英国中小学每年 6 次教育旅行，是“消费陷阱”还是改变人生的资源
English schools run two educational visits a term, at least six a year, in both the state and independent sectors, tied to the curriculum rather than bolted onto it: day trips to museums and galleries, residentials from Year 5 for two to five days, and subject-specific visits. Dr Zhihao Yan, teaching in London, could not at first see why schools already short of lesson time would give up so much of it. Then a deputy head told him about a boy on a red double-decker who held on to the window and stared the whole way — a Year 3 child in London who had never been on a bus or into the centre. He sets out the infrastructure behind it: free national collections, museum education teams trained to a common standard, the Museums and Schools programme, and City of London funds that reimburse visits for eligible schools.
寒假插班：比夏令营更接近真实的英国课堂
After a summer of camps, Dr Zhihao Yan sorts the children who came into three kinds — the sightseeing tour led by a Chinese teacher, the language camp where a mixed-nationality intake forces English, and the academic camp built on two or three weeks of project work. Then he argues that none of them shows a family what English schooling is actually like. A camp is addition: cross-cultural games, arranged socialising, visits, all designed to soften adaptation, with classroom time necessarily limited. A winter placement is the opposite — the child joins a real spring term alongside local pupils, at their pace, with nothing packaged for a visitor. He notes why schools resist two-week placements, why Chinese families keep asking for them anyway, and why a growing share of the enquiries now come from pupils who are already top of their class at home.
Talk for Writing：学写作，真的要等到识字之后吗
The Chinese route to writing is fixed: phonics, then characters, then sentences, then model essays, and only then your own words. A child waits until they have enough characters to deserve to say anything. Dr Zhihao Yan sets that against two classrooms. In Dr Xiaoyun Peng's writing class the starting question is philosophical — who are you, and how do you introduce yourself? — and children who can speak but not yet write take names apart and chain them into a story. In a Year 1 literacy lesson in an English state primary, after The Tiger Who Came to Tea, nobody is asked to write a response: they pick four picture cards and retell the story by ordering them. Migrant children with English as a second language, local children just starting phonics, and a child who will not speak all "wrote". He ends on the difference in marking — a teacher who writes "ran 😊" beside runned and then praises the reasoning.
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.
英国中小学怎么“做哲学”：哲学教育仍是私立学校的专利吗
After nine years teaching philosophy to children in Guangzhou and Shanghai, Dr Zhihao Yan went back to being a novice — a PGCE in London and placements in English primaries. He finds philosophy present but hidden: in Narnia and free will during English, in how we know a theory is true during science, in what is right during PSHE. He describes teaching a PSHE lesson on gender stereotypes where pupils had to physically take a side, and notes who held the strongest stereotypes — recently arrived children with English as a second language. Then the other half of the picture. EEF research put philosophy's cost at about £12 per pupil a year for two to three months' progress, yet one in seven English lessons is taught by someone without qualified teacher status, and his own class teacher's two-week absence was covered by an unqualified assistant. Meanwhile Eton, Westminster and a Fulham prep school teach it properly.
哲学教育在英国：没有法国的“硬性四小时”，却无处不在
France has required four hours of philosophy a week in the final school year since 1808 and examines it. England has no equivalent slot. Dr Zhihao Yan, a philosophy PhD now teaching in an English primary school, argues that philosophy is nonetheless everywhere in English classrooms — inside religious education, PSHE, oracy work, English writing and even science — and names the cost of that arrangement: content with no exam output is the first thing squeezed out in SATs and GCSE years. He traces England's philosophy-for-children infrastructure to SAPERE, founded in 1992, whose accredited schools serve an unusually disadvantaged intake: 59% of pupils on free school meals or Pupil Premium in its 2024 impact report. And he follows the evidence where it goes, from the EEF trial that found two months' progress in reading and maths to the £1.2m scaled replication that found no significant attainment effect at all.
警惕教育中的偏见：什么样的老师还在教室里制造刻板印象
The last week of Dr Zhihao Yan's first placement carried no teaching target, only a TED talk to watch and write up: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story. He takes her point past the obvious one. Adichie was not only the object of a single story — an American roommate pitying her for Africa, asking about her tribal music, receiving a Mariah Carey tape — she was also its author, knowing Mexico only through coverage of drugs and migration. He applies that to teachers, who shape how children see themselves and each other, sometimes more than families do, and then to his own upbringing in Chaoshan and the assumptions about gender and household roles he had to examine. The rest is what an English state primary does about it: Black History Month across subjects, shared reading chosen for who appears in it, and picture books with animal protagonists for the youngest.
特殊教育在英国：公办学校能为特殊孩子兜底吗
A boy runs into a phonics lesson, punches a classmate and starts hammering on the visitor's laptop. He cannot tolerate noise or bright light, and he is in a mainstream Year 1 class, because England places children in inclusive settings rather than separating them. Dr Zhihao Yan spends a placement week with the school's SEND coordinator, one of the busiest people on the staff: 40 children on her list out of about 300, eight of whom cannot work independently at all. He follows the harder part of her job — the families. Parents often refuse the label first; in some households the father blames the mother. Even with a diagnosis, special-school places are scarce and the assessment can take twenty weeks. He asks whether parent volunteers could fill the gap. She says no, and explains why.
课间十分钟，没有的：英国小学生的一天
Chinese parents picture the English primary school as relaxed. Dr Zhihao Yan, on placement in a south London state school where nearly 70% of pupils are on free school meals and under 20% were born in Britain, reports a day that is tightly packed: one fifteen-minute break between 8:40 and noon, an afternoon that runs from one o'clock to 3:10 with nothing in between, and almost no homework before Year 3. The lightness is real but it is on the other side of the school gate — the work has been compressed into the lesson rather than sent home. Break and lunch, by contrast, are untouchable: teachers may not take them, and a child made to wait a minute in the lunch queue cried. And reading is deliberately not framed as homework. It is framed as a reward, and set daily from Year 1.
“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.
看学习障碍门诊不是新鲜事，难的是教师该不该区别对待
A learning-difficulties clinic at a Shanghai children's hospital drew a wave of comment from parents hoping a prescription might fix a bad report. Dr Zhihao Yan points out that such diagnoses are routine in Britain — and that the British worry runs the other way. There, the fear is that a label licenses a teacher to expect less. He reports from an East London primary where a class of thirty may include two or three pupils who cannot follow the lesson and one teaching assistant to support them, and from a classmate placed in a class with eight; a teacher cannot designate a child as having special needs, only a doctor can, and the application for more support can take two years. He then takes apart learning-styles theory, which he argues turned respect for difference into a licence to lower the bar.
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.