NIE Working Paper Series

This paper attempts to provide some fundamentals to help readers appreciate the conceptions of creative and critical thinking through a broad scan of the literature and findings within overseas and local contexts. The paper further provides a brief overview of the assessments used to assess creative and critical thinking to monitor how our thinking works. It brings to the fore the essential conditions for promoting creative and critical thinking. Approaches favourable to nurturing creative and critical thinking are discussed: classroom environment, teacher competencies and dispositions, and school-wide initiatives for promoting creative and critical thinking in our schools. We then suggest some recommendations for supporting teachers in their continuing efforts to promote this among students. We also make the case for the need for systematic baseline study to gauge our intervention developments so that we might better inform the Ministry of Education Singapore on recommended future directions.

With an increasingly diverse Singapore population, there is a need to consider if Singapore teachers are sufficiently equipped with the relevant skills and knowledge to cater to the needs of a more diverse student population. A literature review was conducted to examine and learn from the experiences of other countries and education systems. The literature review identified three major approaches to teaching culturally diverse students through culturally relevant education: multicultural education (ME), culturally responsive teaching (CRT), and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). This paper provides a summary of each approach, and its implications for teachers, their practice, as well as for teacher education. Finally, the paper will look at the implications for Singapore’s multicultural society.

Parent engagement in children’s upbringing and education is crucial for a child’s holistic development. Awareness of the importance of parent engagement in Singapore is high but research is limited. This working paper aims to lay the foundation for a policy conversation about the role of parent engagement in education. It provides a synopsis of international and local literature on parent engagement: its nature, rationales, global trends, benefits and dilemmas. It reviews some influential conceptual models that have influenced both academic work and policies worldwide. It also presents examples of successful parent engagement practices internationally, which may provide inspiration for Singapore’s own initiatives and policies, while cautioning against the uncritical and wholesale transfer of foreign practices. The paper concludes by suggesting future directions for public policy and educational research. It highlights the directions of a system-wide research that we are undertaking in order to support an evidence-based, context-sensitive policy framework on parent engagement in Singapore.

This working paper builds on existing work on teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) in both local and international contexts, to examine how collaborative learning can enrich teacher professional development for the actualization of teacher-led professionalism. It also aims to bring together the multiple views and lenses of state, local and international academia, and practitioners into an integrated strategy for the research on PLCs in Singapore schools. In doing so, the paper aspires, through research, to contribute to efforts for reconfiguring teacher professionalism, buttressed by teacher-led professional learning efforts. In response to these aspirations, we propose a 5-year research trajectory for actualizing teacher-led professionalism through mentoring collaborative reflection among teachers in PLCs.