Lee Shu Shing

The “Student-centred, Values-driven” vision, articulated in 2011, marked a significant shift in the Singapore education system to a heightened emphasis on values, social emotional competencies, character development at the center of students’ educational experiences, and whole-child development. This vision embraces a “broad and inclusive” approach to education and a desire to support all students to succeed and achieve their fullest potential. This chapter describes key developments which accompanied the Student-centred, Values-driven vision with a particular emphasis on how teacher professional learning needed to be re-positioned in order to complement the vision. The chapter describes how Morgan School—one of four publicly-funded specialized independent schools set up to cater to students’ different aspirations—designed conditions for a school-based learning approach. Narratives from Morgan School describe the complexity and nuances between the school’s and teachers’ understandings of conditions that support professional learning. Based on lessons learned from Morgan School, the chapter postulates that the Student-centred, Values-driven vision has created a social-cultural environment in schools that drives professional learning by nurturing community building, strengthening teacher leaders, and promoting teacher agency and partnerships toward the goal of whole-child development.

Singapore was first pushed into the limelight when the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment results were announced and Singapore was amongst the top five performers for mathematics, reading and science. Singapore is a small city-state, which is two-thirds the size of New York City and one-tenth the size of Shanghai. The scale of Singapore's education system could be one reason why it is possible for the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) to achieve its current status in a relatively short period of time even though Singapore is a young nation that achieved independence in 1965. During the 1960s, the Singapore education system began as a mix of community-­based schools that implemented different curricula. The mediums of instruction involved different languages, namely, English, Chinese, Tamil and Malay. Accountability of schools was also centralised. MOE prescribed standards that schools needed to meet. Another significant development was the introduction of school ranking in 1992 as a form of local accountability.

Singapore is a centralized–decentralized education system which recognizes that learning needs to integrate content–disciplinary understandings with twenty-first-century orientations and outcomes. Schools are given autonomy for innovations. One such initiative is FutureSchools. FutureSchools are exemplar schools with successes in technology-mediated pedagogical innovations and work with other schools to spread twenty-first-century learning practices. This chapter aims to understand how lessons learnt from FutureSchools inform the ways schools implement innovations and how context shapes innovation pathways. Lessons learnt suggest that changing practices is a social process requiring tight-loose couplings. Capacity building is key so teachers understand, enact, and adapt practices for their contexts. This chapter describes two case studies and implementation tenets for building teacher capacity to drive innovations and change practices towards inquiry: (1) creating consensus and tailoring innovation for school’s context; (2) forming communities and building capacity through lesson designs; and (3) deepening understandings through in situ enactment and refinement. Tight-loose couplings are unpacked by discussing commonalities enabling two schools to form partnerships and how context shapes adaptations and pathways. Findings are discussed to show how tight-loose couplings between and beyond schools involve multiple stakeholders from the education ecology to create leverages for innovation and change. Capacity building situated within practice enables teachers take ownership, reflect, and refine changed practices as part of everyday work.

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.

This chapter elaborates role of brokers in scaling educational innovations in a system through partnership models. School leaders make decisions for school change and improvement, and they are encouraged to collaborate beyond their school boundaries. Partnerships are integral to scaling and reform. Three models that illustrate students, teachers, and steering committee as brokers within the partnerships are presented. They are brokers who function vertically and laterally at levels of the system, establishing working relationship with stakeholders and negotiating to diffuse innovations. The models emphasize students, teachers, and steering committee can form partnership beyond school boundaries to aid in the process of mediation to scale innovations. They are positioned as leaders, sustaining innovations beyond seeded schools, negotiating with multiple stakeholders toward consensus, and extending relationships across schools for improvement.

This chapter introduces a school-based teacher professional development (PD) approach adopted by a local secondary school in Singapore in its pursuit of sustaining teaching and learning practices that could support school improvement and achieve educational success in the twenty-first century. By comparing the structure and operational guidelines of this approach with the characteristics and guiding principles of effective PD programmes identified in the contemporary literature, we argue that the approach has great potential to succeed, considering its apparent affordances for a community that (1) involves whole-school participation, (2) facilitates individual and group learning, (3) cultivates a collegial culture of sharing and learning, (4) promotes shared leadership and (5) connects with external resources and communities. Despite its promising outlook, we suggest that empirical studies on the intended conditions, enacted process and achieved outcomes of this PD approach are needed for validation, refinement and sustainability purposes.