Teach42

Christopher Tan, Tamil Selvam Chareston, and Mohd Paruk are presenting Learning Communities in a Singapore Primary School. I’m looking forward to hearing some more about what they’re doing, Chris really piqued my curiosity yesterday.

The school is called Shuqun primary school. The main focus was the pedagogy, the process itself of the project. In order to get there, he wants to start off describing education in Singapore.

Think Schools, Learning nation. A vision which will ensure that Singapore will be a nation of thinking and committed citizens who are cable of contributed towards Singapore’s continuing growth and community. Education can no longer be build upon purely domestic foundations. Computers and IT literacy are as important as books and traditional learning.

Because Singapore is such a diverse culture, they believe in Unity in Diversity. One people, one nation, one Singapore. Sounds similar to the US, but at the same time very different. Singapore has no natural resources, the only resource they have are people, which is why education is so important. They have National Education. They want their pupils to learn to be friends, to not make fun of people who are difference, people should be trated equally regardless of race and religion, they should do the same. “how do we build bridges across cultures, races, religions, and nationalities?”

Their answer is a Problem Based online Discussion Forum.

They are trying to move away from “making cookies”, they are trying to move forward to “designing cookies”. They promote innovation and enterprise. Teach Less Learn More.

Teach Less Learn More.
Teach Less Learn More.
Teach Less Learn More.

Forgive the repetition, that one just really resonates with me. The teachers teach less, the students learn more. That phrase was worth the price of admission alone.

The project itself was Ehanncing thinking skills through a problem-based online discussion forum using the contrsuctivist approach. The target group was a 10 classes of 40 fifth graders, total of 400. They had four months to work on this. Training was 2 periods, or one hour. It was an asynchronus project.

Constructivism: Students construct USEFUL, as opposed to inert, knowledge. It should be inherently interesting.

Objectives: OT create learning environment, that ehances ciritical thinking skills and cognitive development. To create challenge learning environment, to expose pupils toa future mode of communication, and to foster understanding and communication: racial harmony.

For the project itself, they gave the pupils a sort of real world problem. I’d say it isn’t truly real world, but it’s a very realistic problem. Basically your friend is having a birthday party and 2/3 of the people invited declined. Why is that so and what changes should you make? They were also supplied the invitation which listed the date and menu and such. So, for example, a third of the people invited were Indian and the menu included beef and pork. Then the students took over the problem.

One of the objectives was to enhance critical thinking skills. Using the tool they’ve developed, the child first has to choose their thinking type “I agree, a theory, opinion, illustration, etc”, and then choose their scaffold, “Someone said, Reason, My Experience, I need to understand, I need evidence”. It forces them to consider what they’re doing carefully, to reflect as they’re going along. Doing so encourages higher order thinking skills.

Constructivism demands persistent questioning throughout the process on the part of the learners, in particular “Why” questions. As he’s showing us more and more posts that these kids wrote, you really see some interesting lines of questioning. Somebody said in an opinion that muslims don’t eat pork. Somebody else asked for proof of this and a link. A third student looked that up, copied and pasted in a few pertinent passages, and links to their source material.

Teacher did point out that students needed to provide evidence, couldn’t just state an opinion. Had to provide their reference materials, sources. The teacher did intervene a few times, but mostly let the students work, figure things out. Sometimes if a group was way off in their information, or had a significant misunderstanding, the teacher might step in as well.

Reconstruction/Peer correction: Students read through each others comments, questions, opinions, and respond to them with their own personal experiences. In this way they reconstruct their own mental models.

They wound up creating a spreadsheet of sorts with new suggestions for the menu. They chose to avoid beef and pork out of respect for all religions. They brought in a separate caterer for the muslims, but made things as common as possible. They did have a budget as well, and found creative ways to work within it.

When you go to analyses, you can see how many notes people have read, how many they have written, and just about every other stat you could possibly want. He’s pointing out a child who only wrote 37 notes, but read 389. They might not have been typing up a lot, but they’ve been actively participating. You can also separate out the types of posts they’ve done, and so on. Reflections are also incorporated.

Interestingly enough, this would also be a great way to practice basic reading and writing and research, simply because the vast majority of the communication is in written form. This is an incredibly fascinating project. I have got to find a way to get involved. The more I hear about education in Singapore, the more it sounds like exactly the sort of system I have been trying to find.

He does admit that this pilot was done with high level students. Can’t fault him for that. I’d love to see how low income, inner city students handled a project like this. I think it could be incredibly effective. It could really connect them to a world far beyond their own neighborhood.

There are some aspects of the program that are still a little hazy to me. Students are put together in groups of 4. The do work as a group, but they do post invididual.

Wow, one of the ‘rules’ was that they are not supposed to communicate at school. In fact, ALL communication occurred on the site. No IM, no email, no phone, no face to face. Online ONLY. So this was done 100% from home as well.

Wow. Now it’s really starting to sink in. So in the international version of this, you might have two students from the US grouped with two students from Singapore, working in exactly the same way.

This is incredible. It’s the same type of collaboration that people are doing in the business world. While the problem itself was sort of fictitious, or artificial based on real world situations, the method which they worked it through is incredibly authentic, just skewed to emphasis on the education involved to learn the skills necessary.

Link to the school is www.shuqunpri.moe.edu.sg

blc05

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