Mandarin TempleCome for Knowledge. Stay for Wisdom.

Guided paths

Teach your first Mandarin lesson

yóu qiǎn rù shēn — “From the shallows into the deep”

Build a lesson on the Teaching Board, put Chinese on it, gather learners in a circle, set homework and follow their progress.

Rather ask a person?

Write to us

A guided path · 7 chapters

Teach your first Mandarin lesson

Six chapters, from an empty board to a circle of learners. Try each part as you go: the path keeps your place.

Jason Mandarin Temple's AI tutor

Read the transcript

The Teaching Board

  1. A board is a deck of slides, not an endless canvas. Your first board starts as this two-slide HSK 1 lesson.
  2. It saves to your account as you work, so it follows you to another device, and nobody else can open it.
  3. On the left, the content column searches the platform’s own material: words, lessons, grammar, readings, culture and more.
  4. With a teaching seat there’s also a Dialogues tab, which puts a lesson’s dialogue on a slide for role-play.
  5. Chinese is built in. Stroke order plays for the class, and you can step through it one stroke at a time.
  6. Tone cards play native recordings of every tone, in the same voice as the pinyin table.
  7. Your slides sit along the bottom. Add one, duplicate it, or select a thumbnail to go straight there.
  8. When you’re ready, Present takes the slide full screen for your screen-share, and Escape brings you back.

Put Chinese on a slide

  1. Start with a fresh slide. An empty slide always shows the three ways in: the library, a template or a tool.
  2. A card from the library points at the real lesson rather than copying it, so it stays correct and opens for whoever has access.
  3. Radicals give you character cards. Select one, and it lands on the slide with its pinyin and meaning.
  4. A lesson opens into its sections. Choose Vocabulary, and the card shows just that part of the lesson.
  5. With a teaching seat, the Dialogues tab puts a lesson’s script on the slide as a role-play strip.
  6. Select a speaker’s name to hide their lines, and your class reads that part aloud instead.
  7. Everything saves to your board as you go, and the chip at the top of the screen says Saved.
  8. And because these cards point at real lessons, Assign can set this slide as homework for a circle.

Circles

  1. All your circles are on one page. Each card shows what kind it is, its level, and who’s in it.
  2. Select New circle for a short form. For a class you teach, choose a Learning Circle, the kind built for teaching.
  3. It’s private by default, with a roster, assignments and a shared timeline. A Community Circle is an open topic space instead.
  4. Give it a name and, if you like, an HSK level and a sentence about what it’s for.
  5. Private means invite-only and out of the directory. You can make it unlisted or public instead.
  6. Creating a circle costs fifty credits, and the form says who pays: a school’s class uses the school’s balance first.
  7. Here’s one already running: its members, and a timeline of the circle’s milestones.
  8. And because it’s a Learning Circle, it opens straight into the Learning Lab, where you follow each learner’s progress.

Invite learners

  1. Every circle you teach has its own invite link, just below its members. Anyone with the link can join, until the circle is full.
  2. Copy puts the link on your clipboard, ready to paste into a message or your class chat.
  3. Or invite learners one at a time, by email. Add their address, and their name if you like, so the email greets them by name.
  4. Send invitation emails them a link that works for seven days. Nothing changes on their account until they accept.
  5. The Roster panel has them too. Select a circle, and Invite students shows its code and the same link.
  6. Someone who opens the link sees your school’s name, when the circle belongs to one, and signs in or creates a free account to see the class.
  7. Signed in, they see the circle, who teaches it, and the name they’ll join as. Join class, and they’re in.
  8. Given just the code, they choose Join a circle on their Circles page and type it in.
  9. Once they’ve joined, they’re here, among your circle’s members.

Set homework

  1. Homework lives under Assignments, a tab in the red bar at the top of the page. Select Assign content to open the form.
  2. Set it for a whole circle, or for one learner in it. Your first circle is already chosen.
  3. Choose a level and a type: a lesson, a grammar point, a reading, a word or flashcards, among several others.
  4. Then pick the content itself. Here it’s HSK 1, lesson one: Connecting With You, from the first unit.
  5. A due date and a note are both optional, and you can queue several activities to set together.
  6. Assign sets it for everyone in the circle at once, and it appears in each learner’s own homework list.
  7. Select Who to see each learner by name, and how far through the lesson they’ve got, checkpoint by checkpoint.
  8. Above the list, a summary shows completion across all your homework, and Export CSV downloads all of it.

Track progress

  1. In the Learning Lab, Circles lists every circle you teach, with how many learners each one has.
  2. They’re ordered by size and never ranked against each other, and neither are the people who teach them.
  3. Open a circle for four figures: who practised in the last two weeks, median mastery, recall after three weeks, and who needs attention.
  4. Anyone flagged comes with a reason, the evidence behind it, and something to try this week.
  5. Below that, everyone is listed alphabetically, never ranked, with mastery, recognition, production and recall for each learner.
  6. A plus-or-minus shows how far a figure could still move, and a dash means not measured yet, never a low score.
  7. In a smaller circle, group figures wait until five learners have practised enough, so no one learner’s result stands for the group.
  8. Select any name to open that learner’s own record in the Lab, facet by facet.

Who sees learner data

  1. It starts with the learner. Their learning record, product analytics and research are three separate decisions, and research stays off unless they say yes.
  2. The optional tasks are research too. They open only if the learner agrees, and what is shared is de-identified and never sold.
  3. Her teacher sees the class: who has practised, the medians, and who would benefit from attention, each with a reason rather than a ranking.
  4. Opening a learner shows the same panels she sees about herself, so they are both reading the same picture.
  5. Under Ethics, some things a teacher never sees, whatever the learner agrees to: research results, and anything she wrote in her own words.
  6. In a class of three, group figures are withheld, because a median over three people is really one person’s own result.
  7. The school sees adoption and medians across its classes, listed alphabetically and never ranked. A class too small to report says so.
  8. A parent sees one card for each child, never a combined figure.
  9. On her daughter’s page: where she is, and what would help most, in plain words.
  10. And under Activity, one panel is left out for parents: the replay of every page their child opened.