Singapore- Connecting Technology to Learning Goals

I'm in the air between Boston and Minneapolis, on the first leg of  a ~30 hour journey journey to Singapore. My EdTechTeacher colleague Tom Daccord and I have been invited by the Academy of Singapore Teachers as part of a new exchange program called the Outstanding Educators in Residence program. We're each spending two weeks in the city-state, running workshops, visiting schools, reviewing programs, meeting with school leaders, and working with ministry officials. They have asked us to share what we know about teaching with technology and 21st century school leadership, and we're looking forward to learning everything we can about how technology supports Singapore's education system.
Singapore is one of the world's best educational systems, routinely appearing at the top of league tables for both major international tests, the PISA and the TIMSS. This wasn't always the case, but rather is the result of 30 years of state attention to reform and improvement. The system has an extremely professional teaching force (every educator I've interacted with so far has exuded a passion for teaching, learning, and excellence easily recognized through email or Skype), and an extremely well coordinated system. They have clear learning goals, and curriculum teacher education, professional development, and assessment are aligned towards those goals. Its a really different place from the United States, and we have a lot to learn from their success.
Education technology is actually a terrific lens to view the differences between the U.S. and Singapore systems. In the U.S., we have about 14,000 different school districts, and most of them have an education technology plan that I would call "radical teacher autonomy." Schools buy technology, deliver it idiosyncratically to teachers for instructional use, and then teachers are allowed to use these tools however they see fit and they can choose not to use technology at all. There is minimal professional development (and grossly imbalanced funding of hardware purchases vs. PD), no assessment of the impact of technology investments, and technology plans discuss hardware replacement rather than how particular learning goals will be achieved.
There are certain virtues to this system--it encourages experimentation, allows enthusiastic teachers to monopolize limited resources, respects the autonomy of teachers, and is unlikely to receive much push back from school committees or teachers unions. In many places, radical teacher autonomy leads to pockets of excellence, where every team, department or building has a few edtech allstars, but it very rarely leads to system adoption of technology practices that support clearly articulated learning goals. It's also almost impossible for systemic improvement to occur in a system where teachers do whatever they want, in whatever direction they want, at whatever pace they want.
The story in Singapore looks quite different. In their Third Masterplan for ICT in Education (MP3), the Ministry of Education offers this goal:

“Students develop competencies for self-directed and collaborative learning through the effective use of ICT as well as becoming discerning and responsible Internet users.”

So Singapore has chosen two goals: self-directed learning and collaborative learning. Of course, you can do lots of other things with technology—develop new media literacies, develop multimedia production skills, focus on formative assessment and data-driven teaching and learning, develop skills for creativity and personal expression, teaching productivity skills, and so on. But Singapore has chosen just two of these to focus on from 2009-2014- self-directed learning (SDL) and collaborative learning (CoL). And their entire educational system can come together around these goals.
So when Tom and I go to Singapore, we know exactly what we need to share on: self-directed learning and collaborative learning. Edtech researchers from Singapore's National Institute of Education know exactly what they need to study and evaluate: SDL and CoL. Ministry officials know what kind of professional development to provide. Classroom educators know what aspects of technology integration to work on, and they can do so knowing that their colleagues down the hall or across the city are working on the same thing. When educators in Singapore get really good at SDL and CoL, they’ll develop a new masterplan and start working on something else.
For sure, there are some real obstacles to achieving this vision—in particular, the assessment systems used in Singapore (basically, the Cambridge A and O levels) don’t provide many opportunities for evaluating SDL and CoL, and these assessments are powerful drivers of learning in Singapore.  It’s not clear to me how much teachers were consulted in developing the vision in the MP3, so I’m not sure what level of buy-in exists across the city-state. And the things they are trying to do are really, really hard.
Still, I’m completely smitten with the Singapore model. A technology plan with a vision for learning provides a blueprint for how a group of educators can not only do good work, but how they can get better. The goals they have chosen are broad enough to allow for educators creativity, but narrow enough to provide some focus. The ministry has set some constraints about the size of the canvas, and educators still have the freedom to decide what exactly to paint.  Moreover, their painting on the same canvas as all of their other colleagues in the system, facilitating conversation, collaboration, and a collective effort towards improvement. My hunch is that an approach with this level of focus would serve U.S. school districts much better than our radical teacher autonomy approach.
Of course, I’ll know much more after two weeks on the ground in Singapore. I look forward to sharing pictures, stories and analysis from my adventure. If anyone has any questions about the Singapore system, post them in the comments and I’ll try to dig up some answers…