Singapore Teaching Practice Reflective Practice Model
- subject matter knowledge
- Teachers will not apply folk pedagogy - This view holds that the way teachers instruct their students is determined to a great extent by the lay theories or implicit assumptions they have about how children learn.
- Tabula Rasa - amindnotyetaffectedbyexperiences,impressions,etc.
- How our beliefs affect the way we teach - "How can I get students to be more interested in the subject I teach?"
- guided by strong beliefs - Systemness of the ecosystem and support structures Teachers to lead from within
We know T&L more than before, the STP is a consolidation of the innovations. All teachers can benefit.
STP is not a standard/step-by-step manual as teaching is complex. Teacher has to innovate/customize and the STP is the foundation. It is a ceiling to meausre the teacher.
STP is a journey - not an end point, continually reflect and apply our teaching practice.
Education Black Box - Outside:Many Changes, Classroom: No change
Attributes of the 21st Century Teacher Profession
Values - student in the centre, teacher identity, learning
MAD Learning
1. Multiple Perspectives in learning - multiple intelligences, multiple disciplines (captured as inter-disciplinary curriculum), multi-tankers - wellness to learn across fields, multi-phasing
2. Aletheia Experiences in learning is what counts - reality experiences, truthful facts, learning is for real, authenticity - meaning is key in learning, must have transcendence, learning is cognitive and emotional, contextualisation, real world themes and tasks
3. Dia-logos in new dimensions to address new learning profile and development - conversations as key in learning, prepare him for the future of life means to give him command of himself (Dewey), pockets of shifts, but student-centered pedagogies for deep learning, teacher centered - student oriented - student centered, patterning system (habits-memory imitation modelling) and inquiry problem-based (novelty), Internet learning - the problem is not copyright but copywrongs
BIG Learning
1. Big Picture thinking is what learning must
2. I's in learning - Inventiveness with imagination, immersion, inquiry, insights through time for observing, question aging skills CPR(Clarification, Probing, Reasoning) XCQ (Question the question)
3. Gamification of learning: play and design approaches
Direction - Design thinking, computational thinking, epistemology of play, maker spaces
What is deep learning?
- transferability of knowledge in different context
- In the new syllabus, process skills is identified as a sub-strand, this shows that process skills need to be supported by explicit instruction
- identify the sub-steps involved in each thinking skill
- misconception vs careless mistake
How is the idea related to our Singapore Math curriculum?
Searching for validity of reform claims in a pragmatic way:
- what is best practice?
- what actions should teachers take to improve instructions?
- what does that instruction look like?
- what should teachers and students believe and expect in mathematics teaching and learning?
NCTM productive and unproductive believes.
Implications:
1. Would the teacher's view have been different if she had a different group of students?
2. Should we have different beliefs or expectations for different students?
3. Memorization of mathematics facts is important but should not be the only focus
4. Does a dualistic statement help teachers better understand mathematics education
5. Students referred a lot associated to performance in assessment
What are the teachers' beliefs in the nature of the discipline of mathematics?
Professional learning community
- culture of teachers working together, feeling a sense of responsibility, de-privatization of classroom teaching
- learning from, learning on behalf of
- purposeful to make a positive difference to students' learning experiences and outcome
Questions to ask about our collaboration
1. Are our collaboration effective? - Spiral of Inquiry, collaboration bringing about deepening of practice and not just moved from one person or place to another
2. Do your forms of collaboration stimulate your creativity and promote (sensible) risk taking?
3.
4. What support is there to develop and ensure sustainability?
Do you see yourself as a catalyst of change?
Levels of Depth of teachers' interactions in PLCs (Coburn & Russell, 2008a, p. 230).
Level of Depth
Definition
Low
Talk related to one or more of the following: how to use materials; how to coordinate the text, standards, assessments, and pacing guides; how to organize the classroom; sharing materials or activities; general discussions of how a lesson went or whether students were getting it
Medium
Talk related to one or more of the following: discussions of how lessons went, including a discussion of why; detailed planning for lessons, including a discussion of why; specific and detailed discussion of whether students were learning (but not how students learn); discussion of instructional strategies in the context of observations; doing mathematics problems together with discussion
High
Talk related to one or more of the following: pedagogical principles underlying instructional approaches; how students learn, or the nature of students' mathematical thinking; mathematical principles or concepts
Culture is dependent on the underlying values. Collectively, we can build culture. It is a cooperative process and it would evolve. You need to know the basics, literacy and numeracy, to learn. Culture building requires strategies and then structure. Culture should reflect what is needed in the 21st century. Preach often and occasionally talk. - Greg Whitby
School culture overshadows practices when they are nort aligned. When there are inconsistencies between practice and culture, new pedagogies would not be adopted. Culture exist in an ecology. CPA sends out messages of the culture. Innovation entails conflict and (70%) failure. - Dr Jennifer Tan
Culture building takes time yet there is an urgency to change. How do we do that? Are there strategies to expedite the process?
- dialogic leadership
- be explicitly clear what you want to do
- take little steps, they make a difference
How do we involve students in co-creating the desired culture?
- involved in the conversations of change
Culture should not be leader dependent. If culture is so important, time is needed for change.
How do we balance the need to manage high performance while allowing failure?
Culture would not change until there is personal responsibility
Passion must be driven by purpose
Be clear what you want and stick to it. The language can change but the intention should remain.
Innovation - be clear of the purpose as there are opportunity cost
Have sufficient clarity
With the use of online resources and courses (technology innovation) to close the gaps in educational outcomes for the people in different SES. - Hansen and Reich 2015, Science.
Connected learning as guiding principles towards engaged learning.
Taking sensible risk
Changing school is not an intellectual challenge.
In school we have unique individuals.
“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and postive action.” - Mathin Lurther King, Jr
What is the new role of a teacher?
Old Teacher DNA
The student is the curriculum, diversity is the norm
From improvement to revolution to transformation
Ken Robinson - create climate of possibility
1. Great leaders create the art of the possible
2. Great leaders
Through which create a climate of change
Being a leader isn't an identity but rather a set of actions... It's not something you are but something you do. It's not being a promising custodian. - Rothman
Failing forward - failure is a core to learning
The new drivers in education is quality, equity, innovation and resource base
The new mindsets are diversity is the norm, student-led learning, feedback, collaboration eats competition, change starts from within, teachers are still relevant
The new teacher DNA as analyst, collaborator, researcher, designer and learner
Instructional Core by Richard Elmore
The heart of Improving Each Child's Learning are personalized experiences, dynamic learning frameworks, collaborative learning experiences
Putting the Right Drivers in Action
New outcomes - global competencies
Shifting to the Right Drivers
From accountability to capacity building
From individual teacher and leadership quality to collaborative work
From pedagogy to technology
From fragmented strategies to systemness (incremental system)
Leadership from the Middle
A strategy that increases the capacity of the middle as it becomes a better partner upward and downward. However, they do not ignore the top i.e. Understanding policies
Clarity of Strategy
Successful cresses are a function of shaping and reshaping good ideas as they build capacity and ownership
Coherence Framework
Three Keys to Maximising Impact
School leaders as a system player, change agent
Learning alongside teachers out what works and what doesn't
Professional Capital
Human capital (teacher qualifications), social capital (e.g. How teachers a collaborating), decisional capital. Strongest results came from schools with high social capital.
Internal Accountability
Individual accountability to the group
Deepening Learning
Stratosphere- technology, pedagogy and change knowledge
Learning must be irresistibly engaging, elegantly efficient, technologically ubiquitous, steeped in real life problem solving and deep learning
Emergence of students as change agents - students as catalyst for pedagogical change, students as partners in organizational changes, students as societal change
Wooranna Park Primary Schools
The New Leadership: Co-learning
Do not allow above yto like what you are doing but not tell you how/what to do.
Project was for capacity building in schools
- conceptual understanding od SDL
- understanding as use of e-learning tools in SDL design and implementation
- leadership in curriculum
- nurture community of practice - generate both theoretical and practical knowledge, theory in scaling
Start with curriculum design and resource development followed by school implementation, this is designed to foster smooth primary jto secondary transition for SDL in science
It is important to build connections where multiple change agents are developed so that innovations can be scaled and sustained. Ecological model is to ensure that there is success.
Design principles
- SDL for all agents
- build connectedness within and across level
- self-organisation
- visualise alignment
- principled design in the use of technology
We should evaluate when and how e-learning works best to bring about effective interactive learning, self-directed learning and catering for learner diversity in different curriculum and school contexts
- establish evaluation mechanisms to track progress, set out assess outcome for formative and summative purposes
Areas of concern:
1. Model of e-learning
2. Model of professional development and school change
3. Model of partnership with different stakeholders
4. Model of scaling up innovation
Analyse the learning activity (teachers' pedagogical designs associated with the submitted samples of students' ICT-using practices) and students' work (exemplars of students' aunthentic work most indicative of the 21CC that the e-learning projects piloted)
Use of ICT for efficiency or improve productivity could also shift teachers attitude and behaviour in the use of ICT for teaching and learning
Key take-away from e-learning pilot Scheme
- learning and assessment design critical for fostering 21st century skills
- build intra, inter and extra school networks and partnerships - establish architecture for learning (structure for interaction, encourage decision-making
- develop a sustainable plan for evolutionary e-learning development
Pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, staffing, routines have to change besides introducing ICT
Biggest challenge in ICT in education is sustainability and scalability
Scaling up ICT-enabled learning innovations
- there are different dimensions to considered
ICT-enabled Learning in Asia and Europe
It was an attempt to map 7 case studies to a 5-dimensional framework to characterise innovations
- Nature of innovation
- Implementation phase
- Access level
- Impact area
- Target
Classroom ecology - teacher play a key role
- design is flexible enough to be used in different contexts and still remain effective
How can and ICT-enabled education innovation become an education epidemic?
- germs (ideas)
- contagious ideas (easily caught)
- a lot of movement, interactions
- the right local conditions (microclimate)
- the right weather conditions (macro climate)
- constant re-combination of genes (evolution)
Implications
- create opportunities for people to share and spread ideas
- risk may need to be taken to test innovations
Scalability of Education Innovations - Scaling Up Education (Chris Dede)
- depth, sustainability, spread, shift, evalution & local adaptation
Teachers as instructors ad assessors
- this mode of working does not make explicit the learning goals, how leanring outcomes are achieved, learning theory/design principles (assumptions why the activities would achieve the target outcomes) underpinning rhe wplan and hence not easily evaluated
Teachers as design profession, we must:
- have a design language or tool as professionals
- mechanisms and tools to link learning outcomes to learning designs
- a way to help teachers develop, capture and share pedagogies as a cumulative knowledge base that link design effectiveness links with learner characteristics
Tools for teachers as learning designers:
- to find and create new ideas to adopt/create, adapt and test
- to collect leanring analytics - redesign, analyze and publish
- to create and accumulate knowledge about effective pedagogies (include blended, online etc)
Learning Designer (Prototype) from HK University
Implications:
- teachers to think about the pedagogy rather than at the activity level
- the objective of the pedagogical scaffold would influence the design of the pedagogical scaffold e.g. augment teaching practices or design learning activities
- build a pedagogical database, track pedagogical practice over time, activity types
-
Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.
No fundamental change in the way we teach
Blackboard - OHP - PowerPoint - Interactive Whiteboard
Required Curriculum - Content Delivery (in class) which is easy & Practice (at home) which is hard
Flipped is where the easy part is done at home and the hard part in class
Flipped Learning - leverages on new media,
content delivery (at home) & (in school) practice, aplication, creation
At home - focus on remembering and understanding of the Bloom's Taxonomy of thinking
Creation vs Curation
Balance of Content Relationships, Curiosity
multiple ways to assess students' understanding - Universal Design Learning
Teachers' content mastery is key.
Lesson Design Cycle
What lends in direct instructions? What lends itself to inquiry?
5 Elements of an Interactive Learning Material - game, simulation, animation embedded into tutorial, tutorial, activity, media
1. Core content
2. Hypermedia
3. Decision making activities
4. Learner assessment
5. Learner feedback and reflection
Open Educational Resources (OER): Learning Continuum
Lower/Higher Engagement -- Active Learning(High & Doing) / Passive Learning(Low & Intaking)
Learner involvement: creating requires application, analysis, decision-making and problem-solving
Learning commons, convergence commons, information commons, knowledge commons
New Book --> Interactive Open Educational Resources - a guide finding, choosing and using what's out there to transform college teaching
Schon - neurology compared to knowledge of driver of his car
The use of technology makes sense when one has strong content knowledge - frog dissection app
Learning outcomes and pedagogical underpinning
- focus on professional training and pd
- effective communication is to satisfy the listeners' mental needs
- 3 pain points:
knowledge beyond understanding of the students
no new approach to communicate
Apply the Art of Communication in the teaching and learning of Mathematics
- begin with praises (focus on human nature)
Showing empathy - using fingers to form the word 'ren' (human)
As maths teachers, we have studied maths, teach maths, mark maths, set maths tests, attend pd maths but our students have very little foundation and experience
The Ron Clark Story - The Triumph
How many questions have you asked in 30 mins
-rather than broad and shallow, better to be few but cause them to think deeply
Big question thinking
e.g. learning circles, why are manhole covers round, using 4 numbers to make 24
Should we create a common space for LPET? The question is not why but why not? As a division we often advocate the use of various ICT tools to collaborate and this is also reflected in BY(i)TES 3.1.3. In order to encourage others, we must try first so as to understand the benefits, barriers, pre-requisite skills etc. To develop others, we need to develop ourselves first. Remember the airplane emergency oxygen mask procedure analogy?
I have always kept my reflections to myself, either in my notebook or in this blog. Never sharing. Fearing that others would read it and pass a judgement on how deep or shallow I am (fear more the latter than the former), my writing ability (more grammar than speling cos ther's auto corect, oops). However, the more I shared with Kim these fears and possible embarrassment, I realised that I had the missed opportunities of having others read what I've posted and get inputs from them through the comment feature of the blog. Imagine what I've missed out since 2010. 危机, a crisis (not knowing what to do?????), from another perspective can be seen as opportunities.
I'm now "coming out", free spirited to share. What is important is to start. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. What are waiting for? At which level of BY(i)TES 3.1.3 are you at? Let's Pull It Together (LPET)!!!!!
Other Reflections (lazy to put them in sentences. For details, read Bee Tin's Learning Log)
1. Start a PLN, being a reflective practitioner - what i want to achieve and any difference i want to make in the classroom
2. Besides reaching out to school leaders, we should engage the SSD as well
3. Giving teachers rehearsal
4. Choice is a strategic thrust
5. What you want to achieve instructionally?
6. How can we sustain? How can we ensure perpetuity and build on of ideas/innovations?
7. The content is core, but there are generic skills e.g. GPK,
8. Common site for resources for all ICT mentor
Ideas to pursue:
Change Agent Programme
Digital Age Teaching and Learning Leaders
Menu of PD Choices
Generate a list of support to ICT mentors
Mathematical Modelling in the Primary School: Exemplifying the Core Components of the Singapore Mathematics Curriculum Framework
- content vs process
- Mathematical problem-solving - mainly the Initiate, Respond, Evaluate (IRE) teaching approach; however what is left out in this teaching approach is the domain of attitudes, processes and metacognition
- Despite students are able to use mathematical model, teachers need a variety of living example of implementation (Black & Williams)
- Students develop models (conceptual representation)
- working towards Mathematical literacy: an individual's capacity to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts. It includes reasoning mathematically and using mathematical concepts, procedures, facts and tools to describe and explain
Model Eliciting Task - mathematising real-world problems
Implications on Teacher Development
- striking a balance: questioning and listening
- deliberate choice to move away from her routine prescriptive approach so as to encourage more student-directed inquiry, teacher need to apply metacognitive strategies during facilitation
- foster the setting of assumption
- independent modelling experience may be necessary for teachers to apply the framework more rigourously
- modelling tasks require teachers' explicitly offline and online interventions through task design, lesson planning and strategic scaffolding
- PBL (more ill-structured) vs Mathematical Modelling
Discussant
- Model as content - the needs for the problem solving
- Model as vehicle - means to an end
- pre-requisite: thorough familiarity with problem context, either existing or through reading (eg. web-based research) or other activity (site visits) and knowledge of relevant mathematics on which to draw: can be different at different levels
- excellent teaching strategies - Resource Kit Challenge is when and how to use them
- students difficulty in articulating thinking processes
- students reluctant/unable to adequately set down their ideas on paper to provide a proper basis for reflection
- tendency to focus too narrowly within potentially
- tendency to jump to conclusions - ahead of modelling
- getting the balance right: problem needs
- meta-metacognitive issues in teacher-student dialogue
Six Roles of Diagram
* scaffolds the complete modelling process - both problem specific and generic
* create structured spaces for student input
* reduces information processing (cognitive) load on working memory
* provides information to teacher - specific student/group
* provides basis for metacognitive activity/prompting
* the box headings are useful for structuring a report
Final thoughts
* Learning new mathemtics is different business from learning to apply existing mathematics (although there can be cross fertislisation)
* teaching and learning modelling
Keynote 5 Teaching for Thinking: How can we Support a Thinking Pedagogy by Linda Darling-Hammond
Strategies to support professional learning
- modelling of well-scaffolded, choice-based, authentic learning opportunities
- collaborative curriculum and assessment development
- lesson study and action research
- case studies of students' learning
- shadowing students through their learning experiences
Assessment should support a thinking pedagogy
- as models of good instruction
- as an exemplars of quality work
Accountability should support learning
- intelligent accountability should be design to support learning
"What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy."
Concerns - Covering the syllabus
Working with students' ideas, learning from each other
Marlene Scardamalia & Carl Bereiter (Institute of Knowledge Innovation Technology, University of Toronto)
- Knowledge Society - where knowledge is an important resource and product
*imperatives for organisations (Innovate or Die!, invent, design, problem solve, create new knowledge), whole society, students and teachers (help students see themselves as part of a worldwide)
First Imperative: Understand what you learn
- knowledge without understanding is declining in value
- learning understanding is a way to defeat knowledge obsolescence
- a basis for transfer and for creative theft
2nd Imperative: Take Risks with Ideas
- well functioning knowledge society all ideas are subject to improvement or replacement by a better idea, so people should not be afraid to share ideas
- delay introducing authoritative source until students have had a chance to form their own ideas, theories
3rd Imperative: Improve your Ideas
- no finality in theory or design
4th Imperative: Make Complexity a Friend
- major real-life problems are almost always to complex for us to take adequate account of all the important variables
- collaboration can help to handle complexity
- list factors, things that need to be taken into account use of graphic organisers, summarise progress and difficulties, discuss various over-simplified ideas and their strengths and weaknesses
5th Imperative: Join People who will Help you Think
- successful solitary thinkers are rare, creative thinking needs a support group
- show the value of thinker help other thinkers
- help students take a higher level responsibilities for goals, strategies, assessment of progress, problem analysis
- pay close attention to students' ideas and give them a place in the curriculum
- be part of the KM effort, not just the guide at the side
- let the student in on the secret, such as what the MOE expects of them
- maintain a spirit of civility and good humour
Progression of KB - (a) Year 1—fixed small-groups; (b) Year 2—interacting small-groups working together
throughout their knowledge work; and (c) Year 3—opportunistic-collaboration, with small
teams forming and disbanding under the volition of community members, based on emergent
goals that arose as they addressed their shared, top-level goal of refining their knowledge
NIE Director Address
Rethinking relevance and soundness
Practice-oriented in the research, impact policy and practice in the classroom
Minister Indranee Rajah's Opening Address
Not what we know, but what we can do with what we know
CIT dispositions - Every student a thinking student
3 Principles
1. All students can think. Believe all students are thinking students. Critical thinking supports creativity
Thinking processes should be taught in accord with the discipline and the curriculum
Provide feedback
2. Develop deep disciplinarity thinking to facilitate future learning
3. School and classroom culture to support and develop thinking
Keynote 1 - Youth DigitalCulture and Implications in Education - Adora Svitak
Attention span of students today
Able to connect with one another
Why we need to relook at the model of a teacher in front trying to complete a set course within a set amount of time
In search for structure, we forget what cannot be quantified
How I did in an assignment is less important than what we learn
Conformity vs practice of freedom on learning
Competition are for horses not artists
Winner of 2012 Intel Science Fair - detecting pancreatic cancer
"Outlier"
Progress require solidarity
Students want a voice - Jeff Bliss shares what he thought about his teacher's teaching
Make good teaching contagious
Reciprocal learning in schools
Curious minds, beating hearts and dreams
Relationship between Executive functioning (self regulation, monitor) to mathematics achievement (Clark et al 2013)
- working memory/updating
- inhibition - unable to inhibit irrelevant information, ability to resist interference from competing responses and processes. Comparison with Passilunghi's work
- shifting/switching e.g. From addition to subtraction for checking
Updating seems to be the strongest predictor of math achievement (Lee et al 2012)
All inhibition and shifting tasks require working memory
Focus on factors that influence executive functioning
1. Anxiety - fears of negative evaluation, underestimate what the children have learnt, inhibitory control of attention, intervention predicted degree of anxiety reduction ie. deep breathing esp students students with high trait anxious students
2. Improving children's updating skills
3. Requirements of everyday tasks in the classroom
How to measure executive functioning?
Use of multiple measures to extract putter assessment skills?
How can we promote the development of executive functioning or horse we work around EF difficulties?
Interventions to improve working memory - Cogmed
Measure - WIAT maths fluency
Working memory training result in improvements in working memory capacity
Symposium 2
Towards a sustainable 21st century knowledge building pedagogy
Performative pedagogical practices (coverage, knowledge, transmission, reproduction) principally explain the character and success of singapore's classroom system
What is the claim of knowledge - truth or contestable?
3 dimensions of epistemic framing of instructional tasks critical:
1. Epistemic pluralism
2. Epistemic Focus
3. Epistemic Practices
Student achievement is function of multiple influences
Practice is related to he assessment regime
To improve the quality of teaching and learning
1. Lifting the ceiling
2. Reducing the range
3. Lifting the floor
KB pedagogy is equal if not greater than performative pedagogy
Range of different variables - students' background interact with the pedagogies
Singapore's performative pedagogy
1. Curriculum coverage - teacher prescription vs flexible options and some student choice throughout the curriculum, slow in-depth pedagogy vs comprehensive but fast pedagogy
2. Knowledge transmission - exponential growth in amount if knowledge, Mendel worked on Sarah's problem, knowledge building and knowledge verifying process, instructional tasks are crucial here-complex and engaging
3. High stakes assessment- promoting evidence-based practices? Appeal to empirical evidence holding teachers and schools accountable
4. Teaching is talking and learning is listening- authentic scaffolding is two-way and reciprocal, types of talk: exploratory; disputational and cumulative (Mercer)
5. Collective argumentation - working together to represent ideas
6. Expanding types of talk: rational argument and logis, playful and creative talk, story-telling and narrative to build connections between context
7. Task - teacher interpretation of tasks crucial- PCK mediated
4 Critical Questions in PLC
What we want our students to learn?
How do I know they have learnt?
What do I do after they have learnt?
What do I do if they have not learnt?
Reflection in Action vs Reflection on Action
Reflection in action allows the practitioner to redesign
what he/ she is doing whilst he/she is doing it. This is commonly associated
with experienced practitioners. However, it is much neglected.
“To think
about what one is doing whilst one is doing it; it is typically stimulated by
surprise, by something which puzzled the practitioner concerned”(Greenwood,
1993).
We can see here that reflection on action involves turning information into knowledge, by
conducting a cognitive post mortem.
“The
retrospective contemplation of practice undertaken in order to uncover the
knowledge used in practical situations, by analysing and interpreting the
information recalled” (Fitzgerald, 1994pp67)
Reflective Teacher - Framework for Teacher Preparation
