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1. Respond/Comment on the Key Question provided by your Host

2. Post your own question

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Here's the people in our group!
Loh Mew Chew

Huang Kee Hong

Eddy Norisman

Ngiam Xing Hao

Ngoh Huiyi

Venugopal

Kiam Ham Yong

MD Finosh

Chong Wee Er Timothy

Nur Fadillah Binte Fauzan

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Question 1
What if we are unable to see eye-to-eye with these stakeholders (Parents and Co-Teachers) on methodology for students' learning? How do we mitigate these situations to achieve the best scenario for students?

Question 2
What are challenges for us to deviate from standardised plans and resources?

Question 3
What should we look out for in observing our students?

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Not a question.
A comment about what I really liked about the keynote on Responsive Teaching.

The speaker kept going back to how teachers CAN deviate from the standardised plans and resources as long as they are clear about the syllabus end goals.

I like how he put it, because that is indeed the crux of the issue. We need to know the syllabus and overarching goals well enough to be able to make the necessary 'responses' in our teaching.

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I've been having the luxury of being able to handle largely different class sizes in my career, from a classroom of 2 all the way to 200. And I really do struggle with responsive teaching in a larger classroom setting.

With limited resources and taking into consideration numbers and class time, it's so much more difficult to carry out responsive teaching using methods that we know of that exist (flexible grouping/tiered assignments) while being able to assess their learning.

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Speaker mentioned about "mutual ethos"  in 5 domains, but I just want to ask regarding two:

- Reporting student progress to stakeholders (parents/teachers involved/peer support)
-Identify what we want students to know and be able to do, calibrating it with subject-like colleagues.

What if we are unable to see eye-to-eye with these stakeholders on methodology for students' learning? For example if we disagree with colleagues on pedagogical aspects. Or if parents are unable to see past their role as the child's caretaker and not educator.

How do we mitigate these situations and create the best possible scenario for the student?

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I don't think it's impossible, but neither do I think it's going to be easy given how teachers play many many roles all at once.

I choose to look at it from a practical point of view - how am I going to make this actionable? I'm not going to ask if it can be done perfectly. I'm going to ask how I can make it as actionable as possible. So, here's my take on it ...

My personal take on responsive teaching is that, similar to the 6 areas of Differentiated Instruction, we don't have to expect ourselves to do responsive teaching for every single lesson. We can pick and choose strategically, to do responsive teaching in topics / lessons which will have the highest impact. For example, I'd choose to do responsive teaching when I'm going through a situational writing task. With suitable guidance based on their needs, most students should be able to see an almost immediate gain in their scores in terms of task fulfilment. But I won't do responsive teaching for very specific grammar items, because the opportunity cost outweighs the immediate benefit, which may also dampen students' motivation levels.

Another perspective that I have on responsive teaching is that there are different levels of responsive teaching that we could take. A baseline sort of responsive teaching is can be based on the general profile of our students that we already know for years, and that kind of responsive teaching can be pre-empted and prepared even at the resource-building stage. Another level of responsive teaching would be based on our knowledge of our own class, that we will have to observe and then make tweaks to the existing resources. But with the baseline there, the tweaks would not be completely from scratch, and hence making it more feasible to even contemplate and try doing it, during our very very busy days.

Hence, I don't think responsive teaching is mission impossible. With proper planning, I believe that there's a baseline that we can all reach, even if not the perfected version of what responsive teaching or Differentiated Instruction looks like.

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I think this is most difficult about teaching - knowing where every individual student is, using all sorts of differentiated strategies to bring them to the desired level by the end of the course.

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Knowing HOW an individual student learn in a class is an important step in setting the overall thought frame. Then we can prepare or tweak accordingly with the tools that are appropriate for them. Definitely its tedious to do for every lesson in preparing differentiated resources, but in the broad stroke, if we know how a particular student  is receptive, we can always guide in that direction. 

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Knowing HOW an individual student learn in a class is an important step in setting the overall thought frame. Then we can prepare or tweak accordingly with the tools that are appropriate for them. Definitely its tedious to do for every lesson in preparing differentiated resources, but in the broad stroke, if we know how a particular student  is receptive, we can always guide in that direction. 

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I feel that differentiated instruction is the a great way to scaffold students, especially those with learning disabilities. It is just a matter of how much time and effort that us teachers are willing to put to provide differentiated worksheets for students of different learning needs. It is definitely time consuming for us to provide various lesson resources for different groups of students, however, I feel that it would really help the students.

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While Differentiated Instruction (DI) has been the talk of the town with clear evidence of how it aids students' learning, my concerns, thoughts or feelings are as follows:
- how does a skillful teacher know when to differentiate and when not to?
- while DI is intended to, according to the speaker, "do what is fair for the students", are teachers equipped with the skills to differentiate instructions?
- I agree that in doing DI, we need time, resources and training. The question would be: Do we have the time to do DI? What are the resources, tools and support available to promote DI?

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I think it requires a large amount of materials and resources be available for students with differing learning styles. Whatever the method we use, these strategies require that teachers have a great number of available resources.

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Being fair does not being equal. All students learn differently and hence we have to teach differently. Applying differentiated instruction to my lessons is something that I believe strongly in to help learners of all ability levels learn. The speaker also mentioned that it is not possible to do it all the time, but we can try our best to do so MOST of the time.

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Adding relevance, especially relating to how the world works, in our respective subjects, would definitely help in our pursuit to have responsive teaching in our class. The aspect about it being time consuming, and the class size issue is definitely a hindrance. While that is the case, it is not impossible, but we have to do it as much as we can. I believe harnessing technology (Padlet definitely help- no im not advertising). It definitely has helped in my struggle with my initially quite disengaged NT class. And yes being clear of the syllabus is also helping me to set clear goals in a differentiated manner.

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Responsive Teaching in SG Education Climate

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Responsive Teaching in SG Education Climate

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Some thoughts that were sparked from the discussion with colleagues:

We tend to see responsive teaching as unsuitable/impractical in our current education climate. But that's because we are held mercy by the rigours of examinable subjects in the national exams.

Perhaps as teachers,  right now we should try to move our DI in a direction of the non-examinable subjects and activities outside curriculum (eg. CCA), where at times we may act like how we do in our classrooms, but during these "non-examinable" activities, we can try to encourage self expression and creativity so that every student can be developed individually at their own pace.