Gleaning the best of two worlds

Educators from the UK and China talk about the key learning points from their participation in a math teacher exchange program, Cao Chen reports in Shanghai.

Ian Pegrum's understanding of the role of Chinese pedagogy in mathematics used to be limited to what he had heard from others - that it was based on rote learning which offered little room for creativity.

But after undergoing a two-week China-UK math teacher program that was jointly launched by both countries in 2014, the 33-year-old Grade 2 teacher at the William Bellamy Primary School in Dagenham, Essex, has concluded that the Chinese pedagogy is nothing like what it is often described as.