教师出海记：不去公办学校，你永远不知道英国的课堂有多难
"Miss Liz is off tomorrow." "Oh, then they'll definitely kick off." Dr Zhihao Yan, with eight years of international-school teaching behind him, took a London state primary class alone for a full day — 8:30 to 3:15, English through maths to art and computing, no other adult in the room, about a quarter of the class with special educational needs. He spends more than half his energy on behaviour. A boy goes to the toilet three times, then reappears in a comic hat; a second child starts crying and the first announces to the class that the teacher made him cry. The next morning the class teacher explains the invisible architecture she runs the room on: never correct that boy, never make him the focus, never let him sit beside another child who needs support, and seven pupils who must be kept apart. Twenty-seven children, seven of them with additional needs.
“你都资深名师了，还要从头学习如何当老师？”——英国 PGCE 培训体验报告
The PGCE is widely misread by Chinese applicants as a certificate. It is a master's-level, practice-led programme that confers no master's degree, and in England it is the gate: without qualified teacher status you cannot hold a class in a state school, and heads do not waive it even in a shortage. Dr Zhihao Yan, who had taught for over a decade in Guangzhou and Shanghai, sets out five things that make it work — theory taught by people still in classrooms; a weekly reading list tied to that week's practice; placements in inclusive state schools rather than selective ones; a dual-mentor system with a university link tutor as firewall; and reflective practice as a compulsory module rather than a private virtue. His own first attempt was a five-minute maths segment. He expected to find it trivially short. It gave him a week's worth of things to write up.
英国教师危机：从热爱到离职，只需三年？
"I can't remember the last time my husband and I had a serious conversation." Dr Zhihao Yan heard that from an English primary teacher on a month-long online training course where two-thirds of participants could not stay for a full session. He uses it to open an account of why England cannot keep its teachers. A primary teacher may cover up to thirteen subjects. Teaching is only part of the job; assessment reports and administration push real hours well past contracted ones. He traces the shortage from the late 1990s through austerity-era budgets and rising rolls to the post-2015 spike in attrition and the early retirements of the pandemic, and notes that around 42% of secondary physics is taught by non-specialists. His own PGCE opened with survival advice and the line that nobody who has not cried has really done a PGCE.