1. Share one point that stood out for you, and why.

2. What do you wish to find out more?

Take 5 mins to think individually.

Share your thoughts with the group for the next 20 mins and then consolidate your points as a table and submit a post.

Please indicate your table number!

The PISA 2022 outcomes struck a few of us- that SG students fell behind in areas like wellbeing, resilience, etc and these are also our work in student devt.

second time watching this, affirmed that the work of the co curriculum cannot be replaced by AI because we deal with the affective. AI and tech can improve sports performance for example but we still need the CCA teachers and coaches to build the mental resilience and push harder.

1. Doing fewer things with greater depth - for teachers to be able to build deeper connection and interaction with students, to priortise what is more important and critical, to have the space and time to give more immediate feedback to students vs structured assessments.

2. Harnessing technology to help with basic teaching/instructions to free up more time for the connection with students.

3. Is it time to revisit the teacher-students ratio?

4. Students learn best from teachers they love; the concept of co-agency and journeying with the students in school.

How to be like Denmark? How to balance academic excellence with emotional resilience?

Teachers

are our teachers equipped with the skills to support students to develop cognitive flexibility, resilience. Many ways to teach creativity, but are our art/music teachers able to do so? Students learn best from teachers they love, but do our teachers believe in TSR and its impact on learning? Are teachers overloaded?

Schools

How can the whole school environment support students? Student development activities may not have the emphasis that academic areas have. Can learning experiences be better catered to the needs of students?? Joy of learning - learning things beyond exam preparation - we need to relook the emphasis on exams, so that learning can be joyful. Social interaction: do our schools provide opportunities to help children learn how to interact socially? Are we too structured - does that prevent organic social interactions?

Parents

Are parents in sync with the messaging from HQ regarding the reduction of emphasis on exams.

• teachers’ attitude and willingness to explore to try different things will have an impact on students’ learning. Eg: teachers openness to use/try AI in the classroom can be a role model in effective use of it for students.

• What is the essence of learning —> no longer the content, but the skills and the attitude towards learning. Teachers is a Key enabler.

• Need to look at teacher agency to develop student agency. What goes into collective agency (PLC)? What does Co-agency with students look like? How does individual agency go deep into this?

• How does OECD define “materials and cultural well-being”? Is resilience measured as an outcome? Or a self-efficacy?

• Has the definition of friendship change? Because the social relationship in Singapore is relatively low. How do we develop quality of relationship? Does AI boyfriend/girlfriend reshape friendships (as AI can fill up the emotional Bank, AI relationships is more for conflict avoidance people)? What encompasses a safe relationship? How does it lead to identity formation?

1. Rethinking School Experiences

   • Learning should be more varied, including more out-of-classroom experiences.

   • Reduce the overemphasis on assessment.

   • Curricula should balance content knowledge, skills development, and social-emotional (SE) competencies.

2. Supporting Identity Building

   • Education should support the development of students’ identities—social, national, and emotional.

3. Integrating SE and Cognitive Development

   • It is important to develop students holistically by enhancing both their SE competencies and cognitive abilities.

4. Future of Work

   • As AI replaces routine jobs often held by less academically inclined individuals, we must consider how this group will sustain themselves in the future.

5. Challenging-to-Measure but Valuable Skills

   • The most important life skills (e.g., 21st-century competencies) are often the hardest to assess.

   • Alternative assessment approaches (like ipsative assessment and self-reflection) may be more suitable.

   • Do all aspects of learning truly need to be evaluated?

6. Rethinking Curriculum and Assessment Design

   • We may have overly prioritized content, whereas dispositions and behaviours related to disciplinary learning deserve more emphasis.

7. Changing the National Psyche on Assessment

   • How can we shift societal mindsets – especially among teachers and parents – to view education as more than just assessment outcomes?

   • This shift is essential for acceptance of curriculum changes or reduction.

8. Project-Based Learning as a Future Path?

   • Should we move toward project-based learning and assessment?

   • Is there a paradox, given that Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) are delaying specialization?

   • Apprenticeships may not be widely applicable beyond vocational contexts (e.g., ITEs, polytechnics).

9. Enhancing Education and Career Guidance (ECG)

   • Mentorship and real-life engagement (e.g., life coaches, practitioners) are crucial in students’ learning experiences.

   • Such experiences can inspire students and help them discover their passions.

What stood out and why:

• Teaching for tomorrow's world. what students love, recognised and what the world needs. Current is the heavy emphasis on what the world needs, and seeming imbalance at this current juncture, to lean more to what they are good at. (Ikigai)

  • Venn diagram - sums up what is helpful for us

• Preparing students for jobs that don't exist - broadening beyond career labels but into sectors

• Jobs for future - is about meaning and purpose rather than findings solutions to their situations

• Comparison between Singapore, Denmark and Peru - cultural differences between our countries that may contribute to the students learning

  • Denmark: Possible to have both academic and good in other areas.

• "Singapore students are not happy" - quite true with some exceptions.

• Productivity- Wow: Less Hours in school but very productive. (Switzerland: at 15, Students learn their deep skills 4 out of 5 days in school. Vocation-education teaching)

Curious to find out more:

• Understand what the students love and help them become good at

• "Singapore students are not happy" - what are the kids going through that makes them unhappy? School - structures - how does it impact their joy of learning. Curious to observe more of what is happening in schools

• TSR - how do other countries do it? What are they doing to build strong relationships with students, that strong r/s and support that builds?

• Belonging - not on being and becoming, but also on the belonging, given that our students get to choose their sec schools.

• Performance: what is needed more for us to focus on?

• Teachers and technology: how do we prepare our teachers for this moving, fast evolving environment? how to help our teachers to help our students be future-ready? What is fundamental to help our students?

• Curriculum and Assessment - how can we do it?

• What can we learn from Denmark to rethink what school looks like, to allow both the learning of academic and social skills?

• Collaborative learning in different environments and contexts, beyond school

  
  

What stood up for you in the sharing and why?

• Singapore has a high academic score but low social and happiness score unlike Denmark. How to be like Denmark? Singapore is already in an achievement mode. The comfort level of teachers, parents and students has to be considered for a new shift towards a more balanced education.

• Modify teaching (remain, modify, eliminate components in existing education) to align with actual productivity and application in the real world. We should prepare students for the next 50 years and jobs not created.

• Students learning thru tech and videos can be enriching but still the human touch from teachers is required to bring the skills and knowledge to a higher level. Teachers who are good in AI is likely to replace teachers who struggle with AI. Teachers can be trained in AI and teach student how to learn from AI and technologies, more than just learning from themselves.

• Redefining success in not just achievement in jobs and qualifications, but also on how to contribute to society and be more resilient and socially responsible. MOE can lead the way to convey such narratives.

Rebalancing Education to build Resilience: How is it that the outcomes are still low despite all our effort to support students in building resilience?

Environment:

• Students currently face more intense family and peer challenges that students face.

• The environment that many of our students grow up in is also too comfortable (affluenza), this limits their experiences and willingness to step out of their comfort zone.  

Rebalance Curriculum:

• How can we take a step back to examine the larger picture and relook at curriculum for each subject to explore spending more time in experiences outside of the classroom that help build resilience such as CCAs, outdoor learning, service learning. These experiences would support students in discovering their strengths and building their portfolio (although this should not be the main aim). These interactions through these platforms is made even more important in this age of AI.

Implementation Considerations:

• The framing of the activity is also important: the mindset with which students pursue the sports impacts the experience as that can take away from the positive effects of the activity.

• When experiences are more creative, student-led and less sanitised, it creates more memorable experiences for the students. If the activity is planned to the T for students without allowing them to take ownership it will not have the same outcomes.

How do young people define happiness?

• Do our students think about happiness in terms of grades? What are they unhappy about?

• How can we help students reframe their thinking so they are more resilient and 'happier'?

• How do we take care of our young people as they transition from schools to the workforce? Are schools overly structured that they become detrimental for young people as they enter the workforce - they are not adaptable, do not have career resilience.

• Students' have high expectations for their own well-being but it seems like it may be more external e.g. what others can do for my well-being, but less on what THEY can do for their own well-being.

• SG youth are not willing to go that extra mile and 'pay their dues'

Teacher-Student Relationships as key --> Strong impact on learning

• Do some of our school structures impact our TSR?

  
  

Strong interest in finding out how the Swiss can have so much productivity of learning.

What does society value?

• It is important to review and be clear about the relevance of school to our students in this day and age

• In view of the “divorce” between assessment and learning, we are reminded that real-time feedback holds great relevance.

• The frame for learning- what you love, what you are good at, how does it matter to the world (what the world needs)- is an important reminder for us as teachers

• Teachers are still key to the education of our students. However, the anxiety and stress that they face, especially in administrative work should be addressed even as we move into introducing AI into the syllabus

• We need to find a balance between teaching fewer subjects and in greater depth versus the other ways around. We should focus on teaching transferable skills in the subjects instead.

• The importance of anticipating what AI is able to enable us to teach students the ways of knowing and doing, and a deeper way of knowing.

• The integration of assessment into technology holds promise in allowing us to measure the skills that the child demonstrates as he grapples with the learning experience. Technology can help us integrate other complex variables in such assessment.

• There is concern about how our education system now will affect the teachers of the future in terms of how their readiness to teach the students of the future.

              Teacher agency

                             ○ How to better involve teachers in the lesson design to engage in the lesson plan

                             ○ How to support teachers in writing lessons, within a fast paced school

              Teacher co-agency

                             - Teachers role model what they teach

                             - Teachers know the students and their profile to improve engagement in learning

              Teacher competences

                             - Understanding of SEL as a pre-service teachers so that the teachers can help the students to develop their SE competences

                             - Content, pedagogy and assessment mastery

                             - How to prepare pre-service teachers to write lesson plans for CCE, PE

              Productivity

                             - Is there over investment of effort by schools and students to produce results? What is learning and growth?

                             - There are too many good things given to students that they don’t even know about. What is the catalyst to unlock more productive learning?

                             - We hold on to the existing while we look for new breakthrough. Can we relook the composition again?

                             - Students know the 'correct' answer in CCE. They didn’t need the 1 hour to learn this.

                             - How can a teacher be skillful enough to attend to students' individual needs in a diverse class of learner?

                             - Future proofing our curriculum

                             - Is there an over investment of effort to maintain standards, what is good enough?

              Student resilience is low in SG

                             - As it is a perception, is it the students have low tolerance for stress, or less capacity to manage stress?

                             - Role of family and society in nurturing the wellbeing of the students. Denmark has strong family and worklife balance which contributes towards developing these well-being domains.

On human flourishing:

1.      Importance of finding the purpose in life and being taught how to flourish in life. Hoping that some initiatives are in the right direction, e.g., full SBB to help develop strengths.

2.      Seems like Singapore students are unhappy. If so, this is not conducive for personal thriving, and this needs a deeper looking into as it affects all aspects of life.

On curriculum and assessment:

1.      Curriculum: Our teachers have a lot of the ‘what to teach’ but do need to improve on the ‘how to teach’ so that students can be better prepared for life.

2.      Keep the context and reorganise the curriculum. Important for teachers not to base their curriculum on what they think would resonate with learners, but what truly resonates with learners.

3.      Not to teach harder or more, but to assess smarter.

4.      Assessment is not a checkpoint but a compass for lifelong learning

Some questions:

5.      When students step out of school and have to deal with life, they are not resilient enough to tackle that outside world. Are we over-structuring in schools? How can we introduce real-world environment in the classroom?

(i) Rethink how to better integrate learning and assessment

(ii) continuous assessment and practical application of knowledge rather than solely on exams

(iii) Balance of formative vs summative assessments (iv) Relationship and feedback between teachers and learners. Joyful learners - Emotions tied to learning. Social-emotional competencies in learning

(v) improve process to motivate teachers to focus on creating conducive environment for quality learning experiences.

(vi) flexibility in learning and assessment formats e.g. reflection/ portfolio

(vii) longer hours doesn't equate to better productivity in our schools - leverage AI

(viii) have students learnt? The need to first understand difficulty faced by learner and help students sense-make more effectively - this is where the human teacher who leverages AI can make a difference.