking one section of it, the useful thing to look at is the boundary - how a park of this size is kept clear of development, who decides, and what it costs a city to hold land back.

Late Morning — the Longjing Tea Terraces
A short drive to the terraces at Longjing, the village the tea is named after. The terraces are farmed rather than industrial, in smallholdings on slopes too steep to mechanise, and the picking standard for the first flush is the thing to see. Over tea the group holds its closing discussion: what each participant will change in how they plan a lesson, assess progress or use the materials they brought, and what remains unresolved.

Afternoon — Departure
Transfer to Hangzhou East Railway Station for the high-speed service to Shanghai, about forty-five minutes, for participants extending the trip, or to Hangzhou Xiaoshan airport for the international flight. Participants are asked to send their written reflection within two weeks.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.