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Since the international management consulting firm S&P Consulting opened its office in Shanghai last year, it has been engaged in China’s education industry. In April 2012, S&P began cooperating with Shanghai Pudong Institute of Education Development (PIED) in a project to establish an international education exchange platform.

PIED was founded in October 2004, and is the first regionally based institute of education research and development in China. The institute is strongly engaged in the advanced training of teaching professionals, improving regional teaching quality, popularizing new teaching technology and implementing international educational exchange projects.

PIED aims to strengthen the competencies of 35,000 school teachers in Shanghai’s Pudong school district. PIED’s objectives particularly emphasize successfully equipping the teachers’ with the required knowledge, necessary skills together with the underlying attitude to handle the challenges of the internationalization process.

Our cooperation with PIED is divided into three phases. In phase one, a survey will be conducted within the PIED, which will reflect the opinions of the teachers and management concerning the international education platform and identify the needs and the ascertainment of specific competency enhancement. The second phase will initiate a pilot project in selected schools in Pudong, during which the teachers’ competencies will be trained with the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR. The PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR is a computer-/media-supported training tool and offers an interactive learning environment for targeted competency development. The third phase is intended to introduce the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR to all the schools within the Pudong District.

The current status is that our 3-step survey (questionnaire, workshop and interview) will be completed in early September. We have received very positive responses from the teachers of the PIED. More than 70% of the 250 teachers and managers have answered the online questionnaire; among them, 80 people would like to participate in the face-to-face interviews and workshops. The final results are scheduled for evaluation in September. These results will be the foundation for the next phase, as we work with the PIED in producing a PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR in pilot schools.

We are looking forward to the further good cooperation with Shanghai Pudong Institute of Education Development in such an exciting and innovative international project.

People on the picture (from left): Prof. Dr. Li Jun, Robert A. Sedlák und Prof. Lu Rong