Engagement to
"Shift the Needle"
with Pedagogy

In his address to the participants of Leaders in Education Programme (LEP) 2017, the Director-General of Education exhorted school leaders to bear in mind three A’s in their leadership journey: to Appreciate the Past; Adapt to the Present; and Anticipate the Future. On reflection, the message I took away from this is that as leaders, we need to be able to strike a balance between continuity and transformation in leading our schools in the present.

Moulding the future of our nation

That we need to prepare our students for the future seems to feature strongly in the discourse amongst the fraternity. In response, we have a national curriculum that emphasises the development of a strong foundation in literacy, numeracy, values, social and emotional competencies, and the emerging 21^st Century Competencies (21CC)¹ in order to prepare our students for a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous future.

However, this only exists at the level of the planned curriculum. Whether or not this would eventually translate into real impact on our students is contingent on the quality of learning and teaching in the classroom. The challenge for us as school leaders is thus to change the pedagogy, and its undergirding mindsets, in our classrooms.

Why fix it if it ain’t broke?

Change is hard! It is even harder when the old way of doing things have reaped results. As a school leader, I can attest to the challenge of changing the way my teachers teach. Through the course of engaging teachers in conversation, I have come to discover that they hold on tightly to tried-and-tested pedagogies like teacher-talk and drill-and-practice for various reasons.

Some claim that these methods have reaped good examination results—the key that will open doors (to further education and beyond) for their students—and so, for the good of their students, they persist in using these methods even if they know cognitively that it might compromise on preparing their students adequately for the future. At a deeper level, I suspect that these methods also give teachers a sense of security and minimises the risk of “failure” or a feeling of loss in competence in class.

Engagement to “shift the needle”

Yet change is necessary. The world of the future demands that our students be equipped with critical knowledge, skills, and dispositions that cannot be developed sufficiently through the “traditional” pedagogies. If we want to prepare our students adequately for the future, we need to change the way we teach.

I thought that effecting a change in teachers’ pedagogy needs to extend beyond merely providing them with professional development. Working off the belief that all teachers aspire to make a positive impact on their students’ lives, I see it necessary to engage our teachers’ values, beliefs, and assumptions about effective teaching and learning.

It is also important to help teachers negotiate the (perceived) trade-offs between the long- versus short-term “good” of their students. Lastly, I think it is also important to provide teachers with the necessary emotional support and assurance as they venture out of their comfort zones to teach differently.

[1]Values, Social and Emotional Learning and the emerging 21^st Century Competencies (21CC) are encapsulated in MOE’s Framework for 21^st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes.