Minister Chan Chun Sing's speech at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference 2024 emphasized Singapore's approach to education in the digital era, encapsulated in the concept of the "pedagogy of one." This concept revolves around personalized learning, leveraging technology to tailor education to individual student needs and strengths. Minister Chan highlighted Singapore's initiatives in integrating technology into education to enhance learning outcomes and ensure equitable access to educational resources. He stressed the importance of nurturing critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability among students, essential qualities for navigating a rapidly changing global landscape. Minister Chan reaffirmed Singapore's commitment to innovation and collaboration in education, aiming to cultivate lifelong learners prepared for future challenges through personalized, technology-enabled pedagogical practices.
The "pedagogy of one" emphasizes personalized learning experiences tailored to individual students. Examples include:
Adaptive Learning Platforms: Utilizing AI and data analytics to customize learning paths based on each student's strengths, weaknesses, and pace of learning.
Differentiated Instruction: Teachers design lessons that cater to diverse learning styles and abilities within the same classroom, ensuring every student receives appropriate support and challenges.
Project-Based Learning: Students engage in projects aligned with their interests and abilities, allowing for self-directed exploration and application of knowledge.
Individual Learning Plans (ILPs): Collaboratively developed plans between teachers, students, and parents that outline specific learning goals and strategies tailored to the student's needs.
Flipped Classroom: Students access instructional content online at their own pace outside of class, allowing for more personalized interaction and application of concepts during class time.
Minister Chan Chun Sing highlighted these approaches within the context of Singapore's education system, emphasizing the role of technology in facilitating personalized learning experiences that prepare students for the complexities of the future global landscape.
Pedagogy in the teaching and learning of science
Pedagogy in the teaching and learning of science involves various instructional strategies and methods aimed at fostering understanding, critical thinking, and scientific inquiry among students. Some key aspects include:
1. **Hands-on Experiments**: Engaging students in practical experiments and investigations to observe scientific principles in action and develop skills in experimentation and analysis.
2. **Conceptual Understanding**: Emphasizing deep comprehension of scientific concepts through interactive discussions, simulations, and visual aids to facilitate learning and retention.
3. **Inquiry-Based Learning**: Encouraging students to ask questions, explore hypotheses, and conduct investigations independently or in groups to cultivate curiosity and problem-solving skills.
4. **Integration of Technology**: Incorporating digital tools, simulations, and online resources to enhance understanding and provide interactive learning experiences that complement traditional methods.
5. **Collaborative Learning**: Promoting teamwork and peer-to-peer interaction through group projects, debates, and discussions to foster communication skills and collaborative problem-solving abilities.
6. **Formative Assessment**: Using ongoing assessments such as quizzes, concept maps, and peer evaluations to monitor student progress and provide timely feedback for improvement.
Effective pedagogy in science education combines these approaches to create a dynamic learning environment that supports both conceptual understanding and practical application of scientific knowledge.
Syncing Pedagogy of One with Pedagogy in Science.
The "Pedagogy in the Teaching and Learning of Science" shares some common principles with the concept of the "pedagogy of one," particularly in terms of personalized learning and effective instructional strategies. Here’s how they align and where they differ:
1. **Personalization**: Both approaches emphasize tailoring learning experiences to meet individual student needs. The "pedagogy of one" advocates for using technology and personalized learning plans to adjust teaching methods and content to suit each student's learning pace, interests, and strengths. In science education, this can translate into differentiated instruction, where teachers adapt their teaching strategies to accommodate diverse learning styles and abilities.
2. **Technology Integration**: Both pedagogical approaches recognize the role of technology in enhancing learning outcomes. The "pedagogy of one" leverages adaptive learning platforms and digital tools to provide personalized learning experiences. Similarly, in science education, technology can be used for simulations, virtual labs, and interactive multimedia resources to engage students and deepen their understanding of scientific concepts.
3. **Student-Centered Learning**: Both approaches promote student-centered learning environments where students are actively engaged in the learning process. In the "pedagogy of one," students have more autonomy in selecting learning activities and setting goals based on their individual interests and learning profiles. In science education, student-centered learning involves inquiry-based approaches where students investigate scientific phenomena, formulate hypotheses, and conduct experiments to discover knowledge.
While there are clear overlaps, the "pedagogy of one" focuses more explicitly on personalized learning facilitated by technology, whereas "Pedagogy in the Teaching and Learning of Science" encompasses a broader range of instructional strategies specifically tailored to science education. Both aim to foster critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and lifelong learning habits among students, albeit with different emphases on personalization and subject-specific methodologies.
Speech by Minister Chan Chun Sing at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference 2024
1. A very good morning to everyone. To our international guests, a warm welcome to Singapore too. Today, we live in an age in which technology and society are evolving faster than what most of us can naturally adapt. The question today isn't if education should transform, but rather the pace and extent of this transformation.
2. Let me sketch out our burning platform: First, the pace and scope of technological changes allows and requires us to reimagine how education is delivered. Consequently, we will also have to reassess what counts as success in education. Education must transcend the mere acquisition of knowledge because knowledge is increasingly commoditised and ever changing. Instead, education must be about the acquisition of skills and dispositions for lifelong learning, especially those that distinguish us from machines and algorithms. It will therefore mean that our real measure of success is not what we can achieve in these first 15 years in school, but more importantly, in the next 50 years beyond school.
3. Second, a more fragmented and fractious world. The ability to connect, and bridge differences through new perspectives and propositions become more important than ever before. It means that known knowledge and skills alone, while necessary, will no longer be sufficient. Holistic development with the right dispositions to connect, create, and contribute becomes more important than ever before.
4. Third, individual and societal expectations of education have changed, and will continue to change – with heightened demands for more personalised outcomes, more timely and relevant skills, and yet greater versatility to adapt to ever changing needs. All of us know that no one enjoys being taught to the average, and that has always been the challenge for teaching to a large group of students. The challenge now is to shift from mass access to education, to mass personalisation and customisation. How do we use technology and data to overcome the conventional education "trilemma" of achieving quality at scale, proliferation with speed, and affordability in cost? It used to be said you can achieve two out of three at best, but seldom all three together.
5. We are confronted with three sets of challenges and opportunities: First, how do we apply our understanding of the science of learning while harnessing technology to augment our capabilities? How will advances in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive sciences change how we teach and learn? How will we achieve mass personalisation by leveraging Generative AI and EdTech to complement our teachers in the classroom, and to deliver timely and relevant learning and feedback to every learner?
6. Second, how can we develop all our learners holistically, beyond content knowledge? How do we foster their socio-emotional growth and their capacity to engage with the world and relate to others different from them?
7. Third, how do we empower our teachers to build and leverage partnerships beyond our schools for collective success?
Personalisation of Pedagogy, Both Within and Beyond the School Experience
8. Let me start with the first set of challenges and opportunities – new pedagogies. The science of learning can help us better understand how our learners learn today; with and without technology and the Internet; and how their socio-emotional foundations are formed. Through neuro-imaging, we can observe how learners' brains develop and which part of their brains are activated when they come across different learning settings – individually or in groups, face to face or virtually.
9. This can help us explain the learning challenges each and every learner encounters – whether they are not deeply engaged in learning or if they have specific learning difficulties and are struggling with specific concepts. We can also measure how the brain changes following effective learning. All these will help us to better personalise teaching and learning approaches according to the individual needs and characteristics.
10. The National Institute for Education (NIE) is now deepening the science of learning to add value to the art of teaching. We have first been focusing on our school going children for some time. We must now also extend the study of this science of learning to preschoolers and adult learners. We have started work on the preschoolers, and we need to do so with the adult learners urgently. If anything, the work on the adult learners in the next 50 years beyond school is even more challenging than the preschoolers and school going children in the first 15 years.
11. Our GUSTO [Growing Up in Singapore Towards Healthy Outcomes] cohort study that Singapore has supported for more than a decade has surfaced important findings, which can guide the preschool curriculum. This is especially so in enhancing the physical development and wellbeing of our young children. But we need to do more in the adult learning space. The National Institute of Early Childhood Development and the Institute of Adult Learning (IAL) must then actively translate the new insights to transform teaching of young children to adults. I am encouraged to learn that IAL and Singapore University of Social Sciences are actively thinking through how we can apply the science of learning not just for preschoolers and school going children, but also adult learners.
12. In our schools, we have started to use tools that provide real-time data-driven insights to deliver more personalised educational experiences for our learners. For example, the Short Answer Feedback Assistant in the Singapore Student Learning Space, our national online learning platform, uses Generative AI to provide feedback to students. It was previously only able to provide feedback for close-ended questions. We will soon be able to do the same for open-ended questions as well, from June 2024. How it works is that teachers can input suggested answers or rubric descriptors that are aligned to the national curriculum, or other learning outcomes into the system. This means that our students will receive more targeted feedback, across a wider range of learning experiences.
13. Another example is MathsCheckPlus which was introduced by the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board to schools in 2023. The MathsCheckPlus leverages AI to customise tests based on each student's ability, adjusting test difficulty according to students' performance during the test. It measures students' performance on core knowledge and skills in Primary Mathematics. More importantly, it provides valuable information on their learning gaps, which means that our teachers will have a keener sense of which student may need more help with the topic. The beauty of this is that the data does not just provide feedback to individual learners. As we collect more data, we will also better understand the challenges faced by a class of students, or even a cohort of students and what better ways we can teach them concepts from different approaches. This will strengthen our pedagogical practices.
14. These are just two examples of how we can better empower our teachers to help our students learn better, with edtech and data.
15. Edtech recognises that each student is unique. Our aspiration is to proliferate personalised learning systems at scale to cater to individual learners, their diverse learning objectives, and the unique learning contexts which they are in.
16. Such proliferation of technology in our lives must be balanced with teaching our learners how to use technology in the right amount, providing the right content, with the right relational support in an age-appropriate manner.
17. Let me be clear: these tools will not replace our teachers. Their professional judgement has to be the first and last mile to bridge what technology provides us and what our students need.
18. In fact, as we incorporate more technology in teaching, the greater the judgement required by our teachers on when to use, for what to use, for who to use and how much to use. This is the new craft that all our teachers must master as part of their professional development.
19. We already have preliminary experiences that tells us that we cannot apply EdTech uniformly across all teaching contexts. For instance, with high-ability students, having high tech can be a tremendous advantage because it helps to stretch them. But for high-need students, we must start with high touch, to settle the socio-emotional foundations, before we apply the appropriate technology for them.
20. So for the same subject, same class of students with different needs, we must be able to use different EdTech to achieve the outcomes we desire. It's not a one size fits all, and certainly the more we apply EdTech to our teaching, the more finely calibrated we must be in our approach. This is where the skills of our teachers must come in the first and last mile.
Developing Students Holistically Beyond Content Knowledge
21. The second set of challenges and opportunities involves having to develop our students holistically beyond just content knowledge. For our students and parents, a wealth of information is readily accessible through Internet search engines, more than even what our teachers can muster.
22. Therefore, the premium is on our students' ability to distil, discern and discover from what they see rather than just regurgitating content knowledge. The teacher's role becomes more of the facilitator for discovery rather than a didactic transmission of information.
23. All these must be anchored upon a robust social-emotional foundation, a lifelong passion for learning, and a zest for life. How do we inculcate such dispositions in our children, beyond just content knowledge, will be our next challenge. This disposition will be even more important than the content knowledge as they learn throughout life.
24. Our students must also cultivate the ability to connect across cultures, to work and learn in teams. This includes having values such as respect, integrity, and responsibility, while understanding and appreciating diversity. They must also learn the relational skills to manage and harness diversity to create new value propositions with people from different backgrounds.
25. What do these mean for pedagogy? We must explore ways to help our students learn independently, to master subject matter, and skillfully and creatively apply it in real-world situations. We must support students in developing empathy, perspective-taking and relational skills to work collaboratively and harmoniously across diverse groups.
26. In Singapore, we call these dispositions and skills the 21st Century Competencies, or 21CC. 21CC are more challenging to teach and master than conventional subjects. We will need to discover and implement novel ways of teaching to help our learners acquire such dispositions. The establishment of the Singapore Centre for Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) by MOE and NIE last year is one part of this effort.
27. I encourage all teachers and practitioners to keep exploring new ways not just to deliver the content knowledge, but more importantly to help our students acquire those critical dispositions to learn for life.
Partnerships for the World as Our Classroom
28. This brings me to the third set of challenges and opportunities – Partnerships. Partnerships will help us to move from the classroom as our world, to the world as our classroom.
29. Today, our stakeholders, including parents and industry partners have elevated and more diverse aspirations for not just the learners, but the outcome of our education system. As education researchers, we must look out for unexplored possibilities and capitalise on the opportunities of the community, the industry, and the world around us. Reach out to the world and bring in new perspectives, new connections, so that we can enrich our teaching and the learning of our students.
30. As teachers, it is our job to broaden our perspectives beyond our classrooms, so that we can bring the world to our classrooms, be it the real world or the cyber world. This in turn helps to better equip our students to become skilled and confident enough to take on the world.
31. And as our students transition from school into subsequent stages of their lives, learning should not, and must not cease. We must better organise ourselves, if we want to build an ecosystem that encourages lifelong learning. What are the future skills required by our economy, and how can we develop these skills?
32. We have to build partnerships with industries, to facilitate channels for them to articulate their demand for skills, and work together with them aggregate these demands across industries. Next, we must activate the supply to meet these demands, through our institutions of higher learning, which must also transform into institutes of continuous learning.
33. And for the institutions, we have to continuously seek out not just the cutting-edge technology, but also the frontier science of teaching adult learners. This is a blue ocean that is vastly unexplored, for us to achieve breakthroughs in years to come.
34. To do all these well, our teachers will need new skills. We have to help our teachers acquire the skills to collaborate with parents, industries and the community. This is not something that will come naturally. In my conversations with NIE, we often ask ourselves how do we, in the finite time that we have in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education, to inculcate in our new teachers, not just the latest and best pedagogical practices, but help them to acquire those skills to build partnerships so that in time to come, they can leverage those partnerships to enrich their teaching.
35. Today, while we help our students to acquire the skills to collaborate with parents, industry, and the community, we must also make time for them to understand the world in context, so that they can bring back the teaching in context.
36. This challenges us to build new dispositions in our teachers to navigate the complexities of education. To be responsive to diverse needs, be resilient through challenges, and to be resourceful to continuously enhance our teaching practices, and learning beyond the educational fraternity. All these must stem from a commitment to lifelong learning by our teachers first. If our teachers can exemplify the spirit of lifelong learning, we have a better chance to inspire our young learners to be lifelong learners themselves too.
37. When done well, we will break down the divide between academia and the world, with our teachers becoming the bridge between academia and the real world. It will not be a binary choice of the world or academia, but a double helix reinforcing one another as we continue to develop our strengths.
Conclusion
38. Pedagogy will, and must, continue to evolve. But the significance of our teachers' roles endures. As we adopt more technology and diversify our pedagogies, it becomes increasingly critical for our teachers to adeptly apply the appropriate pedagogies and technologies to suit each student's needs.
39. Our teachers must be both scientists and artists in their professional practice. Scientists in the art of using data and technology research, and artists in combining all these diverse tools in a way that brings out the best in each child. That's what makes our teachers special. That's what garners societal respect and inspires the next generation to pursue a career in education.
40. Let me pull all these threads together with an aspiration towards the "Pedagogy of One". In medicine today, we talk about producing medication or drugs in a "Batch of One", customised to the genome of the individual. Can our education system be similarly customised to achieve mass personalisation, at scale, at speed, with quality and affordability to achieve the "Pedagogy of One", where each and every child has their own customised learning journey.
41. I think we have in our hands now the technology, data, and collective experiences of our teaching fraternity to give this our best shot. Where we can achieve mass personalisation, where every learner's educational journey is crafted to their unique learning needs, based on their unique dispositions leveraging insights of their learning journey prior, and also from the collective experiences of learners across time and space, so that we can customise the way we teach according to everyone's needs.
42. If we take the lead from gamification and next-generation adaptive learning systems that we already have today, we can dynamically evaluate and respond to a learner's progress, needs and preferences. This is a dynamic process where what you will be taught or encounter will depend on how well you have learned from the previous level.
43. If done well, then assessment for the sake of assessment, or assessment for the sake of comparing with one another, will be history. Instead, assessment will be closely intertwined with the lessons and the pedagogy for the individual.
44. In essence, if we can aspire in medicine towards the "Batch of One", we can similarly do so in education. In the early days, when education was first made available, perhaps only the privileged and royalty had access. This class had what we call, "many to one" – many teachers to one student. That was version 1.0.
45. Progressively, we moved towards "one to many", which has the challenge of teaching to the average. It doesn't cater to the high needs, nor the high ability learners. But what if one day we can cater to the "many to many", but each customised to the individual. It is something achievable.
46. But I do not want us to get the wrong idea. The essence of the "Pedagogy of One" is paradoxically not about solitary learning. Far from it. It calls for an environment where each learner brings their best to the team, collectively cultivating the dispositions to be creative, collaborative, and to learn for life.
47. It is about coming together as one community, blending the physical and digital realms to learn beyond the classroom walls. And together, transcending barriers to forge new connections and create new and better ideas. One seamless, integrated, lifelong, and dynamically evolving learning ecosystem. If we get this right, we can go beyond the debate of classroom size, because you can have a classroom of any size. Everyone can progress and learn according to their own needs and pace with a "Pedagogy of One" because they have adaptive learning systems that can customise the content and pace for each of them.
48. That may be a vision that will take some time to realise for everyone, but I am certainly confident that today we have the seeds of this concept already in place, and I can see some of these being practised across our schools currently.
49. The "Pedagogy of One" will require our teachers to acquire even deeper understanding of our students' needs and the potential of the world, and the potential of the technology and data that can come with it. So the art and science of teaching has become more demanding, more elevated, but certainly more fulfilling.
50. One can argue that throughout history, our teachers have always aspired towards the "Pedagogy of One". We were never able to achieve this because of the constraints of resources and time. But today, with the technology, data, and experiences, we have best chance to do this well, and we must have the urgency to do it fast. This will be the true mark of our professionalism to inspire and engender deep respect.
51. On that note, I wish you all the best at this conference, and I look forward to hearing your new ideas on how we can better mass customise pedagogies across the entire cohort of students for us to truly bring out the best; where teaching to the average will be history, where assessment for assessment's sake will be history. Instead, teaching is always customised in context to the needs of the learner, teaching is always based on the data that technology that we can use to help us stretch the high ability learners and to lift the high needs students. Where assessment will always be to help our students be more prepared and better sighted in the right environment for their next learning.
52. If we can do all these, teaching will be a much more challenging, and yet much more fulfilling profession for our teachers in our system. I wish you all the best, and I hope that we can learn from each other and I certainly hope to learn from all of you on how we can stretch the potential of our teaching fraternity in service of our nation and others.
53. Thank you very much.
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