After months of suspension amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Stepping Stones is very excited about resuming its Videolink Teacher Training program, providing training to a new cohort of 20 English teachers from Xin Gan County, Jiangxi Province.

Launched in 2016, this program aims to improve the quality of English education in rural schools and increase English teachers’ confidence to use English in class, as well as improve their teaching methodology for English practice activities.

The majority of our 20 new trainees are working as primary school teachers, from Grades 3-6. They range in experience, from teachers who are in their first year, up to 7 years teaching. According to our professional trainer, Carrie, they’re an enthusiastic and participative group. Carrie said:

We’ve met once so far for a Zoom class, and we discussed ways to use more English in their classrooms. Examples include greeting students, giving instructions, giving praise and error correction. The trainees are all very keen to get guidance and appreciate any ideas to improve their techniques and to try them out in their classrooms.

The program includes eight training sessions, and after each session, trainees will send a short video of themselves using the techniques discussed in the session. Our trainers will then give feedback and ask questions so trainees can all help each other and learn from each other.

Future training sessions will include: help with lesson planning, improving students’ fluency/reading/writing, as well as ideas to teach grammar in a more interactive way. In addition, we will discuss how to use games and songs in their classrooms to increase engagement and student excitement while learning English.

With the help of this program, we hope to inspire and excite our trainees to expand their teaching and create more opportunities for their students to learn, practice and improve their English.

After two weeks of intensive work, Stepping Stones has launched its Home Classroom English Lesson for children affected by the outbreak of COVID-19! On Tuesday this week, the first batch of volunteers from around the world were trained up to deliver their first English classes to children from our partners schools, and lessons started the following day.

At the height of the fight against the epidemic, the Stepping Stones team started to think about what role we could play in the response. We realized that many children would not be able to go back to school on time. Some of them face a quarantine of at least 14 days once they are able to return to where their schools are. How to minimise the disruption to these children’s education? We wanted to use our expertise to help.

On 19th Feb, our Home Classroom for quarantined children formally started after a successful pilot lesson the previous week. Children can log into the online platform Zoom via a smartphone or computer to attend the English lessons taught by volunteer teachers with the support of parents.

To ensure the good quality of the teaching, we maintain a small class size, with one volunteer to four students.
It is the first time for these children to attend this kind of lesson, though it is not new to us, since we have been using similar method to train English teachers for a few years.

Obviously, children were quite excited to see their volunteer teacher and their classmates from across China including Shanghai, Hunan, Jiangsu, or even Jilin provinces on the same screen. They paid great attention during the whole lesson, and the responses of the teacher and other pupils could be seen immediately. It was also very effective for the teachers, as they could assess each student’s individual situation and take care of them appropriately, to make sure all the students could follow the lesson. (We have to say that our volunteers are truly the kindest and most patient of teachers!)

This week, 14 volunteers from around the world will deliver 21English classes to 82 migrant children from Wednesday to Sunday. Each volunteer will teach at least two classes per week, 30 minutes for each class.

The director of Stepping Stones Corinne Hua said, ‘These children have already been cooped up at home for a whole month, so we are all very glad not only to be able to provide them with a fun way to improve their English, which can truly focus on the children’s individual needs, but also to give them some support and encouragement from the outside world. The format of one volunteer to only four students provides a unique level of personal contact that cannot be achieved by most online educational programs.’

Like our other English lessons, the new Home Classroom program aims at enhancing children’s interest and confidence in speaking English.

We have tailored the PPTs from our Videolink program to make them suitable for teaching grades 2-5 in the Home Classroom context. Volunteers are recording videos of the lessons for students to preview before class, and preparing worksheets for the students to complete after class.

Volunteers receive online training from Stepping Stones covering our lesson plans, online platform, teaching context and teaching techniques before they start teaching.

We will open more Home Classroom groups from next week based on this week’s experience. Over the coming two weeks, we plan to scale-up the team of volunteers to 60, so that we can teach 120 lessons per week to 480 students. In order to be able to scale-up sustainably, we are also recruiting volunteer coordinators to assist us to set up new student groups, provide technical briefings to the students and their parents and support for the teaching volunteers.

In addition, our Stepping Up program team is preparing Home Classroom computer lessons so that children can continue to study digital literacy at home.

Stepping Stones was established in 2006 and is registered in Shanghai as a non-profit organisation. The organisation’s mission is to improve the education and general welfare of disadvantaged children in China. Over more than 10 years, Stepping Stones has provided high-quality English lessons to children in schools and community centres in Shanghai and other provinces, by recruiting, training and deploying volunteers from all over the world.

In recent years, Stepping Stones has developed computer and life skills courses for primary and middle school students, and online English courses to reach children in remote areas, as well as professional training for local school English teachers. Currently, Stepping Stones has more than 300 volunteers teaching more than 5,000 students each week at more than 40 teaching sites, including schools in 10 other provinces.

Our expected impacts are increases in student’s skills, interest and confidence to optimise their access to a higher level of education and better work opportunities in the future.

December 2019, I accompanied our volunteers to visit our partner schools in rural Jiangxi and Henan Provinces, and was very struck by what I saw.

At a rural boarding school in Henan, the children’s eyes sparkled with excitement as they surrounded us in the playground, eager for an opportunity to practise their English skills. The children at a central primary school in rural Jiangxi confidently answered most of our volunteers’ questions. But at a village school not far from that central primary school, the students hardly dared to look at us, never mind open their mouths to speak to us.

We have been sending volunteers to the first two schools for some years now, and our online volunteers are even offering weekly English lessons to the children in Henan through videolink.

Sadly, there are many more rural schools, like those village schools we visited, where we have not yet been able to offer those great learning opportunities.

That is why we are launching a fundraising campaign through Alipay, to allow us to send more volunteers to teach English to children in rural schools. A donation of just RMB225 allows a volunteer to teach 4 English lessons in a rural school in one day.

Please donate generously to give the precious gift of education to more rural school students in the new year. Help us to put smiles on the faces of those children!

By Stepping Stones Founder: Corinne Hua

If you are unable to donate through Alipay but would like to contribute, please e-mail fundraising@steppingstoneschina.net to find out different ways to support our programs.

Last week was Stepping Stones’ annual team meeting, where we reviewed our program performance in 2019. In advance of the publication of our annual report, we would like to give a sneak preview of some of the highlights to our loyal followers.

From all the program reports, we can see that all our programs are continuing healthily and according to plan. Among other exciting developments in 2019, we started to teach English to autistic children in Shanghai and started teaching English through videolink in Yunnan province.

Our Shanghai English Teaching Program is still our biggest program. Last year, our volunteers taught 3,868 lessons to 5,951 students at 33 program sites in Shanghai. In spite of the closure of some migrant schools, and decreasing numbers of migrant children in Shanghai, thanks to continuously developing programs with new partners, our student numbers did not decrease significantly compared with 2018.

Drawing on 13 years of experience of running English teaching volunteering programs in Shanghai, we continued to help volunteering organisations in other parts of the country develop their own English programs, providing training, teaching resources, and advice and support on volunteer management, fundraising or other aspects as needed. We now have three such partner organisations in Jiaxing, Dalian and Zhengzhou, and are directly helping an additional 39 volunteers to benefit another 452 students at two of these sites.

In addition, thanks to continuous improvement of our teaching materials, as well as improved volunteer training and support, our program impact was even better than expected. We were happy to find a measurable improvement in confidence in English. We carried out our first oral test at one teaching site in Jing’an District, and found a marked improvement in the oral English abilities of students in both age groups.

In addition, we began to expand our English teaching services to new audiences. In the past year, we started to teach English at a school for autistic children for the first time, and we look forward to gaining more experience in special needs education in 2020.

We provided teacher training to 42 teachers at 9 schools in Shanghai in Spring 2019, with more than 5,500 students estimated to benefit from this program each year. Another 32 teachers at rural schools participated in our online teacher training throughout the year, benefitting more than 3,500 students each year. Teacher training programs provide the most efficient way to improve English teaching for the largest number of students over the long-term, so we are glad to have secured funding to continue these programs both in Shanghai and in rural China in 2020.

Our Rural Programs all grew by leaps and bounds.

We sent 26 individual volunteers to 10 rural teaching sites last year (44% more than last year) and they taught 689 English classes to 3448 students. In the coming year, we plan to recruit more volunteers and increase the time volunteers spend at the project site. Judging from the impact evaluation before and after the project, students’ feedback on the volunteers and their teaching is overwhelmingly positive. The most negative feedback is about the fact that the English class is taught entirely in English. Some students say that it’s too difficult to understand, showing that we need to continue to train our volunteers how to successfully implement an all-English classroom environment, using simple language and body language to avoid losing some students.

In 2019, Stepping Stones’ online English classes developed rapidly. From the central plains to the remote southwestern mountains, we continue to provide high-quality English education to rural children through videolink, and some rural students enjoyed their first English lessons ever. The project benefited 12 project sites throughout the year, and the number of beneficiary students reached 1,457, which has doubled from last year.

Our Digital Literacy program has also yielded fruitful results. In 2019, we delivered 981 computer classes to 712 migrant school children with 2 full time computer teachers supported by 73 volunteers. Students have made significant progress in using office software and searching for information on the Internet.

In the summer of 2019, we met the expectations of the Youth League Committee of Minhang District to run an enriching summer camp for 104 children at the two sites. family. Over a two-month period, as well as regular English and digital literacy lessons, another 94 volunteers were involved in teaching 418 other fun lessons to the children, including in art, craft, life skills, science, environment, geography, dance, martial arts, drama and music. This summer school was once again praised by parents, volunteers and the Youth League Committee.

Of course, as we always say, none of this would be possible without the tireless efforts of all of our volunteers. As the Spring Festival approaches, we sincerely thank all our volunteers, donors and other supporters, and wish everyone good health, good luck and much happiness! We look forward to working with you all next year!

For more details of all of our projects, stay tuned for the annual report, which will be out in the Spring.

Hooi Hoon arrived at a school in Huaiyuan county of Anhui province on Sunday in Autumn. Several students were running around the playground chasing each other.

This scene made Hooi Hoon feel sad: the children stay at school all semester and can’t go home on weekends.

Lim Hooi Hoon, 51, is a university teacher from Kuala Lumpur. Like many of the foreign volunteers at Stepping Stones, she has been to China, but never to the countryside. She is used to travelling to big cities like Shanghai or Guangzhou. It was the first time she had seen the countryside in the less developed parts of China, and the children left behind by their parents and the fast changing outside world.

In the whole month of November, Hooi Hoon lived in the school, and followed a dailyschedule with the school’s teachers and students. In this boarding school, 85% of the students are “left-behind children”. They wake up at 6 a.m., have breakfast at 7.30 a.m., and have classes from 8.20 a.m. until 8.20 p.m., breaking only for lunch and dinner. After the last class, everyone washes quickly before bedtime at 9 p.m.

Hooi Hoon taught three or four English classes a day, with a ten-minute break between lessons, when she had an opportunity to talk to the children. The children’s English proficiency and pronunciation was poor. She would try to correct them and give them an opportunity to learn new words through chatting.

Hooi Hoon worries that the future may not be bright for these children because of the limited education opportunities in the countryside. The students may fall behind when they enter middle school.

At the same time, she noticed that even in such a remote village, some children were very smart and intelligent, with high ambitions for their future. There are also children who can turn anything they have into a toy and have fun on the playground. She marveled at the creativity of these children.

She also found a special “community spirit” in her village school. The children love the school and their teachers. They are all very willing to help the principal and teachers with minor tasks.

As a rural English volunteer, Hooi Hoon admits, it’s hard to say how much a month of volunteer teaching can help these rural children — the challenges they face in the future are not just academic, but also in their living environment. But the presence of foreign volunteers exposes children to new worlds and gives them a chance to make some connections with volunteers that will have a lasting impact. “They can remember that they had this volunteer from some foreign country who came to their village school. So I am sure it will leave a lasting impression on the children.”

That seems to be the view shared by many volunteers. Andy, a volunteer from PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong, had a similar experience. A tax consultant, Andy was born in Hong Kong and grew up in New York. During a company activity organized by Stepping Stones in May this year, he and the company’s volunteer team went to an elementary school in Hunan province for a week-long volunteer event. After the event, he immediately decided to return there to teach on his own.

He said the students there were the main reason he decided to go back.

Andy reveals that he originally wanted to be a teacher, but didn’t choose this career out of practical considerations. The volunteer teaching experience was very rewarding for him: “There was pleasure for me being there and then inspire them to be more interested in learning English, which was what I wanted to do – basically to send the message to students that learning English is fun. And that they should all have that opportunity to try.”

He says the Stepping Stones rural English teaching program brings outside resources to local students. Andy states, ” The students can get different exposure. The exposure to get to speak to other people … will be a beneficial to them, because they do not have that kind of practice.”

Of course, for volunteers, going to the countryside to teach is not only an opportunity to generate and spread love, but also a good chance for them to learn about China. Similar to Hooi Hoon, Linda, who is an accountant from Canada, had never been to a Chinese village before. After she came up with the idea of volunteering to teach in her native country, her father googled “volunteer teacher in China” and found Stepping Stones. As a result, she decided to come to Shanghai and participate in the Stepping Stones rural English volunteer teaching training.

In October, Linda was assigned to a boarding school in Guangde county of Anhui province. She went just in time for the school sports meeting and watched the whole event with great interest. She was impressed by the competitive spirit of students and teachers in various sports competitions.

She organized an English corner with students from grade one to grade eight, some even from outside the school. Near Halloween, she organized a Halloween event at the English corner. She taught them words for Halloween, taught them to sing and draw, and taught them how to make witches’ hats out of cardboard.

“I think people enjoyed it.” Linda said.

Obviously, the volunteer teaching was a really interesting experience, and she couldn’t stop smiling when she talked about it.

She said the Stepping Stones’ rural English teaching program provided an excellent opportunity for foreign volunteers to learn about China, ” Because China still for a lot of people is a land unknown.”

“(The kids’) exposure to the outside world is not a lot. So I think it is really great to have that kind of program so they would interact with people from outside their country, outside of their normal circle,” she said. “And it also gives them a really great opportunity to learn English.”

Stepping Stones has been sending groups of volunteers to rural China since 2007, and started the Rural Individual Volunteering (RIV) project a few years later to cater to individual volunteers who would like to spend longer in rural areas than the groups can. Most of China’s rural schools are in isolated rural communities, where children have little access to the outside world and English teaching resources are very limited. The project utilizes Stepping Stones’ advantage in English educational resources to bring outstanding English teaching volunteers to China’s rural elementary and middle school students, to encourage rural students to learn English, and at the same time also open a window onto the world for them, bringing them knowledge about different cultures and languages, opportunities to interact with people from different regions and countries, to make them more confident and provide motivation and encouragement for their future development.

If you are interested to volunteer in a rural area, please email Gao Xiaolan at projects@steppingstoneschina.net, or go here for more information or to register.

If you are unable to donate through Alipay but would like to contribute, please e-mail fundraising@steppingstoneschina.net to find out different ways to support our programs.

Arts, music, drama, computers, crafts, English, geography… the children of Stepping Stones Summer Camps just had a fantastic summer accompanied by our volunteer teachers.

We appreciate all the staff and volunteers involved in the project for their great commitment. Over nearly two months, through repeated heat waves they did their best to look after those children and secured them a safe, cool and enriched summer.

The 22nd August was the last day of the Summer Camps. We held the closing ceremony with joyful children, our staff and the last remaining volunteers. Please watch the video below, which was produced for us by ID Creations.