Contributed by Suhaimi Bin Zainal Shah from the Ministry of Education and Tan Jing Long from Temasek Junior College,  for SingTeach Virtual Staff Lounge

The Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference (RPIC) 2022 was held from 30 May to 2 June 2022. Amidst the voluminous presentations, two participants share their experiences and afterthoughts on 10 speeches and presentations. The opinions expressed are strictly the writers’ own and are not representative of their affiliated organizations.

The Seven Shifts in Teaching and Learning

1. The RPIC is a biennial NIE conference at the forefront of education and teacher research. At its opening ceremony, Mr Chan Chun Sing, Minister for Education, Singapore, spoke of seven transitions (Figure 1). Some are already in the making, but the formal recognition of the following two transitions is a pleasant surprise:

• • • From the transmission of knowledge to sense-making
    • From understanding solutions of yesterday to framing challenges to find new solutions for tomorrow

To us, it is a hitherto unambiguous call for teachers to abandon “teaching to the test” in favour of “teaching for life.”

Figure 1. Minister for Education, Mr Chan Chun Sing, giving his speech at the conference.

Keynote Talks

2. Professor Diana Hess, Dean of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, kickstarted the conference with her keynote speech titled “Schooling to Build Robust Societies”. Her references to teaching actions such as Think-Pair-Share and Initiate-Response-Feedback immediately resonated with many teachers in the audience. While teachers typically regard classroom talk as a healthy sign of active learning, Hess invites teachers to rethink its intent. Particularly, Hess distinguishes between teaching with discussion, and teaching for discussion, the former being content-focused while the latter being process-focused. We are thinking that we ought to spend time teaching students how to discuss constructively, before getting them to engage in discussion.

3. The third keynote speaker, Dr Dennis Kwek, Centre Director of the Centre for Research, Pedagogy and Practice at NIE, started the second day with his speech “Cultivating Robust Education Research for the 21st Century: The Interesting Case of Singapore”. He highlighted the four lessons for Singapore (Figure 2), so that we may turn the recent crisis into opportunities for our education system to be more robust, inclusive, dynamic and sustainable. We are looking forward to seeing how education research will help make that possible but it is also important to keep in mind that the responsive actions taken to strengthen the system will not overly strain one of our biggest resources in Singapore education – our diverse teacher population.

Figure 2. The four lessons for Singapore education.

Educational Technology

4. Ms Helen Hong and Ms Crystal Tay from the Educational Technology Division of the Ministry of Education (MOE), Singapore shared their research on primary school-aged children’s access to digital devices. Their findings indicate that more screen time is associated with a poorer quality of life, although moderate internet use may help children build rapport with peers and may not necessarily displace physical activities. The team also recommends low to moderate screen time (1 to 4 hours a day) for children and that they should be empowered to take charge of their own usage. Thus, with secondary school students getting a personalized learning device each, strategies should be aimed at effectively helping students self-manage.

5. As MOE teachers, we were drawn by Ms Eunice Chew’s presentation “Exploring Teachers Use of the Student Learning Space (SLS) for Differentiated Instructions”. We were keen to learn how SLS – the de-facto learning management system in MOE schools – has been used for differentiated instruction (DI), a key application of technology according to the MOE e-pedagogical scaffold. She shared how skilful teachers have used SLS for DI:

• • • tapping on the hints function in the question components,
    • providing optional prepopulated texts in the Interactive Thinking Tool (ITT),
    • allowing for submissions of different media forms (audio, video, and infographics) through the free response questions, and
    • including different sources of content as well as simulations for students to explore on their own.

Figure 3. Factors influencing teachers’ use of SLS to enact Differentiated Instruction.

STEM Education

6. The virtual booth for the Multi-centric Education, Research and Industry STEM education research centre at NIE (meriSTEM@NIE) was particularly interesting to us as trained Science and Math educators. Associate Professor Tan Aik Ling from NIE explained that integrated STEM is a curricular endeavour that purposefully incorporates the disciplines of STEM to achieve the conceptual, epistemic and social aspects of STEM learning goals (Figure 4). We are excited to learn about professional development opportunities that can upskill educators in bringing the interdisciplinarity of STEM into the classroom with real world applications.

Figure 4. The inter-relationships between Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and an authentic problem.

7. Assoc Prof Tan Aik Ling, together with Mr Lee Hong Liang from meriSTEM@NIE, spoke on creativity, an elusive and fuzzy trait which we teachers seek to cultivate in our students. They generalized three characteristics of creativity: multi-faceted, domain-specific and dynamic, i.e., they change with time and context. To evaluate creativity, they proposed a modification of the Scientific Creativity Test which measures creativity in three dimensions – originality (statistical rarity), fluency (number of responses) and flexibility (number of conceptual categories that uses could be binned). Perhaps they have blazed the trail for assessing creativity in schools.

Masterclasses and Workshops

8. Mdm Lee Min Huey, Mdm Tan Xing Yu and Mrs Tio-Fung Eng Chu from Riverside Secondary School reexamined how rubrics, the means by which teachers evaluate alternative assessments, may be rewritten for a lower secondary science integrative activity to foster student self-assessment and directedness (Figure 5). On occasion, rubrics are made available to students, without much consideration of their intelligibility. Their approach is two-fold. First, they substituted teachers’ vocabulary, e.g., “scientifically sound”, for simple and clear descriptors. Second, they included an exemplar for each standard with explanatory comments. The simplicity and immediate applicability of these interventions impressed all who were present.

Figure 5. Revised rubrics for student self-assessment in authentic assessment.

9. Dr Tan Teck Kiang from the Institute for Applied Learning Science and Education Technology (ALSET), National University of Singapore, delivered a workshop on the Cognitive Diagnostic Model (CDM). Although almost unheard of in schools, CDM has roots in psychometry and is an educational assessment designed to measure specific knowledge structures underlying students’ performance. CDM is a probabilistic model which can identify the deficient fine-grained skills required for mastery of a task, e.g., subtraction of two fractions. In the workshop, Dr Tan demonstrated how we may run CDM on a sample dataset using a R package (Figure 6). We are inspired by the great potential for rich and adaptive assessment for learning.

Figure 6. Student diagnostic report of subskill mastery in fraction/subtraction.

10. The Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition (CLIC) team conducted an interactive session about the role of working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility in students’ learning and their pedagogical implications. Instead of teaching to increase Intelligent Quotient, they proposed that teachers may train students’ executive functions and step back so that children or students can manage and eventually make meaning and learn on their own or with others. We were relieved to hear that brain breaks during transitions are encouraged as it helps signal to the student to prepare the mind for a new activity or simply rest their mind before they need to refocus again.

Despite being able to engage with only a fraction of all the presentations, there were many takeaways we found useful. While operational issues may take up our attention in school, we hope to be able to preserve headspace to be exposed to cutting-edge research and bring them into our classrooms.