My Big Takeaways from Singapore
This is the final post in a series of reflections about my two weeks spent as an Outstanding Educator in Residence at the Academy of Singapore Teachers.
What I’m thankful for in American Education…
I told two stories in Singapore that people found shocking. First, in several workshops I shared the Flipped Classroom model. (Singapore’s education system has such a strong focus on direct instruction, that this seemed to me to be one of the only realistic ways to provide teachers with tech-integration strategies that they could use the following day after a short workshop.) Teachers were stunned to hear that the Flip model was being popularized by two science teachers in the Midwest who pretty much invented the strategy and pursued it entirely of their own accord (and certainly developed it without a mandate from the district central office or a state ministry of education). I also described the development of the #sschat group, an online community of history teachers who started getting together to share resources, discuss practice, and support one another. Again, this group was started by a couple of teachers of their own volition.
For American educators, these kinds of stories are as common as the sunrise. Of course teachers innovate and do whatever they want… who would tell them what to do? We expect that every teacher invents their own assessment, curriculum, pedagogy, and pursues innovations (or not) entirely of their own initiative. Even in places that have made progress towards collective improvement initiatives, we still nurture a culture of tremendous teacher autonomy.
For Singapore educators, this is absolutely crazy, and actually somewhat difficult to conceive and process. Teachers just do whatever they want? They just invent stuff? Based on whatever they feel like? In Singapore, teachers progress through a career ladder with multiple branches and multiple ending points in schools, in administration, and as part of curriculum development teams. The Ministry of Ed isn’t staffed by people who didn’t feel like teaching anymore; it’s staffed by people who are masters of their craft and then moved into serving the system. New initiatives are developed by senior leaders, and teachers are expected to carry out, implement, and perfect these initiatives. There is some room for innovation in implementation (and actually, Singapore teachers see themselves as outstanding at inventing and developing templates to teach students how to answer standardized assessment questions), but most innovation is developed outside the classroom and the exported into them.
In America, we let a thousand flowers bloom. Some of these flowers are huge, colorful, marvelous displays. Some of these flowers wilt.
I left Singapore, however, grateful for the entrepreneurial spirit that we allow to flourish among American educators, where genius really can emerged from two guys in a science classroom in the Midwest, or a few teachers who want to get together online to talk shop, or some non-educator tutoring his cousins in India. The challenges of education for a changing world are so demanding that it is impossible to imagine that there are enough brains sitting in ministries of education around the world to solve them. There are not enough education technology and curriculum officials the world over to develop the new technology-rich lessons that we need from K-20 in every subject in the world’s curriculum. We need distributed teacher innovation and experimentation to create the next generation of lessons and learning environments. Seeing this in short supply in Singapore made me appreciate more what we have here.
What I wish I could bring home from Singapore…
Now, as much as I love our flowers that bloom brilliantly, we have two problems in the U.S.: first, we have too many flowers that wilt. Singapore’s education system is constantly measuring and evaluating teachers and their students and providing teachers with a wide variety of supports to improve. Singapore teachers live in a culture of continuous improvement, where it is understood that teachers will work together, collectively with administrators, ministry officials and others, to get better at their work and to serve children better. Part of this culture is enforced through policies, procedures, merit pay, teacher evaluations, and other pieces. But the culture is more than the sum of the policies. When I shared technology integration strategies with educators from teachers to ministry officials in Singapore, I constantly heard the question back: “How do we know that this will work? What’s the evidence that this will improve student learning?” The questions, seemed to me, to emerge not just from worrying that technology integration will compromise people’s performance on their Key Performance Indicators, but from an ingrained sense that every new idea needs to be carefully vetted to ensure that it’s not just new, but better. I wish more American educators drilled me with these kinds of questions, even as I suggested to Singapore teachers that they needed more experimentation at the classroom level.
The other problem with the 1000 flowers strategy is that if everyone can do whatever they want, it’s almost impossible to collectively get better at anything. Educators in Singapore were amazingly good at learning from and with one another. When 15 educators—international visitors, principals, other teachers, other administrators, ministry officials—showed up uninvited to a science class, the lab paused for about 30 seconds to welcome us, and then everything proceeded exactly as before. When the History master teacher thought the time was right to make some improvements in the history curriculum, he easily brought together curriculum, technology, university, and other specialists for a conversation—one that would be followed up by further dialogue with teacher focus groups and other teams. Singapore has been incredible good at picking a few things to get better at every year, and then focusing on making improvements in those domains, and then finding new problems after meeting older objectives. We need more policies and procedures in the U.S. that allow and compel collaborative growth, but we also need that spirit that our job is not only to make our own classroom great, but that we need to work together for systemic improvement. Of course, some teachers and schools have nurtured this spirit, but in far too many places, radical teacher autonomy dominates our school cultures. Just as Singapore won’t get to the next level of work without a little more autonomy; American won’t get to the next level of work without a little more coherence and collaboration—which necessarily involves constraining autonomy to some extent.
What you read and what’s real…
A final lesson from my trip to Singapore is that information consumers need to be very careful when reading about international comparisons of education systems. I had a conversation recently with a colleague who is a researcher at Rand who has been doing a lot of work on 21st century skills. She had been reading quite a bit about Singapore, and the extraordinary work happening there to promote 21st century learning and tech-rich learning at a systems level. She was pretty shocked to learn that Singapore’s efforts, at this point, primarily exist in Ministry-level policy documents rather than with a full implementation on the ground. I had also just read a white paper on technology in education quoting Singapore’s policies which mandate a certain level of technology based instruction, just a few days before hearing from Singapore teachers that “We pretty much teach how we used to teach from day 1 through the exam, then after the exam we cram in all the technology stuff and tick all of the boxes on our checklist.”
So caveat empor when reading about international comparisons—educational policy doesn’t always reflect classroom reality, and that is true anywhere in the world.