Friday, April 15th

    Today we were the students. We were the guests of the Hebei Provincial Education Department, and were greatly warmly at their spacious building. Hebei province has 900,000 staff and faculty members working in 30,000 kinds of schools. The number of students in this province, which we were told is roughly the size of the United Kingdom, is 13 millions. That's a lot of students and teachers! We were once again greeted by our host, Dr. Hou, who introduced us to each of the speakers. Shuxing Zong, a professor from the Hebei Education and Science Research Institute spoke about basic education, particularly the Compulsory Education Law of 1986. Xiaoyan Shi, professor and Deputy Dean of the Education College of Hebei University, spoke about her research into the methods of assessing teachers. Our final teacher was Qixue Chengdu, the Deputy Director of Human Resource Office of the Hebei Education Department, and an expert on teacher and principal recruitment. Except for an extended lunch in the middle of the day, we were seated in a large conference room and were able to ask questions of the Chinese, so as to gain a perspective of their education system before we begin shadowing our principals in their respective schools.