5-Day Beijing STEM Teacher Workshop: Curriculum & Classrooms

Morning - arrival and transfer
Your guide and driver meet you in the arrivals hall with a name sign and take you to your hotel. Beijing is the administrative centre of the system you are here to study: the Ministry of Education sets the national curriculum, the municipal and district education commissions interpret it, and the schools you will visit in the next days work inside those documents. Traffic between the airport and the city centre is heavy through most of the day, so the schedule keeps the first afternoon light on purpose.

Afternoon - Workshop opening: the 2022 curriculum
The workshop opens with a briefing from a teacher educator on the compulsory-education curriculum plan and subject standards issued in April 2022, which took effect that autumn. Three changes matter to a visiting teacher. Science is now introduced in grade 1 rather than grade 3. Information technology is integrated into other subjects, and labour practice is a separate subject with its own hours. And at least 10 per cent of class hours are reserved for cross-disciplinary, topic-based learning - which is the door through which most STEM work in Chinese schools now enters.

Cultural Insight - who runs teacher training
Chinese teachers are not trained once and left alone. The school's teaching-research group meets weekly to prepare lessons together, teachers give open classes that colleagues observe and critique, and a district teaching-research officer visits schools in the subject they specialise in. Since 2010 the national teacher training plan has paid for large-scale in-service programmes, and much of the practical STEM training a Chinese science teacher receives arrives through this route rather than through a university degree.

Evening - Welcome dinner and programme briefing
Dinner with the group, a short briefing on the school visits, on the protocol for foreign visitor groups in Chinese public schools, and on the two questions each participant should bring to the classroom observations.

Meals
Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning - the host school
You are received by the academic affairs office and given a short briefing on the school: how many classes per year group, how the timetable is built, how science and information technology hours are allocated, and how the school runs its after-school service under the 2021 reduction in homework and off-campus tutoring. Class sizes in Chinese public schools are commonly 40 to 45, with a 40- or 45-minute period, and the school will tell you plainly which of its science rooms are purpose-built and which are converted.

Late morning - classroom observation
Observe one or two science or STEM lessons, matched to the phase you teach. Note the lesson structure rather than only the content: the pace of questioning, how much time a class spends on whole-group instruction against hands-on work, how the lab equipment is shared between classes, and how the teacher checks understanding before moving on. Participants are asked to record observations against the two questions set the previous evening and to write up a short note before the afternoon session.

Lunch
With host teachers, in the school canteen where the school day allows, or at a restaurant nearby.

Afternoon - teaching roundtable with the research group
The school's science teaching-research group joins you for the roundtable. The agenda is practical: how a unit is planned across a year group, what an open class is used for, how practical work is assessed when laboratory time and equipment are limited, and how project-based learning is squeezed into a syllabus that is also examined. Your delegation is invited to present a lesson or unit of its own for critique, and to compare how the same topic is sequenced at home.

Cultural Insight - why the teaching-research group matters
In a Chinese school the unit of professional work is the group, not the individual classroom. Lesson plans are shared and revised collectively, new teachers are mentored inside the group, and the district officer's visit is a shared event that the group prepares for together. Visiting teachers who expect to meet isolated practitioners are usually surprised by how much of the work is done in company, and how quickly criticism is given and taken.

Important
School visits are arranged with the host school and are subject to its agreement, its calendar and, for groups from abroad, to the approval of the local education authority. Public schools are normally closed to visitors during the winter and summer vacations and during examination weeks. We confirm the school, the phase and the timetable in writing before the programme is finalised, and if a visit cannot be approved we substitute a teacher-training institution or a district education exchange.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning - the host school
An international school or the international division of a local school receives you, matched to the age range you teach. The head of Chinese gives a briefing on how the programme is built: which learners start with pinyin and which start with characters, how classes are streamed, how much time is spent on speaking against writing, how the syllabus feeds the external exams learners sit at 16 and 18, and how Chinese native speakers studying the same language as a first language are accommodated alongside beginners in one department.

Late morning - classroom observation
Observe a Chinese language lesson. Watch for the mechanics: the warm-up drill and how it is corrected, how tones are modelled and echoed, whether the class writes by hand or on a device, how the teacher manages a room in which a few learners already speak the language at home, and how much of the lesson is conducted in Chinese. Participants are asked to note three techniques worth stealing and one that would not travel.

Lunch
At the school with host teachers where the timetable allows, or nearby.

Afternoon - co-planning and a micro-lesson
The department works with you on a unit: objectives, the character list, the grammar point, the speaking task and the assessment. Participants then teach a 20-minute micro-lesson to each other or to a volunteer class, followed by structured feedback from the host teachers on clarity of instruction, modelling of tone, and the amount of Chinese used. The session closes with a comparison of the two systems you have now seen - a Chinese-medium school and an international one - and what each assumes about the learner.

Important
School visits depend on the host school's agreement, its calendar and the approval of the local education authority, and are confirmed in writing before the programme is finalised. Schools are generally closed to visitors during vacations and examination weeks; if a visit cannot be approved we substitute a university school of international Chinese education or a private teaching institution.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Two gardens in one
The Summer Palace is not a single composition. It is a hill, a lake and a court, and the reason it rewards a full day on foot is that the three were designed to be read in sequence - the throne room first, then the hillside terraces and temples, then the water. Building began in 1750, when the Qianlong emperor turned a reservoir into a birthday present for his mother and named the place Qingyi Yuan. In 1860 British and French troops burned it, leaving eleven and a half bays of the covered gallery standing. Reconstruction began in secret in 1886 under the guise of naval funding, the name was changed to Yihe Yuan in 1888, and the work finished in 1895. It has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since November 1998 and is a first-batch national key cultural relic site of 1961.

Morning - the court and the covered gallery
We enter from the east and walk the court first - the hall where the emperor gave audience, and the courtyards behind it, including the one where the Guangxu emperor was kept after the reforms of 1898 failed. Then the Long Corridor: 728 metres of continuous covered gallery running along the foot of the hill, painted along its whole length, and acting as a kind of architectural hinge between the hill and the water. The gallery is the single best place to understand how this garden works - the way it frames a view, then hides it, then opens again, and how it lets a court that was used in winter and summer be walked in any weather.

Lunch
Lunch in the garden area, or just outside the north gate.

Afternoon - the hill and the water
After lunch we climb the middle of Longevity Hill to the Tower of Buddhist Incense, 41 metres tall with three octagonal storeys and four tiers of eaves, standing on its terrace above the lake. Below it, the Seventeen-Arch Bridge runs 150 metres across to the island, eight metres wide, with 544 carved stone lions. Then we come down to the water and walk the western and eastern banks, where your guide explains what Kunming Lake actually was: a reservoir expanded in the Yuan dynasty by the engineer Guo Shoujing as part of the water system that supplied the capital and fed the Grand Canal, and thus a piece of infrastructure that a later emperor turned into scenery. The three islands in the lake are a deliberate quotation of the three mountains of the immortals.

Walking and pace
Six to seven kilometres in total, with one sustained climb of about a hundred vertical metres to the tower. There are boats across the lake in season, which can shorten the day considerably; the vehicle waits at whichever gate you finish at.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

Morning — the Forbidden City
The palace opens to visitors in the morning and the entry queue is the single biggest variable in any Beijing day, so your guide buys the timed tickets in advance against your passport details and you go in at the earliest slot you can be ready for. Completed in 1420 and home to twenty-four emperors of the Ming and Qing, the Forbidden City is laid out hall behind hall along the same line that the whole city is built on; your guide walks you through the outer court where the state was conducted and the inner court where the imperial household lived, and points out how the hierarchy of roofs, courtyards and gates does the work that a written protocol would do elsewhere.

Late morning — Jingshan and the axis seen whole
Out through the northern gate and across the road to Jingshan Park, the artificial hill raised from the excavation of the palace moats. The climb to the Wanchun Pavilion at the summit is short and the reward is disproportional: the entire palace roofscape lies to the south, the Drum Tower to the north, and the line between them is the Beijing Central Axis that UNESCO inscribed in 2024 as the longest urban axis in the world.

Lunch
A Peking duck lunch in the city — the one meal most travellers feel they have not had a Beijing trip without.

Afternoon — Tian'anmen Square and departure
Tian'anmen Square is itself one of the fifteen inscribed elements of the Central Axis, and it is a five-minute walk from the palace's southern gate. Entry to the square is free but requires a passport reservation, which your guide arranges with the tickets. How much time remains for it depends on your departure: with an evening flight there is room for the square and the National Museum's exterior; with an afternoon flight your guide will move the palace earlier and take you straight to the terminal after lunch.

On timing
This second day is the flexible one. Confirmed flight times decide whether the palace, Jingshan and the square are all covered or whether the day is trimmed to the palace and the transfer. Tell us your flight number when you book and the itinerary is built around it rather than the other way round.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Tour ends with the transfer - no hotel night included.