The Shanghai Education Commission has released a three-year action plan with around 100 primary and middle schools taking the lead in promoting project-based learning over the period.

It aims to cultivate students’ abilities in solving real life problems in creative ways.

Schools will design real and challenging problems, with teachers guiding students to solve them in creative ways. In the process, pupils will develop their ability in creative and critical thinking, group communication and cooperation.

“Problem-based learning will be an important experiment in our education system,” saidJiaWei, deputy director of the commission. “Most of the challenges we face now are cross-disciplinary, so we have to keep our children curious to learn and be creative in applying all their knowledge to solve problems.”

Hestressed that the plan was not to add more courses, but to restructure teaching and learning models. “There should be more complicated real-life questions to bridge the learning content and children so as to arouse their curiosity and motivation for learning.”

Shanghai has a good foundation for carrying out the plan with 32 schools having piloted the new education model for the past five years and with principals and teachers developing many successful projects.

ShanghaiLuwanMiddle School in Huangpu District is one such school which adopted an approach called “education without borders” to put the skills of all disciplines on an equal footing and pool resources while teaching students to solve real life problems, instead of having lectures in each discipline separately.

“One reason to launch the program was to adapt to the new high school entrance exam where students need to develop an ability in cross-disciplinary andexplorativelearning,” saidZhangYi, the principal.