(Teacher Liang Yuechan)
Where does the path of professional growth for a history teacher lie? Reflecting on my own journey from the greenness of first stepping onto the podium to now leading a team, and drawing on the practical explorations of RDFZ's history teaching and research group, I have come to deeply understand: persistent and sustained academic reading is the one and only method for teachers to meet new challenges, achieve professional refinement, and ultimately implement core competencies. It is the key to breaking through difficulties and illuminating the path of growth. This is a deep reflection rooted in more than ten years of my own teaching practice, especially in the process of facing the challenges of the new textbook.
01 Teaching Growth: From Confusion to Conviction
When I first stepped onto the podium, I carried the confidence and pride accumulated through seven years of professional study, convinced that teaching secondary school history would be no problem. But reality quickly brought me back to earth: although I was familiar with the textbook content, I spoke incoherently in the classroom, could only dryly read the textbook, and the teaching outcomes were worrying. Faced with students' questions about knowledge points, I was often stumped after just two questions, with anxiety and self-doubt lingering without reprieve.
Fortunately, I was in the RDFZ History Teaching and Research Group led by the renowned history teacher Li Xiaofeng — a place of professional excellence and mutual support. Faced with my tentative requests for help, the lesson preparation group teachers gave generously of their knowledge, and also gifted me the full set of Teacher Li's teaching courseware and recordings. I treated this as a treasure and began a cycle of "listening to recordings — studying monographs — preparing lessons." Many of my doubts were suddenly illuminated by the recordings, and I deeply felt ashamed of my former pride.
Through years of dedicated study and practice, I established a core belief: improving teaching competency is not a simple accumulation of experience; the foundation lies in sustained and in-depth academic reading and professional accumulation. This persistence has supported me in growing from a nervous novice teacher to a teaching and research group leader capable of guiding the team in exploring teaching reform. This belief is both the cornerstone of my personal growth and the "family heirloom" passed down from generation to generation in the teaching and research group.
Under the dual pressures of the new textbook and competency-oriented teaching, I keep asking: how exactly is the value of academic reading reflected? How does it specifically transform into the power to break through teaching difficulties and promote teacher growth?
02 Professional Depth Determines Classroom Effectiveness
History teaching is by no means a simple retelling of historical facts. To accurately and profoundly grasp the content of the textbook, to clearly explain the logic of history, one must penetrate the surface and deeply understand the specific spatiotemporal background in which historical events occurred and their internal connections. Teaching without an academic foundation is like water without a source or a tree without roots — it easily becomes rigid and one-sided, and even disciplinary errors can occur. The new textbook incorporates a large number of cutting-edge academic achievements, with a significantly elevated level of professional difficulty. Only by constructing a deep professional background through solid academic reading can teachers accurately understand and command the textbook, avoiding the problem of "leading others while being confused oneself." Academic reading is the "ballast stone" that guarantees the precision and depth of teaching. The following three examples illustrate this.
Clearing the fog of cognition around "non-suppression of land mergers." The Song dynasty policy of "establishing no land system" and "non-suppression of land mergers" is often simply interpreted in secondary school teaching as official inaction leading to uncontrolled land merging and heightened social contradictions. After studying monographs on ancient Chinese economic history and examining the evolution of the land system, I came to understand its deeper meaning: this was a transformation of national economic policy against the backdrop of the perfection of private land ownership and the rise of the commodity economy. The Song dynasty government had already shifted its focus from adjusting land ownership to limiting the rate of rental exploitation, safeguarding finances and stabilizing governance by regulating the tenant relationship, reflecting the ruling regime's adaptive adjustment to economic development. Academic reading enabled me to step out of the rut of simple criticism, making classroom instruction more historically substantial and intellectually stimulating.
Clarifying the distinction between "Three Departments" and the "Three Department System." The new textbook explicitly states that "Emperor Wen of Sui formally established the Three Department and Six Ministry System." Students often wonder: since the Three Departments already appeared during the Wei-Jin period, why was it only "established" in the Sui dynasty? This actually involves the fundamental distinction between "institutional establishment" and "political system." Only by consulting monographs on China's bureaucratic political system can the core logic be clarified: the Three Departments as central institutions appeared in succession during the Wei-Jin-Northern and Southern dynasties and came to hold power, while the Three Department System is "the system of mutual coordination and checks and balances between the Three Departments and the monarch and prime minister in decision-making and execution of government affairs." The formal establishment of this system was indeed in the Sui dynasty. Academic reading gave me the ability to penetrate the fog of concepts and precisely grasp the deeper meaning behind the textbook's expressions.
Logically reconstructing voluminous textbook content. The current unified senior high school history new textbook, on the one hand, strengthens the implementation of materialist historical thought; on the other hand, its volume has also reached an unprecedented level. Against this backdrop, teachers even more need to rely on academic reading to clarify the internal logic and structure of textbook content, so as to efficiently complete teaching tasks in limited time. Lesson 9 of China and World History Compendium (Vol. 2), "Bourgeois Revolutions and the Establishment of the Capitalist System," covers content related to eight major countries — the English, American, and French revolutions; the establishment of the capitalist system; and the reforms of Russia, Italy, Germany, and Japan — and must be completed in 1–1.5 class periods. Through extensive reading of monographs on the history of capitalist development and comparative political systems, I extracted four core problem chains: (1) the differences between the capitalist political systems of Britain, the USA, and France versus Germany, Italy, and Japan; (2) the root causes of these differences; (3) the internal connections between capitalist political and economic systems; and (4) the essence of the capitalist system. Guided by the problem chains, students can quickly grasp the overall logic and efficiently master the core content. Academic reading helped me discern the internal logic of the textbook and simplify complexity, improving teaching efficiency.
03 Scholarly Depth Supports Competency Heights
The five core competencies proposed in the new curriculum standards are the soul of new textbook teaching. Although the large volume and high difficulty of the new textbook bring challenges, competency is not an abstract ideal; its foundation is deeply planted in the teacher's profound understanding of the disciplinary essence and the academic frontier. Without scholarly support, competency-oriented teaching easily becomes a formality, and academic reading is the key support for competency implementation.
The textbook content must be integrated and processed. Integrating the textbook content is a combination of moves: it requires clarifying the internal logic and structure of the textbook content, merging systems, dividing stages, laying out key and difficult points while briefly handling some non-key content or content that students are already relatively familiar with. All of this must be built on the foundation of the teacher's accurate and deep mastery of the textbook content; otherwise, not only is the teaching task difficult to complete, but disciplinary errors are likely to occur. This requires teachers to build a solid professional knowledge background through academic reading.
In the teaching process, truly implement core competencies in the classroom. To truly implement core competencies, it is necessary to design the classroom teaching segments well. The design of classroom teaching segments ultimately comes down to setting problems and tasks, and students' main tasks in the classroom are to analyze materials, think about problems, and solve problems. For teachers, the core issue is selecting materials and setting problem clusters, which is an extremely demanding test of the teacher's academic foundation. The depth of the teacher's own understanding of the disciplinary logic determines whether the problems they design can truly touch the core, trigger higher-order thinking, and thus achieve the rooting of competencies. Academic reading is the inexhaustible source for teachers to understand disciplinary logic and grasp the precision of teaching.
The key to material selection: what is the logical connection between the material and the textbook? Does it have academic consensus? Does it match students' cognitive level? For example, in the lesson on "The Enlightenment," I selected original text fragments such as Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" to explain "rationalism," because they can vividly and accurately express the core concept of "reason." The precision of material selection directly comes from the teacher's familiarity with and judgment of academic resources.
The challenge of question design: "progressive questions" are by no means a simple "what — why — how" routine. Truly effective problem chains must not only conform to students' cognitive laws, but must also profoundly reflect the academic logic of the content being studied. In the same "Enlightenment" lesson, for the difficult point of "rationalism" and the thoughts of the Enlightenment thinkers, I designed four questions: first, what exactly is the connotation of "reason"? Second, what power/role do the Enlightenment thinkers believe human reason possesses? Third, what is the internal basis (philosophical and scientific basis) for them attributing such a status to reason? Fourth, based on reason, what characteristics do they envision for an ideal society in terms of politics, economics, and intellectual culture? Following this exploration, students not only mastered the knowledge but also experienced a complete thinking ascent process, with competencies such as historical evidence and historical interpretation naturally permeating. The inspiration for the design of this problem directly came from my reading and reflections on monographs related to Enlightenment thought.
04 Going Alone Is Fast; Going Together, You Go Far
As a teaching and research group leader, I deeply know that the power of an individual is limited. Faced with the challenges of the new textbook and the reality of most teachers' fragmented time, how can the individual's understanding of the value of academic reading be transformed into the driving force for the team's collective advancement? My reflections and practices are: cultivate an academic atmosphere, build a shared reading platform, and let the spark of individual reading converge into the prairie fire that drives the team's professional development.
Focus on problem-driven shared reading. Regularly organize teaching and research activities to collect real and difficult problems from teaching. After screening, assign tasks and guide teachers to engage in targeted academic reading with clear goals.
In-depth exchange to transform achievements. Based on reading gains, conduct high-quality sharing and seminars. Encourage in-depth exchanges and collisions of ideas. More importantly, introduce the seminar outcomes into classroom practice; open group research lessons, with everyone observing and commenting, to verify the actual effectiveness of transforming reading achievements into teaching benefits.
Encourage output to consolidate experience. Actively create conditions to support teachers in elevating their reading gains and teaching practice achievements to theoretical expression by writing papers and striving for publication. At the same time, build an online shared resource library within the group from accumulated academic resources, teaching designs, and seminar achievements, creating a continuously updated resource treasury.
Academic accumulation catalyzes curriculum innovation. Drawing on their respective academic specialties and sustained reading accumulation, teachers in the group have progressively and independently developed distinctive elective courses including Ancient Chinese Economic History, World Civilization History, The Palace Museum: History and Culture, Exploration of Major Issues in Ancient Chinese History, Exploration of Frontier Issues in Modern Chinese History, Beijing: History and Culture, and History in Cultural Artifacts. The entire process — from syllabus formulation, selection of viewpoints (choosing mainstream academic consensus), problem design, material compilation to courseware production and task design — is independently completed by the teachers themselves, and is a vivid embodiment of the deep integration of academic reading and teaching innovation. The flourishing of elective courses is one of the abundant fruits of the teaching and research group's deep academic heritage made manifest.
This model of team building centered on academic reading as its core bond has achieved remarkable results. The teaching and research group has undertaken numerous national, municipal, district, and school-level high-quality research lessons, and has become a backbone force in municipal and district history teaching and research. Outstanding results have been achieved repeatedly in competitions at all levels. Cumulatively, more than a hundred papers have been published. Approximately 60% of teachers in the group have been recognized as district-level backbone teachers or above, and two Beijing municipal special-grade teachers have been cultivated. All of this confirms the powerful vitality of "adhering to academic reading as the family heirloom."
Academic reading is by no means self-admiring isolation in an ivory tower. It is the source of vitality for history teachers to understand the textbook, command the classroom, implement competencies, and inspire students; it is the core driving force for teachers to break through professional bottlenecks and achieve sustainable professional development; and it is the fertile ground for the teaching and research group to gather wisdom, collaborate on innovation, and cultivate distinctive characteristics. My path to becoming a renowned teacher is "cultivating teaching through scholarship and leading growth through depth." In the garden of history education, only by cultivating the fertile soil of scholarship can the classroom radiate the light of thought, can teaching carry the weight of talent cultivation, and can the flowers of core competencies ultimately bloom in splendor.
