Collaboration Through Teacher Meet Communities

A “Teacher Meet” is a gathering where teachers come together to discuss and share ideas about their practice, often focusing on curriculum development, instructional strategies, best practices, and addressing challenges, essentially providing a platform for professional collaboration and development among educators. The benefits of collaborating beyond a school and engaging with the educational community around us is essential. 

When I moved to Shenzhen in 2023, I had already built up a wide ‘virtual’ network of teachers from around China in which we supported each other on an important but superficial level. Shenzhen is an amazing city with a plethora of international schools of many different types and educational structures. I saw the wonderful opportunity for these communities to collaborate and focus an all of the things that makes a teacher meet successful.

Whilst the virtual presence and discussion with each other are very useful, the opportunity to meet a few times a year and have a deep dive into various aspects of mathematics and pedagogy, sharing the ideologies of different educational structures is invaluable.

We held our first Maths Meet back in October 2023 and it really was just an opportunity to meet informally and talk about each other’s challenges in teaching. It was decided at this point that we would continue with each session having a specific focus lead by a different person each time with each person ‘bringing something to the table’ for each session. It was also when the Shenzhen Middle Schools Team Mathematics competition was born.

During our first formal session, we created the structure of the competition between the five schools who were present at the meet, delegating question writing and organisational tasks, all leading to a highly successful first competition in June 2024.

Once established, we wanted to get to the nuts and bolts of good mathematics pedagogy and so early this year, our session focused on Low Floor High Ceiling tasks. 

The principle of the session is that teachers research the topics in advance and, if feeling confident, can share their thoughts and findings. After this, teachers gain the opportunity to further discuss, develop their pedagogy and create resources based on this topic. I personally was very interested in the idea that low floor, high ceiling activities allow all students to start but also allow all students to get stuck and develop skills surrounding that. It was good to see the teachers present working together to create some of their own low floor high ceiling tasks and the follow up discussions after the teachers meet as they tried them out in their classroom.

One of the joys of the maths meet is that while there is a diverse selection of curricula, we also have representation from the many phases, from primary through to pre-university courses. To leverage this, our next meet focused on teaching concepts in different phases. It was exciting to see, from a secondary focus, how concepts are taught using concrete exemplification and how misconceptions are managed. Teachers from the primary phase were also very curious about how this is moved to abstraction as students move through their schools.

Teachers meeting from different curricula and phases of education can have significant impact on our own implementation of curricula as it gives in a friendly atmosphere the opportunity to discuss, share and improve our practice and indeed network, make new friends, all of which are critical in an international setting.