GoEast Teacher Skills Competition 2026: From Solo Work to Teamwork

For its first three years, the GoEast Teacher Skills Competition was a solo event: each teacher came up with a lesson, recorded it and edited the video alone. The fourth edition, which ended on September 10, 2026, Teacher’s Day in China (教师节 Jiàoshī Jié), changed that. Every entry was built by a team of three.

This recap covers the winners, how the new “2+1” team format and the scoring worked, and what teachers said about learning from one another. It is also a look at how teachers at GoEast Mandarin, a Chinese language school founded in Shanghai in 2012, keep sharpening their teaching.

What is the GoEast Teacher Skills Competition?

The GoEast Teacher Skills Competition (教师技能大赛 jiàoshī jìnéng dàsài) is an annual in-house contest in which GoEast Mandarin’s teachers show how they design and teach lessons. It has been held every year since 2023, and recent editions have concluded on Teacher’s Day in China, September 10. The 2026 competition was the fourth.

This year’s theme was 乐在学中 lè zài xué zhōng, “Joy in Learning,” with a motto about making every learning moment sparkle and every class full of joy. The competition closed with an online awards ceremony at noon on September 10, where three teams received Best Teaching Demonstration prizes and two received the Most Popular Award.

The third edition, in 2025, was themed “A Hundred Flowers Bloom” and gave awards for Teaching Performance and Teaching Design. The 2025 Teacher Skills Competition recap lists those winners.

Who won the 2026 GoEast Teacher Skills Competition?

Group 10 won first prize for Best Teaching Demonstration, Group 9 placed second and Group 4 placed third. The two Most Popular Awards went to Group 4 and Group 6, which made Group 4 the only team to win in both categories.

First prize extends a run for Fiona Li, a K-12 teacher who won the Best Private Class Teaching Award in 2025, when she was recognized for the second year in a row. This year’s result makes it three consecutive years among the winners. Group 9’s second place came with a story of its own: the team’s teaching advisor, Karen Shi, edited the video herself.

How did the new 2+1 team format work?

In 2026, GoEast replaced individual entries with “2+1” teams: a course designer and a course tester, who create and teach the lesson, plus a teaching advisor who mentors them. In each of the first three editions, a single teacher planned the lesson, recorded it and edited the video.

The reasoning behind the change is that a good lesson is rarely perfected by one person working behind a closed door. The teacher who designs a lesson, the teacher who teaches it and a colleague who has observed many classes each notice different things. Bringing those three viewpoints together before an entry is submitted gives the lesson a better chance of holding up in a real classroom.

How were the Best Teaching Demonstration and Most Popular awards decided?

The Best Teaching Demonstration score had two parts: 70% came from GoEast’s internal experts and 30% from a vote of all teachers. Because everyone voted, every competitor was also a reviewer.

Clytie Yuan, the GoEast curriculum researcher who led this year’s competition, sees the vote as more than a scoring method:

Many GoEast teachers take part in voting on the entries, so everyone gets to study each team’s work more closely and open up new ideas for their own teaching.

In practice, the vote gave teachers a reason to watch colleagues they might otherwise only have heard about. Instead of taking a colleague’s reputation on trust, a teacher could open that colleague’s video and see how the lesson begins, how the teacher responds when students go quiet and how a grammar point is slipped into a game. Watching other teachers at work is one of the quickest ways to improve your own teaching, and the vote made it part of everyone’s competition.

The Most Popular Award worked separately. It recognized the entries that drew the strongest response online, and this year it went to two teams, Groups 4 and 6.

How did GoEast’s K-12 teams prepare?

The new format changed preparation most visibly on GoEast’s K-12 team, which teaches children and teenagers. Two groups there went all out, and they finished first and second.

Group 10: teaching by day, revising by night

Group 10 kept a schedule that Chinese speakers call 白加黑 bái jiā hēi, literally “white plus black”: teaching through the day, then working into the night. Once their classes were over, the three teachers went back over the lesson plan together. Messages kept arriving in the team chat late at night, the plan went through version after version, and the version numbers in the document titles kept climbing after midnight. For this group, revising the lesson plan in the small hours was routine rather than a final push. Group 10 went on to win first prize.

Group 9: the mentor who took over the editing

Group 9’s extra effort came from its mentor. A teaching advisor’s job is to give suggestions, guide the team and appear on camera to rally votes; editing the video is not part of it. Karen Shi, the team’s advisor and a GoEast teacher who began teaching Chinese in 2011, did it anyway. When she saw a stretch of footage whose pacing could be better, she took over the edit and adjusted it frame by frame. Group 9 placed second.

What did teachers gain from working in teams?

The competition’s organizer and a first-time competitor describe the same benefit: teachers learned directly from each other.

The organizer: “Teachers really started exchanging ideas”

Clytie Yuan, who won the Best Teaching Design Award herself in 2025, says the format changed how teachers work together:

This year’s format really got teachers exchanging ideas with one another. The experience of our in-house mentors could go straight to new teachers.

“Straight” is the important word. In the past, a mentor’s know-how usually reached newer colleagues through training materials and secondhand accounts. This year, mentors and newer teachers sat on the same team, worked from the same lesson plan and talked through the same recording, so experience passed directly from one person to another.

A first-time competitor: “I gained a lot”

Doris, a teacher on Group 6, took part in the competition for the first time this year, and her team won a Most Popular Award. Asked about the experience, she said:

This was my first Teacher Skills Competition, and I think it’s a really good way for us to learn from each other and exchange ideas. The teachers also helped one another, and I gained a great deal from that. And through the other teachers’ videos, I got to see each of their teaching styles.

A newcomer finishing her first competition with that verdict is exactly what the format change was designed to produce. What tends to discourage new teachers is not the risk of missing out on a prize but competing in isolation: preparing alone, handing in the work, getting a score and moving on. Doris’s competition looked different:

• She had two teammates, one of them a former first-prize winner.
• As a voter, she watched every team’s entry, a tour of teaching styles from across GoEast.
• Her team’s entry was shared on social media, where it collected likes.

What she carries forward is less a trophy than the lessons she watched, the plans she reworked and the colleagues whose names she now knows.

What does the competition mean for GoEast students?

For learners and parents, the competition offers a look behind the scenes at how GoEast Mandarin teachers prepare lessons. Each 2026 entry was planned by one teacher, taught by another and shaped by an experienced mentor’s feedback. It was then scored by internal experts and watched and voted on by teachers across the school, so techniques that worked in one team’s lesson were seen by teachers throughout GoEast.

Several of this year’s winners teach young learners. Fiona Li teaches GoEast’s online Chinese classes for kids, and Bella Jin is part of the curriculum team that designs GoEast’s kids’ courses. The 2026 theme echoes the aim of those classes: making Mandarin a joyful adventure.

You can read about more of the team, including Karen Shi, Bella Jin and Clytie Yuan, on the GoEast teachers and staff page.

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