education – what is really valued and important

the answer to the above can be glimpsed from the recent speech by our minister at the teachers’ conference event. below is para. 15 i copy-n-pasted:

“15. Beyond these very important shifts in what we teach and how we teach, our students will also pick up important cues from their school environment regarding what is really valued and important. For our students to value their holistic development, they must perceive that their schools strike a good balance in the educational experiences designed for them. Schools ought to prioritise character development and the development of attributes that will put the students in good stead for the future. An over obsession with grades and over obsession with the outcomes, rather than the process of school programmes, will run counter to the intent of what we seek to achieve. In other words, we must find the balance between what can be measured (grades) and what can only be observed (values and character). As Einstein once said, ‘[n]ot everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’

(:

TALIS 2013

TALIS, which stands for OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey, final report 2013 was released yesterday. was first brought to the attention of it via some fb shares of the CNA report.

TALIS 2013 has an interactive webpage which allows users to make comparison between two countries, and the overall average. after making some chart comparisons between SG and Finland, i am glad our system is doing significantly a lot more (not sure statistically so or not) in terms of teachers’ PD. MOE’s belief that PD can improve our teachers and education as a whole is strongly reflected in the charts; this also matches my personal experience and belief (not sure how much belongs to MOE’s influence in this). CNA’s headline “Teachers in Singapore are … among the best-trained worldwide” rightly captured this gist.

another piece of writing related to the TALIS 2013 report is a blog post by Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. for those of us who dun have time (which is most of us and i confess i am one of us) to read the 442-page report, Schleicher has shared some of his takeaways which could be useful for us too. cut-n-paste a few quotes that i find meaningful [personally]:

  • “if a teacher is convinced that students learn better when they are encouraged to think through and solve problems on their own, then they are likely to use more active, student-centred approaches to teaching and learning” [this touches on the importance of teachers’ beliefs]
  • “constructive and fair teacher appraisals and feedback have a positive effect on teachers’ job satisfaction and on their confidence in their abilities as teachers” [teachers, students, we are all alike, aren’t we?]
  • “they should also work with other teachers to develop a system of peer feedback on all aspects of teaching, from lesson planning and classroom practice to student evaluation” [this requires a very open-mind about feedback. is strongly culturally related.]
  • “While in many countries there is a lot of debate about the ideal class size, TALIS finds that class size has no measurable impact on teaching efficacy. But teachers who reported that they teach classes where more than one in ten students are low academic achievers or have behavioural problems also reported significantly lower levels of confidence in their abilities to teach, or what is known as self-efficacy.” [work on our students’ self-efficacy, and the classroom size issue may just be no issue anymore?]
  • “Since TALIS finds that teachers who participate more in decision making in their school are also more likely to believe that society values teachers, they should be open to work together with colleagues and school leaders.” [ownership, buy-in … reminded me somewhat of SDL]

education has a long tail …

this is the second/third time that i was locked out of the new SOEasy (to be locked out), and it’s 1hr now and the password reset isnt here. so thought i could take 3 mins to drop this note into the storeroom.

“education has a long tail. you never know when it will get back to you. it may be a good stroke or it can be a hit ”

… this quotation came from a course trainer, whose course yh2 attended. great wisdom in those words, 真知灼见。 we’ll not see the immediate effects of our education have on our young ones. it could be 20-30yrs down the road that one SEES them. it’s 46 yrs since 1965. look around for it’s abt time for us to see some effects of the policies implemented over the years.

lately we’ve seen the power of web2.0 (or social media, the “IN” term) in both GE2011 and PE2011. it’ll be interesting to see which way the long tail will sway, say the year 2040-50, when C2015 has equipped our students with the 21st Century Competencies, and it’s time for some, if not all, of our students to become “Self-directed, Confident & Concerned Citizens and Active Contributors”.

就让我们相约30年后,我们拭目以待吧 (:

it’s always good to learn from stronger n better others

正是知己知彼百战百胜, we have always heard and admired how well the Finnish’s system’s doing, and this morning saw the article “Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?” being retweeted, and took a quick look and copied down some lines and some thoughts:

“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools

in comparison, we’ve around half that number of teachers, and 1/10 the number of schools

professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education.

i wonder which percentile of graduates is our education service attracting. we’re beginning to work towards leveling up the capacity of our teachers, but an all master teaching force is still some effort to put in.

Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student.

WOW! reminds me of juniors’ childcare centre, the intake size that is.

If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else.

哇!真的没有面子这回事的?如何塑造这种风气呢? 羡慕羡慕

“Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,”

how “stupid” can these teachers be when they are top 10% of the graduates, and when they’re so open to consult with colleagues?

said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

well said! we were also very much concerned about the “human aspect” and spent lots of efforts and resources on this, but somehow the feeling’s that parents/society’s only interested in the ‘statistics’ part?

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school.

i could not have imagined how my schooling experience would be in such a system, and juniors’ schooling experience for that matter. 须要身历其境,亲身体会方可我想。

There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded.

most, if not all, of our mainstream schools are like that too aren’t they?

The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians.

looks like they have no mid-career teachers joining the profession?

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers.

what’s the hours an American teacher’s spending? and in contrast, how much time’s our teachers spending on average?

Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests … “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

indeed there’s only so much those numbers derived from quantifiable stuff can tell us about our students.