HD Ningbo-Run away from this place! HDNB Ningbo Hede Experimental School Mistreated myself and other teachers and make our lives hell. Ningbo Zhejiang

This is a school I got suckered in at working for. I'm going to tell you why you should not send your kids to this school, instead find a real international school in Ninbo (there are a few). If you are are a teacher who is looking to come to this school, my honest advice is run away! They will make your life hell.

As a teacher, you are given zero trust and autonomy. Everything you do is controlled. Let's talk about that first...

Some of the ways in which you are given no trust or freedom as a teacher:

-very strict dress codes

-lesson plans for every class

-not allowed to leave campus during lunch time (I was denied many times)

-you are required to use a very convulated and overly complicated rubric to assess all assessments

-the way you mark homework and anything has to be done in a specific, stringent way 

-Even the way you file homework, assessments has to be done in a certain way

-you are not given parent's emails directly so any parent complaints that get sent about you go straight to management (and not to you)

-you as a teacher are forced to give all the students good grades 

How they treat teachers poorly:

-they will fire you if parents complain (even about the most frivilous things), more on this later

-no freedom or trust at all (covered above)

-they don't ever want to hear your side of the story with parent complaints, they will just give you a warning (parents side always over teachers side)

Firing Because of Parent Complaints

Teachers get easily fired from this school and once you dig down deeper into why, it is usually for frivilous reasons. One teacher was fired because the parents complained the students weren't given enough homework. Another teacher got fired because he was too tall and he "intimidated" students. 

The parents at HD Ningbo are known to be extremely demanding and for frivilous reasons (for example not enough homework, too much homework, not enough snacks not given to them in snack time, etc.). This is due to the fact that HD Ningbo overpromises and expects the teachers to handle it, again no regard for the wellbeing of teachers.  

No Transparency

I have had a few parent complaints that were sent directly to the school and I was not even given a chance to give my side of the story to parents. Instead, they gave me a warning and only once I did some investigating I found it was through these parent complaints. Management didn't even talk to me about the issue or try to hear my side of it.

Don't care about what actually matters

Child safety and learning experience are two very important things and thts

Most of the "training" and "PD" that I recieved was not helpful at the slightest. For example, the trainings on differentiation and Child safety lacked any sort of actionable knowledge for me and most of the time was just going over very general theory (in my opinion). There was nothing I could take and use in my own teaching practice. The only thing I was taught here is this is how you use our rubric, how to do marking the way we want, etc. I did not learn anything valuable about pedagogy whatsoever in my time here.  

They don't care much about classroom experience or child safety at all (the Chinese teachers frequently yell and verbally abuse children), yet they care more about busy work that they can show to parents. 

They overwork teachers to the point where they can't focus on what really matters, the child's learning. What matters more to them is that the foreign teachers dress super nice and produce lots of busy work to show to parents. 

Assessment Weeks-A waste of time

There is about 10 weeks in the year which are called "assessment weeks". Basically for these 10 school weeks, we run the students through ridiculous amounts of assessments and then mark them. During these 10 weeks, very very little actual teaching is done in my opinion. The teacher is simply too busy to teach so they play videos, give out random worksheets and find ways to kill time.

Now, doing the assessment week process one time a year or once a semester is fine (for a week each) but doing it over 10 weeks is a complete waste of time, again this is done solely to show parents how much "work" we are doing.

If You Care About Education, Do Not Work Here and Do Not Send Your Kids Here

I cannot reitirate this enough. If a school doesn't support and treat their teachers well, how can they care about the students?

I as a current teacher am definitely going to resign after this year. Working at HD Ningbo completely destroys my passion in teaching.