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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced school closure thus shifting teaching and learning towards full home-based learning (HBL). Technology plays a key role but the considerations to design online learning environments that meaningfully engage students are complex. This exploratory, qualitative study attempted to elicit eight mathematics teachers’ considerations and perspectives in designing online home-based learning lessons for the engagement of elementary and secondary students. Data were gathered through interviews. Ground-up thematic analyses were conducted. The following implications are derived—(1) student engagement in online learning context is paramount to their learning, (2) there is no one software application for all the learning activities, (3) teacher professional development is necessary to keep them up-to-date, (4) online social networking platforms may be necessary for students’ discussion beyond official online lesson time, and (5) students need to be inculcated with more self-directed skills and habits for learning in online and face-to-face contexts. This study gathers evidence-informed considerations for teachers to design lessons and engage students meaningfully in a unique, online HBL environment. While this is an exploratory study, future studies can inform this area of work by including more teachers across subjects, grades, schools, and geographical contexts. Studies involving students and parents would also be meaningful.

Education cannot adopt the linear model of scaling used by the medical sciences. "Gold standards" cannot be replicated without considering process-in -learning & diversity, and student-variedness in classrooms. This article proposes a nuanced model of educational scaling-and-diffusion, describing the scaling (top-down supports) and diffusion efforts (bottom-up innovations from teachers and schools) in Singapore's education landscape. For educational innovations that focus on explicit knowledge, scaling is mechanistic ("roll-outs"), while inquiry-based learning designs are connoted as organic ("diffusion of innovation"). Inquiry-based learning designs focus more on process rather than content dissemination, although content and process are intertwined. Roll-outs are generally sound when disseminating content as products, and in the haste of implementation, we inherently partake in the fallacy that process abilities can likewise be taught as content.

The paper attempts to bridge informal and formal learning by leveraging on affordance structures associated with informal environments to help learners develop social, cognitive, and metacognitive dispositions that can be applied to learning in classrooms. Most studies focus on either learning in formal or informal contexts, but this study seeks to link the two. The paper proposes three tenets to augment de-contextualized learning in schools by putting back the: (a) tacit, (b) social-collective, and (c) informal. This paper seeks to advance the argument for a consideration of how formal learning might be made more authentic by leveraging the affordances of informal learning. Two case examples are illustrated. The first case shows learners operating in a virtual environment in which—through the collaborative manipulation of terrain—adopt the epistemic frame of geomorphologists. The case seeks to illustrate how the tacit and social-collective dimensions from the virtual environment might be incorporated as part of the formal geography curriculum. In the second case, interactions between members of a school bowling team highlight the contextualized and authentic metacognitive demands placed on learners/bowlers, and how these demands are re-contextualized—through metacognitive brokering—to the formal curriculum. Productive linkages are made between informal and formal learnings and anchored through learners’ authentic experiences.

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.