Intrinsic motivation

The balanced bilingual education at 3e has also tempted Joanne O'Connor to send her two children to the school as the Australian family plans to stay in China for a while.

"Learning Chinese helps them to get a full experience to live in China," says O'Connor, who is proud that her elder daughter in Grade 2 can recite Chinese poems and sing Chinese songs just like a native speaker.

And what really surprised her was that even during holidays, the daughter would get up before 6 am to do her homework.

"The high teacher-student ratio helps my child, and instills self-discipline," she says.

Shi agrees with this assessment and says the teachers at 3e encourage students to learn by exploration instead of driving them to acquire the knowledge of a certain field quickly using rewards, which gives the children a chance to explore the world on their own.

"They learn it, because they like it," says Shi.

"At 3e, the motivation that prompts the children to learn actually arises from within themselves."

Cheng Liyuan, who teaches Chinese, arts, science and mathematics in the Chinese immersion classroom, says what the teachers do is to target the school's curriculum objectives in a flexible manner, so normally the teachers use topics that students are interested in to deliver the content and meet the objectives.

She says when she finds that some of the children talk about their experiences of skiing, she uses winter sports as a topic for her class to study.

Then she organizes various activities based on the topic, which covers basic knowledge about water's three states and even the making of a pair of model skates.

"When participating in these student-initiated activities, they are willing to think, discuss and learn," says Cheng.

Having worked at 3e for over 13 years, another staff member, Hu Dongjuan, also finds that she remains motivated to teach as she experiences a feeling of warmth and trust.

"I don't need to write every detail of my classes into reports or deal with different forms of time-consuming assessments as I used to do in a private kindergarten earlier," says Hu.

"Hence, I get more time to adjust my class routine and content according to the children's feedback."