Dennis Kwek

‘Reading’ the Home and Reading in School: Framing Deficit Constructions as Learning Difficulties in Singapore English Classrooms

Half of the students in the Normal (Technical) stream leave their classroom every day not understanding their lessons. They spend less than an hour a day studying. One in four said they had difficulty studying because their English was poor. At home, they speak mainly Mandarin or dialect. Poor study skills and habits are common. These students have trouble concentrating and listening in class, so they also have difficulty remembering what has been taught. They also manage their time poorly (Tan, 1996)

Visible Learning and the Enacted Curriculum in Singapore

In this chapter we assess the intellectual quality of the enacted curriculum in Secondary 3 Mathematics and English in a large representative sample of schools in Singapore using criteria and standards identified in part by John Hattie in Visible Learning. In doing so, however, we have expanded Hattie’s particular model of visible learning to include a range of instructional practices that we believe are critical to enhancing instructional transparency and student learning. In particular, we focus on a range of standards that have the potential to ensure greater epistemic clarity with respect to the nature and cognitive demands of the knowledge work involved in the design and implementation of instructional (and assessment) tasks.

Preparing Students for the Twenty-First Century: A Snapshot of Singapore’s Approach

The teaching and learning of twenty-first century competencies in Singapore schools began with a vision in 1997. The Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN) vision initiated a series of educational reforms to strengthen thinking and inquiry among students, preparing them for learning and working in the twenty-first century. The momentum generated from the TSLN vision led to the development of the Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes which articulates the twenty-first century competencies that will be nurtured in schools – civic literacy, global awareness and cross-cultural skills, critical and inventive thinking, and communication, collaboration and information skills. This chapter narrates the policies and approaches that were central to TSLN, specifically on the structural and curricular changes, the re-perception of teaching and learning and a redefinition of the role of teachers. TSLN, which captures the central ideas of preparing students for the twenty-first century, was never conceived as a programmatic change in that it did not contain an explicit set of intervention strategies and targets. TSLN was an entire systemic effort encompassing the policy, cultural, curricular, assessment and professional learning arenas. TSLN recognised that Singapore can no longer depend on large structural fixes to transform the education system. Instead, any refinement has to be at the nexus of teaching and learning, be reflexive and responsive to students’ needs and interests, and create new opportunities and learning experiences dynamically in and out of the classroom. Bringing about transformational change in teaching and learning requires honest recognition of issues of implementation in the classroom. Significant reductions of the national curricular content took place to make time and space for student inquiry approaches. The role of teachers was examined and rebalanced – while recognising the importance of the teachers’ role to tell, instruct and demonstrate, there was also an imperative for teachers to teach less, so that students learn more. Teacher-preparation and in-service professional learning programmes were re-designed to build teachers’ capacity to develop students’ twenty-first century competencies and give a greater emphasis to teacher-initiated learning.

Making a Common Future: Lee Kuan Yew’s Values for the 21st Century

Lee Kuan Yew left no stone unturned when he mapped out the future of Singapore, a plot of land 640 km2 wide wedged between hostile neighbours. With utopian-inspired governance (Plate 2010, p. 217), he pieced together a skilled governing elite that shared his core, fundamental values and beliefs, and that pushed the nation to become a global economic powerhouse. Across the decades, he had an unwavering vision, foresight, and principles that should be seen as his legacy for the nation. Lim (2015) argues that Lee’s legacy “is the spirit of courage and imagination, integrity above all else, delivering on promises and being a people of our word. It is energy and enterprise, determination and dedication, seeking to understand others … It is openness to new ideas and new realities even while sticking with fundamental principles like character and trustworthiness, steadfastness and adaptability, excellence and meritocracy”. This chapter highlights the core principles, values and beliefs that Lee held, including a future orientation, pragmatism, meritocracy, cohesion and tolerance, strong leadership, collective teamwork, talent and expertise, and character values. Lee’s beliefs about the future of Singapore is examined before proceeding to compare his legacy against current 21st century competencies frameworks to examine the commonalities and gaps, with the ultimate aim to suggest that it continues to represent essential educative philosophies that Singaporeans should recognise and integrate into their lives.

The teaching of literature in a Singapore secondary school: disciplinarity, curriculum coverage and the opportunity costs involved

Abstract Set against the backdrop of reinvigorating the study of literature and concerns about the adequate preparation of students for the world of work, this paper explores how a Singapore teacher presented a literary text in the classroom. Drawing on data from a large-scale representative sample of Singapore schools in instruction and assessment practices, we discuss some of the potential consequences of instructional choice-making from a disciplinary perspective. Our findings suggest, for example, that when teacher-dominated discourse and interpretations dominate, instructional flexibility and responsiveness are correspondingly limited and restricted. These courses of action, we contend, may occur contrary to teachers’ plans and expectations. The paper closes by making a call for further longitudinal research across multiple research sites into the nature of literature pedagogy that has a strong disciplinary focus.

Complex network analysis of teaching practices

The application of functional analysis to infer networks in large datasets is potentially helpful to experimenters in various fields. In this paper, we develop a technique to construct networks of statistically significant transitions between variable pairs from a high-dimensional and multiscale dataset of teaching practices observed in Grade 5 and Grade 9 Mathematics classes obtained by the National Institute of Education in Singapore. From the Minimum Spanning Trees (MST) and Planar Maximally Filtered Graphs (PMFG) of the transition networks, we establish that teaching knowledge as truth and teacher-dominated talking serve as hubs for teaching practices in Singapore. These practices reflect a transmissionist model of teaching and learning. We also identify complex teacher-student-teacher-student interaction sequences of teaching practices that are over-represented in the data.

Children's Voices: Talk, Knowledge and Identity

Kenya, and he speaks Gujarati with his mother and English with his peers. One of the major points that emerges from this chapter is that there is no single way of ‘doing being’ British Asian. In a final chapter aptly named Taking Stock: Where to London? the author revisits the themes from the first part of the book in the light of the four London stories, asking what the stories tell us about migration as a global phenomenon, multiculturalism and multilingualism, migrant identities in the early 21st century, and finally, about London as a global city. The stories do actually reveal much about what it means to live in London and, as noted previously, the strength of this book is both the theoretical input and the vivid and telling accounts of a variety of under-researched London communities, or more correctly, individuals from these communities. The stories of these real individuals make this a very readable book and, at the very least, demonstrate the remarkable ethnolinguistic complexity of London. In attempting to make sense of the very different stories in the book and in line with the initial aim of the book, the author has drawn on several conceptual frameworks. Although a quick glance at the book might suggest it to be an odd assortment of stories foregrounded by a discussion of globalisation, migration, multiculturalism and identity, it does, in fact, provide a coherent whole and one which raises as many questions as it answers. One of the main issues which the reader grapples with is, on the one hand, the very vivid stories told in the four cases and, on the other, the attempts to pigeonhole these individuals into migrant categories. Given the fluid and flexible ways in which they live their lives, the attempts to fit them into particular migrant categories is not always convincing.