Forty Form Two students of Shun Lee Catholic Secondary School could not hide their surprise at seeing more than 100 teachers waiting for them as they filed into a temporary classroom at the school hall on Monday.
The nature of the event was as unprecedented as the scenario. Fifteen teachers, principals and education bureau officers from the Dong Shan district of Guangzhou were in the SAR for a one-week exchange programme, not only to visit schools and talk to local teachers as in other exchange trips, but to conduct a parallel teaching session with their local counterparts.
The trip was part of a Quality Education Fund project launched by the University of Hong Kong's Centre of Educational Leadership (CEL) and six Catholic secondary schools two years ago. Since then, the SAR participants have visited schools in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Shun Lee Catholic Secondary School and Guangzhou Municipal No. 7 Secondary School, one of the three Guangzhou secondary schools participating in the programme, each sent a Chinese language and mathematics teacher to teach the same topics as their local counterparts to four classes.
The rest of the group, as well as teachers invited from other local schools, observed. A forum was held after the lessons to discuss how and why the teaching from the two sides of the border differed.
'We were surprsied to hear only a few days before the trip that we were expected to give two open lessons. But I certainly understand much more about local teaching compared with previous exchanges,' said Feng Xuchu, the master teacher of Guangzhou Municipal No. 7 Secondary School.