After many days working with the Ministry of Education and Academy of Singapore Teachers, I have *finally* had the chance to get into some schools! I had two terrific visits to two very different classrooms, and I left both visits energized and excited about the future of education technology in Singapore.
My first visit was to the Eunos Primary school, to a sixth grade classroom. The sixth grade year ends with a high stakes exam--the Primary School Leaving Exam--that does have a profound effect on students future trajectory. No pathway is a dead-end in Singapore, but some pathways are expressways and others by-ways. Conjure your stereotypes now: stone faced Asian students sitting at their desks in silence, with a look of terror on their face, spending a full year cramming for a brutal exam. Now, dismiss those stereotypes.
I walked into Rose's sixth grade classroom, and it was one of those elementary classrooms where you immediately feel the warmth emanating from the special bond between teachers and students. Rose's students sat clustered on the floor, generally in respectful, attentive quiet punctuated by laughing, hands shooting up in the air, and the occasional playful joke or tease. If I had four concurrent lives, I think I might dispatch the fourth to being an elementary school teacher (first- as is, second- mountaineering guide, third- professional video game player).
Rose's lesson was, on the whole, masterful. She was preparing students for an English oral examination where students have to describe a picture. Some of the assessment is a bit structured for my tastes-- students are taught to begin every examination with "This picture is a depiction of ...." But generally, I think it's a good example of good learning emerging from good assessment-- kids should be able to review an image, describe the scene, identify details, use adjectives and adverbs, express opinions, interpret events, and organize their oral thoughts with an introduction and conclusion.
The heart of Rose's lesson was using a screencasting tool, Screenr, to have students record a practice session, post it to a class blog, and then comment on a partners' image. It was a perfect application of the tool. Traditionally, Rose would have had to sit at her desk, calling students up to her desk one at a time to allow each student one practice session, while the other 39 students did whatever they were doing. In this manner, she empowered her students to run their own practice session, self-assess their own performance, post their performance for peer review, develop a richer understanding of the rubric by evaluating a peer, and--while they are at it--learn to use a new media tool with a broad range of applications. Critically for the Singapore context, she managed to use ICT to help students develop self-directed learning and collaborative learning skills while still making progress towards curriculum in preparation for high-stakes assessment. Win-Win-Win.
Rose introduced the lesson with--a screencast--which didn't just introduce the topic for the day, but stepped back to suggest the important of ICT technologies in life and in lifelong-learning. She then explained the task to students, had one student create a screencast in front of everyone to demonstrate, and then reviewed the protocol for offering feedback. She did all this, with perhaps 15 teachers, school leaders, representatives from the Ministry, huddling in the back of her room. She was, as far as I could tell, completely unfazed by our presence (more on this later), and her forty students proceeded through the lesson without much noticing our 15 observers, photographers, videographers, etc.
After the lesson, we returned to the school conference room, where we debriefed the lesson in front of the same 15 people. Rose gave a short rundown of her initial impressions of what went well and what could have been improved, and then respectfully and attentively listened to my 15 minute soliloquy of some of the outstanding features of the lesson as well as some of the weaker points. Pause here to conjure this image: you have just taught a lesson, and immediately afterwards you retire to a conference room to allow 15 people to critique your performance. Rose expressed appreciation for a few suggestions, and pushed back on some points. The principal entered into the conversation, and shifted our discussion towards the issue of how we can support teachers like Rose in their innovation.
The lesson was videotaped, and I hope I'll get to share it at some point, because it was really great. More importantly, I hope it gets shared widely throughout Singapore's primary schools. It was a model of how the talented teachers in Singapore have the capacity to take ownership of their curriculum, innovate with new technologies, and realize the nation's goals of leveraging ICT to support self-directed and collaborative learning.
I learned even more, perhaps, from my second visit to a history class at the Victoria School. The Victoria School is a boys school in Singapore and one of the nations finest. Again, dismiss the stereotypes that you have of such a place-- they have an extensive arts program, active sports team, and we even got to visit a home economics class of boys with multicolored bandanas preparing to make apple crisp. Throughout the school, evidence of the school's commitment to educating the whole child was everywhere.
We started our visit with a school tour, which included several unannounced visits to various classrooms along the way--the aforementioned home ec class and a science lab. Again, a small army of teachers, school admins, ministry officials walked into these classroom. Students paused briefly, stood, wished us good morning, and then immediately went back to work. Both teachers continued their lesson *completely* unfazed by our presence. This is a culture where people are in each other's classroom all the time.
The history lesson we observed was, as they say, a good effort. The teacher crammed all manner of technology activities into an hour, and as a result she lost the thread of the learning objectives. Less would have been more. But she was gracious in receiving feedback during the conference afterwards, and it was a great opportunity to remind the assembled school leaders and ministry officials that improvement will require this kind of experimentation, and if teachers don't feel like they have the freedom to make mistakes, then they will never experiment and never learn.
In that conference room, talking about how the lesson went and where it felt short, I had a profoundly different feeling than the feeling I have when critiquing a teacher's lesson in the U.S. In the U.S., each of us teachers succeeds and fails on our own accord. If we teach a great lesson, we deserve the credit, and if it flops, then the fault lies within ourselves. When we blame structural factors for the challenges of teaching, they tend to feel quite distant: "It's hard teaching my class because my students are transient, homeless and hungry"--and it's sort of the fault of the writers of the 10th amendment. But in Singapore, critiquing a so-so lesson really felt like critiquing a system. My ministry colleagues wanted to know why the department head hadn't reviewed her lesson plan? Why didn't the curriculum provide more space for experimentation and innovation? In a coherent, aligned, cohesive system, it wasn't just that teacher's responsibility to figure out a better way to teach-- everyone in the room felt a connection to that classroom, that teacher, those kids. And because everyone was in the room together, everyone willing to offer both honest criticism and meaningful support, I have every confidence that as Victoria embarks on it's 1-1 initiative, that the next time I visit, the lessons will be much stronger.
Many thanks to the many wonderful colleagues who hosted me the past two days! I had a fabulous experience!