Fostering communities of practice through learning communities
This paper discusses the issue of fostering or building learning communities among heads of department (HoD) in IT in Singapore schools. A preliminary study was conducted among 17 HoDs anchoring on the issues of IT MasterPlan II (MP2) in Singapore. The study reveals the issues of concern for these HoD ITs vis-à-vis the impending need to implement the pedagogically inclined stance of MP2. This paper presents a framework of an evolving community of practitioners (CoP) along a simulation, participation, and codetermined interactions continuum. Simulation, participation, and co-determined interactions are three models of learning, which describe how learners are brought through a scaffolded process within a community experience.
Singapore’s learning sciences lab: Seeking transformations in ICT-enabled pedagogy
Journeys in the learning sciences: The Singapore experience
This article provides an overview of research in the Learning Sciences from a Design Research perspective, as it has been framed in Singapore by the National Institute of Education (NIE). The initial research agenda is considered in the light of challenges and the subsequent re-casting of objectives, based on the working out of a tripartite relationship between the NIE, the Ministry of Education, and local schools. A conceptual model is proposed as an attempt to provide structure for new research interventions going forward.
A social-cultural view of information technology integration in school contexts
ICT-based learning innovations for the twenty-first century in Singapore: Scaling change through apprenticing and ecological leadership
ICT-based learning innovations have augmented learning in many ways; however, scaling innovations are complex. Scaling in education is not a linear replication of products but an iterative process with an emphasis on the capacity of people. To provide further insights, a case study of the spread of a learning initiative in Singapore is elaborated on. The resultant findings build on a translational and scaling framework, developed by researchers at the Office of Education Research (OER), NIE. The framework, Scaling Change through Apprenticing and Ecological Leadership (SCAEL), is a context-sensitive model demonstrating the approaches that learning innovations can diffuse and spread through the multiple leadership roles of stakeholders in the ecological system.
Addressing the skills gap: What schools can do to cultivate innovation and problem solving
Singapore students have consistently demonstrated outstanding levels of performance in mathematics and problem solving captured in international assessments. However, these stellar results stand in contrast to Singapore's real-world problem-solving capacities, evidenced by her diffident innovation levels and a limited talent pool with problem-solving skills that are high in the value chain. This chapter seeks to address this "skills gap" between what schools develop in students and the high-value workforce skills needed for innovation and enterprise. Focusing on mathematics problem solving, we first examined the historical and socio-cultural development of Singapore mathematics education to identify the system's affordances in cultivating the performance in international assessments, and its trade-offs in developing students' skills in dealing with authentic, non-routine and complex real-world problems. We then examined the trajectories and the impact of pedagogical innovations that were designed for the Singapore mathematics classrooms and that sought to address the trade-offs. From a postulation of factors behind the challenges of implementing and sustaining these innovations in the classrooms, implications for policy, practice, and research are put forth to propose how the Singapore mathematics education can be enhanced to mould the value-creating talent that Singapore needs to stay competitive.
Teachers at the heart of system change: Principles of educational change for school leaders
People, especially teachers, make all the difference in educational change, with epistemic shifts in teachers being the highest leverage point for system change. Foregrounding the chapter with a non-objectivistic approach in learning sciences for education change, this concluding chapter postulates that the teacher is at the heart of the system and school change. While we can have a system and school improvement theories to guide us in the course of systemic change, the heart of teaching and learning reforms lies with the teacher. It will be the expert teacher who will be able to enable purposeful learning by our students where their learning will be more life-long, life-wide, life-deep and life-wise. With reiteration of the key concepts of ecological and apprenticing leadership via networked learning communities, the middle leadership of teacher- leaders is reinforced and serves as a powerful mechanism driving inside- out change within the system.
Inductive leadership: Activating community-oriented student agency towards school improvement
In this chapter, we share a case study of a very successful Singapore secondary school’s efforts to implement a revised curriculum that is more student- and inquiry-oriented, i.e. to move towards purposeful learning for students. Through this case study, we have identified the notion of “agentic student leadership”, a term that we have devised, that could be leveraged to catalyse and spur school improvement through the activation of community-oriented student agency. We unpacked this notion of “agentic student leadership” into its constituent 3-stage process that had been enacted by the principal. We discuss how “agentic student leadership” constitutes 2nd order improvements in schools, as well as argue for the location of its potential contribution to the literature on school leadership and school improvement.
Leadership for change in Singapore schools: An introduction
As the first chapter of this book, we share some background information about Singapore and Singaporean education to provide the necessary context to understand the subsequent chapters in this book. We also share the kind of education that we think that Singapore should provide for its citizens to meet the challenges ahead and an overview of the role played by educational leadership in Singapore to bring about the required changes that led to the educational innovations described in the subsequent chapters. We hope that readers who are not familiar with Singapore will find a good overview of Singapore and Singaporean education in this chapter. However, for readers who are already familiar with Singapore, we recommend that they should skip these two sections and proceed to the section on “Preparing for the Future”. In this book, we share about how to prepare learners for the future and will focus on the role played by school leadership in preparing these learners for the desired future.