Developing High-Performing Systems - A Conversation with Wei Li Liew

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If you spend most of your time on the academic pursuits, neglecting what you do in the sports field where you learn a lot of 21st century competencies, perhaps in the arts or the leadership opportunities that you have in school, then you're not going to be able to get that holistic development which is actually going to bring you even further in life.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. It's a fantastic pleasure this week to be able to share this conversation with you, given how much global interest there has been in recent years in the educational successes of Singapore. In this episode, Ms. Liew Wei Li, the Director-General of Education for the Ministry of Education in Singapore, shares her insights into the many reasons for this success, including Singapore's restless commitment to improvement and innovation. Miss Loo has been the appointed Director-General since April 2022, overseeing K-12 education across Singapore. She had school experience as a chemistry teacher and a school leader and has headed a division to develop school curriculum for primary, secondary and pre-university levels. Previously, she was Deputy Director-General of Education for Schools and concurrently Director of Schools for 5 years, where she led a team of zonal directors and cluster superintendents with oversight of some 350 mainstream schools. Thanks, Rayleigh. It's a, as I say, it's a huge pleasure and privilege to be able to talk to you. I know that Singapore is a widely viewed country in terms of its education prowess and incredibly high-performing system. And many people are trying to understand what the secret behind the success is. So it's great to be able to talk to you today and ask some of the questions about some of these things. I know you've got some really exciting developments happening around AI and 21st Century Skills Framework. And so I'd love to talk to you about those. But perhaps if we could start firstly just with a slightly broader view of the history of education in Singapore. I know it was a huge priority right from the inception and Lee Kuan Yew, you know, was a real advocate for education and the role of being educated and the role of building human capital in the country. So yeah, perhaps, perhaps we could start there. If you could just say a little bit about why is that such a priority for the development of the country in general?

Yeah, so that's interesting because it was our biggest disadvantage. Singapore being a very, very small country, it's a relatively young city-state. We're all of 800 square kilometers, which means that if you drive for 1 hour, you hit the other end of the island, right? Yeah. So we're not very big. We have no natural resources, so you can try to dig, but there's no oil, there is no minerals to be found. So ultimately it was just looking at one another and that's all we have. It's just you and me. We were an immigrant nation. So really there was no choice, right? It was a Hobson's choice. So we had to make a go of it. We started out needing to export, needing to industrialize. And so to do that, we needed to have skilled manpower. So in those days, hardly anybody went to school in 1965. So we were just building primary schools in a great big hurry, building secondary schools later, just to try to get everybody into school, right? The literacy rate was really low and we had higher unemployment. So the good thing was we had several fortuitous things happening for us. English was our working language because we were a British colony. So that helped because we had Chinese, Malay, Indians, Eurasians, everybody was speaking a different language. So we needed to have a common language. Language. So English became the de facto neutral language. So it was fortuitous because it is a language of commerce, trade, science, and technology. So that helped. And then after we got everybody to have primary and secondary school education, then we started looking at the higher education, right? So we, right from the get-go, we were interested in technical skills because that was the way to really develop the manufacturing sector. And so because of that, we still have a very strong technical bent in our education system now. So we Institute of Technical Education, we have the polytechnics, so our students come out with skills that the industry can use, and that's a very big part of what we believe in. So pretty much over 90% of our students, maybe 93-95% of our students now, will come out into the industry with either a certificate, skills certificate, a diploma, or a degree. So that's, that's very high, and so that probably helped bring about our transformation. We had our per capita GDP in 1965 1965, about, I think, $800 US to now it is over $80,000 US in 2022. So, so that's a huge transformation. And I think education played a really big part of it.

Absolutely. No, it's fascinating. And I mean, perhaps if I may, the other observation I made in my reading about Singapore is just there was a seeming coherence in the education, the evolution of the education policy since, I mean, for example, 1997 and the Thinking Schools Learning Nation work. And then it seems that there's been quite coherent development, obviously, you know, changes along the way, I'm sure, as you respond to new technology and these things. It's very interesting how the, even for example, for the 21st century competencies framework, some of that, the seeds for that was set very early on, right? I mean, 25, 30 years ago.

Yeah. I think we've been quite blessed to have a lot of stability in our system.

Sure.

We've had both a governance stability. We also had— have a very strong teaching workforce. I think based on TELUS, our teaching workforce is probably one of the most motivated, mission-minded, and also skillful in that they continually get professional development and they are also compensated adequately. And because of the various ways in which they are developed and continue to be developed. It has helped to create a store of good professional knowledge as well as continuity. So I think our policies all build on one another and we don't chop and change.

Yeah.

So once you have that, you really can go far with the directions that we had. So if you look at the 21st Century Competencies Curriculum Framework, we had that since 2010. And it was built on the understanding that now knowledge has got a very short life cycle, right? It's getting shorter and shorter. And some of these lifelong skills has become more important, more critical. We talk about lifelong learning, our students, we can't just frontload education. They have to have the means to continue to learn by themselves. And so some of these competencies now are more and more important, not, you know, the only thing that they have to know, but definitely much more important than in the past. But again, we also talk about dispositions and social emotional competencies, and that's also in the framework. Values is also in the framework, and that, that helps to build the ballast for our students as they continue to learn.

And I know, I understand you've recently released a couple of months ago an updated version of some of that work, and I wanted to ask you about that because I think there's some really interesting— you've placed a greater emphasis, for example, on adaptive and inventive thinking and communication and civic literacy in that. And I just wondered, where are you seeing the need still to keep evolving that work in response to, for example, technology, etc., which we'll come on to later? But in, in terms of evolving circumstances, those three things seemed like an interesting— yeah, interesting developments.

I, I think we're seeing that the world is becoming such a challenging place. Yeah, it's changing all the time, and I think the cycles of change are accelerating. It's not just the geopolitics, it's the social changes that are happening. Some of it is the technology changes. We are more interconnected, but at some sense we are at risk of being polarized as well. So our students need to be prepared for such a future, right? And they have to be confident in situations where it's not going to look the same as in the past, or even the same as what was predicted, right? And they have to be resilient. They have to be nimble to change in a different context, and perhaps they have to be able to operate in multiple different jobs for their life course. So we thought of introducing a new element into our 21CC framework, which is adaptive thinking, which has this element of cognitive flexibility where you actually have to apply what you know to new contexts, and you have to be able to understand when the context has changed and you need to change your solution, right? You can't stick to your old solution. So having the wherewithal to be able to collect information and relevant information, and then when the need arises, you have to change the solution or evolve your solution. So this is a very challenging, complex skill, but we thought that we owed it to our students for them to really prosper or thrive in tomorrow's world. We have to put it in adaptive thinking. So that's one. Inventive thinking. We've been working on that, but we don't think we've completely got it yet. So by virtue of the fact that we have to create new value, all our students or all our Singaporeans need to create new value. Otherwise, you know, we can't justify our wages, right? So we have to keep innovating. There's so many constraints in Singapore. So the only way is to significantly add value, significantly create new value, new products, new services. And so that's why we're thinking innovative thinking. Inventive thinking has got to be in every one of our students. It's not just for the entrepreneurs, it's really for every single one doing whatever job, you can add value to it and that's how you can continue to do better work, right? Civic literacy, because we are a very diverse country, we are, I think, the most diverse per square kilometer. So you will find many ethnicities here, many religious groups. Many even nationalities in Singapore. We've got 1.9 million non-citizens in Singapore. We also have a very high internet penetration rate and smartphone penetration rate, so it's all above 95%. So it's very cosmopolitan. So you have this soup of very different ideas, but yet we need to continue to be cohesive, to have harmony. So civic literacy becomes very, very important, right? Yeah. So that's why we put it at the front. And then communication skills, We think that communication skills is becoming more complex now. It's more than having good language skills, right? It is something that we think we can, if we get it right, we would have strategic advantage. So communication skills is not just written, it's also oral communication and using different devices to communicate as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, multimodal communication as well. Yeah, absolutely. Then it's fascinating that There's, there's almost a through line through all of those 4 things of just, I mean, as you were talking about, like clearly there's such a need in the world right now for more, not just in Singapore, I'm sure we see it in all over the world in that need for avoiding or overcoming the polarization through communication, through, through multiple perspectives, through understanding each other and, and even perhaps through adapting to changing circumstances. And that idea of creating value, I think is so important in not just in an economic sense, but also in a social sense, right? You were talking about Building human and social capital in Singapore. I mean, that idea of creating value by creating more and supporting and enabling more cohesive communities is a huge value as well, right, in the world as it currently is, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. So hopefully with all this in every single one of our students, regardless of where they go, even whether in Singapore or any part of the world, you know, they will have the basics that they need to thrive at any time, anywhere.

Sure. I mean, you, and then you, you obviously mentioned supporting the teachers, enabling them to be able to kind of create the conditions for the young people to develop those, because we, as you know, of course, it's complex competencies are complex to develop in young people, right? I mean, in a way, transmitting some knowledge is, is an easier, you know, it's not straightforward, but it's a simpler thing to do. Than trying to develop dispositions and complex competencies in young people. And so I know all around the world teachers are learning that skill, right? They're struggling with how to make that transition from a more of a knowledge-based curriculum towards supporting these complex competency development. And then you talk in the new framework about the cultures of collaboration that you're building. I wondered perhaps if you could just talk briefly about that in terms of how, how do you see school environments being framed around these cultures of collaboration so that the teachers themselves perhaps are developing some of these competencies in order to also be able to create conditions and environments where the young people are doing the same.

Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head, Tim. This is, this is more challenging than the old way of teaching, right? In order to have our students inculcate or develop these competencies, the teachers have to have it first, right? And the teachers are already adults, right? So it's going to be challenging. Each skill competency is so complex and it manifests differently in different contexts. How do you actually get to teach them? And they're very difficult to actually test for as well. So it's not so easy. And we still have maybe less than 24 hours in a day because it's just a school day. So this is a challenge and we're still trying to wrap our heads around how do we do it well. Well, there are certain things that are in place which is helpful. One is that we've got a national curriculum, so that really helps. That direction, the documents, the curriculum outcomes that we have, we can write it into every single subject discipline. And that's helpful because we have a set of curriculum developers in our Ministry of Education, and they have thought long and hard about this. They've done all the research, and so they are carefully crafting it into every curriculum document, every syllabus. So every 6 years we review our curriculum. So that's very helpful. So we catch the cycle and we fit it in, and then we recommend what approaches, what pedagogies, which topics are more amenable to this competency where you can really bring it out. So we actually get to write it in some of our textbooks as well, and we approve all the textbooks. So some of our companies that are writing the textbooks will also know and to write it in and our teaching and learning guides also incorporate it. So that's one. Two, we have very strong professional development system. So TALIS assures us that our professional development system is very tight. That's very helpful because we only have one teacher development institute. So that means all our teachers come out to our schools that's trained by one institute that's affiliated to our university and we have a very good working relationship with them. So whatever we know in terms of the 21CC, we discuss it with them and they already feed it into their training preparation for our teachers. So they come to us trained with some of this knowledge and some of these skills to convey it. So that's helpful. Our in-service training is also provided by one of the divisions in our ministry, so that helps. So we ensure that it gets into every single one of our relevant workshops and we mount workshops that are relevant for it as well. We also have a system of mentoring in every school. So we have trained mentors in every school, and they have time set aside for communities of practice discussion where we have network learning communities. It can be within a school, it can be across schools. They come together for a common purpose and area of interest, and so there's time set aside for them them as well. In-service training is all paid for, and then we ensure that there's time set aside for them. So we will, yeah, even on a school day, we can take the teacher out for training and we put a substitute teacher in. So that helps to support our teachers. And then we have our master teachers, senior teachers, lead teachers, which is a whole group of people that we think that they're more masterful, so we're giving them the title. They're in all our schools. They are teachers leading teachers, teachers teaching teachers within the fraternity. So again, they're looking up to these people who are themselves teaching in classes and showing them it can be done in a class itself. So they open up the classroom and their colleagues come in, the fraternity comes in to view how they do it. So nothing better than actually seeing it in action. So that's our professional development system. And then finally, all our schools are in clusters. So they're in groups of 12 to 14 schools in a cluster. And this gives them that kind of, again, a close community of schools that they can learn from one another legitimately. They're not in competition, but they're collaborating. So I think learning from another school also helps because some school would have found some answers for it, and that would be very helpful.

No, that's really good. I mean, I think it's so important, isn't it, to learn from people who are going through the same things, as you say, like in a similar context. If the school locally is going through similar challenges, they can learn from each other, but also that culture of coaching and mentoring and collaboration in a school where you're learning as a teacher, you're learning from another teacher who's perhaps a bit further on than you. That's really powerful, much in a way, much more than, you know, learning from the books or from, from the, the policies.

Yeah.

But, but I, if I may, one of the other observations I think that other countries struggle with is that they have more perhaps dispersed or decentralized systems. So they actually, cuz it sounds like you've got a huge degree of coherence across the whole system, which is a real advantage in some ways to be able to create that opportunity for everyone in, in that system. Whereas perhaps that sometimes is where other countries might find more of a challenge.

Yeah, because I, I think the national curriculum helps. So every teacher knows if I'm teaching this topic, there's always somebody I can learn from another school or within that same department who is also tackling this topic and how, how it's carried out. So certainly that is, uh, very helpful.

Absolutely. Yeah, no, great. And obviously, I mean, there's the huge development recently of advanced AI, and I know you've been responding to that, so I'd love to speak to you about that as well. I mean, given what you've said about technical skill development across the country and the history of Singapore, I think you're in many ways very well set up to continue that kind of technical skill development in response to transforming education through technology, the work that you're doing in the Master Plan for 2030. But I was particularly interested in some of the parts of that, for example, the student learning space that you are creating. So how are you, well, firstly, how are you kind of feeling about AI? I mean, is it posing existential risks for you personally or, you know, nationally? But it, no, more seriously, you know, what are the amazing things that you are doing in relation to how you might create opportunities for young people to come into contact with that AI safely and in, you know, in positive ways?

Yeah, we've had to think very hard about this and we're still continuing to evolve our thinking about this. So This is our actually 5th master plan. So we started way back in 1997. So we've been having subsequent master plans using, first we started out with IT, but now we decided that we just call it technology because there's just more than IT, it's technology. And then we had COVID-19, right? And which—

Yes, we did.

Kind of threw a curveball in everything. But in a way, it was a bit of a blessing in disguise because while we had technology in our schools and our teachers were using technology and our students were comfortable with parts of the technology, it was patchy. And there wasn't this huge motivation to do it in a consistent manner and determined manner. So with COVID-19, I think it forced it to be ubiquitous. Really, every teacher— Yeah. Right down to the last teacher had no choice but to use it. And our students also, you know, learn to use it and they had to figure out how to use it in a healthy way, right? So it is really about 3 elements in our master plan, which is using technology to teach and learn. It is also learning how to use technology by the students and also learning about technology itself by the students. So all these 3 elements students are very important in the master plan. So I know we've been thinking about, so does technology put the teacher, you know, out of a job? And we actually think that it makes the teacher's role more important.

Sure.

Yeah, because we realize that students— and I mean, just starting from babies— they respond to humans better than any other thing, right? Than inanimate objects and, and so on. And our students actually respond to teachers better in the long run when it comes to learning than just faced with a box or, you know, just ICT. They get bored after a while. So a teacher needs to kind of mix and match and know when to use what tool at which point. And perhaps even for the profile of students, you know, you've heard about each class responds differently. So you have— you may be teaching 3 different classes the same thing, but you have the 3 different lesson plans because they don't even laugh at the same jokes, right? So the teacher actually has to be, you know, squarely in the driving seat and really figure out, okay, what's going to work for this group of students at this point of time. So they have to apply technology skillfully and appropriately at the right times and change it up a little bit. So we've got the Student Learning Space which is a national online learning platform for all our students aged about 7 to 18. And that's turned out to be very helpful because it was built already before the COVID-19 pandemic. So even though it's not built to be an online learning system in an asynchronous manner, it was there and it's agile development. So it keeps changing all the time because we found that we had to keep evolving it. A bit disconcerting for some teachers who realize that the features keep changing, but we've had to do it because there are new ways of learning all the time and the students are responding differently. So that's our Student Learning Space as a backbone. It's a way for our teachers to get really high-quality curated resources because they, they are specially developed by our resource developers in the Ministry of Education and tagged to our national curriculum. Okay, so it's very specific for our curriculum, so it's— the teachers don't have to search the whole wide field for something that is useful and relevant. It's all in there, and they can share. So they can share out, and they can construct their own lesson plans using the resources. So it's a very flexible place for them to plug and play and then construct using a pedagogical frame. So it's even built in, it's like a teaching wizard that allows the teacher to pull which tool he wants, and we plug in other tools that are developed by either private sector for them to use, right? So the teachers can use sticky notes and discussion, collaboration, students commenting, etc., embedded videos, even Google Earth can, you know, can be used and you don't have to go out of the system. So it's a very flexible space for our teachers to dabble in with the students. And the students can, with the lessons that are assigned to them, they can also learn it by themselves at home.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, so it's a very good safe space for our students to learn. And because all our 13-year-olds and above have got a personal learning device, so that's even more helpful because now they have immediate access to it and they can really make use of it to learn.

Yeah, that's great. I was, I mean, that was one of the questions I was going to ask is how much that the students are using it autonomously to explore, because clearly one of the ways that they're developing these complex competencies is through putting them into practice in somehow real-life situations. So to be able to autonomously navigate and learn and pull the right resources at the right time and do that kind of research work, etc., is also you know, another way that they might be developing those competencies.

Yes. So another thing that we're starting to put in is interactive digital textbooks. So that's another thing that we're growing in that space.

Great.

Because things change so fast, having a printed textbook may actually be a disadvantage. So we're rethinking very hard about how you might interact with a teacher, with a textbook, work with students in a more three-dimensional way so that your teaching and learning becomes really networked, and you can also depend on your peers to learn. So it's not just teacher-directed, there are multiple ways of learning and multimodal. So now textbooks can really, really truly be multimodal and be updated even faster.

That's amazing. I mean, it goes back to what you were saying about the life cycle of knowledge, right? I mean, if you've got— you're printing paper-based textbooks, there is clearly is going to be a limit to how often you can reprint given how quickly the knowledge is changing. You need to be able to respond to that in evolving it in that agile way. Again, nice. And if I could just then, because you mentioned the idea of assessing these competencies, which is sometimes quite challenging for teachers to understand how to track and make visible the growth in these competencies. And I was reading about your learning feedback assessment Assistance, which I think you're bringing in at the end of— towards the end of this year, perhaps. It sounded very interesting in the way that you're using AI to then provide feedback on learning direct to students. So is that something you can talk about, or is it still, still under wraps before it's launched?

Well, it's almost ready for launch, and some of our schools have already piloted and tried it out. That's how we develop things. We pilot it with our schools and keep tweaking it to improve it. So we have several AI tools that we are playing with already. One is the language feedback assistant for English language. It's not as smart as we would like it to be because it gives feedback on basic things like spelling and grammar and all that. But what it does is it frees up the teachers to concentrate on the bigger ideas, creative writing. How do you put ideas together and string it coherently? Language construction in a more complex manner. So it gives immediate feedback for students students who are perhaps needing to fix certain basic things in their writing and not requiring the teacher to put so much time into that. So that will help students in that area. The other one is a short answer feedback assistant. So the teacher can set any kind of a question, and it's not multiple choice, but it's a response that is in a paragraph, and it's a— it's like an auto marking. So it really marks well, and then the teachers can also take a look at how the machine does and either override or to give comments on the student's response. So that again helps to give students, I mean, very, very quick feedback, the immediate feedback to whether he's on the right track or he's on the wrong track. So I think that can be very motivating when you shorten the feedback cycle in learning. So I think that's the powerful thing about this. We have another one which is the Adaptive Learning System for Mathematics. Mathematics. So it's an adaptive learning system, not a testing system. So it helps students learn because mathematics can be quite hierarchical. So that's very helpful when we are able to develop a system to help students to, to learn. Maybe they are requiring more help to learn, and so this is a way for them to get back on track, on speed. And for some who are perhaps not in school, this is also another way to do it. And then the teachers again can tend to common issues and problems and spend more time on the more critical things for students.

Yeah. And what you were saying there about the shortening the feedback cycle, I think is such a critical piece of what, even as you were talking about the development of Singapore as a country, or you're developing, you know, talking about the development of the way the structure of the student learning space works in agile ways, it's almost built into all of that is this iterative feedback process where you are just putting something out, learning from it, adapting it, improving it, putting it out again. And I think that is learning, right? In a way. I mean, that, that is what learning is. And so to be able to alleviate some of the workload burden of the marking from the teachers and then automate some of that so that the learning, that learning process of iterating and improving and developing understanding through practice can just happen faster, and I think that's a really exciting part of it.

Absolutely. I think all the data around the world shows that the teacher's workload has increased.

Sure.

And we think that using technology can actually relieve our teachers of some of this workload. Perhaps it's also on the administration side to relieve them of some of this workload. But also, you're right, in terms of marking, it can really improve that. Also, we want to turn learning on its head, right? So a student can learn by himself, and that's, that's one of the skills that we want to teach, um, self-directed learning. How do you learn by yourself without a teacher? And that's an important skill. So that is also inherent in some of the ways we design some of our tools to be able to help them to do that. And then our teachers actually need to observe them in terms of the more complex 21st century competencies because That's not so easily marked or tested for in a time-based exam, but the teacher can observe it in a longer-term project group work that students are doing. And that's where we want our teachers to spend some time just observing, setting up the environment for a group of students to learn by doing a complex task, getting hands dirty. Teachers facilitate and learning even as they're doing the project, right? That's how you get inventive thinking and adaptive thinking. When things change, how do the students respond to it? And that's the learning. So giving a mark is not important in that situation at all. It is really learning it, picking up the lessons from the teachable moments even as you go along handling that well-designed task.

Absolutely. And it, it goes back to what you were saying about context with the adaptive thinking as well. So enabling young people to understand the importance of learning in a particular context or taking an idea and putting it in a particular context. If you put it in a different context, it's gonna look very different and how you have to keep trying those things in multiple contexts and understand how the contexts all interact and interrelate. And that's, again, a hugely complex complex thing that in a way can only be learned experientially, I would say.

Yes, certainly.

So it, I'd love to finish just thinking about, you wrote a piece which I really appreciated drawing on the, the Goldilocks principle idea, which I think if people don't know the, the fairy tale is the idea of not too hot, not too cold, but somewhere just about right, you know, eating porridge or whatever it is. But I think that's really interesting in the way that you are balancing certain tensions tensions, because in education sometimes I think there's a tendency to try and search for a right answer to the educational problem, right? And it's like, it's either this or it's that. And actually most of the time, as I'm sure you know well, every day you're living this idea of trying to balance tension, whether it's structure and agency and learning for young people. And so I'd love to talk about some of those with you if we can, just to, to see how do you balance some of those tensions as you are running an, you know, an incredibly high-performing education system like Singapore. So firstly, if we can, we haven't really touched on the home environment and the role of parents and expectations of parents in, in this. You know, we've talked a lot about the way that the educational decision-making happens, but actually we're also dealing with the context of families and the world that they're coming to from home and the expectations of parents. So firstly, thinking about the Goldilocks principle, how do you find that, that just right space of, of balancing that kind of control to some extent, or from an educational side, but also really acknowledging and understanding that we have to listen to the parents and learn with them as a kind of co-learner as part of supporting the young people.

Yeah, we think parents are really, really important, and actually they're the children's first teachers, and they continue to be the teacher throughout their young lives while they're growing up, whether it's in inculcating values or social emotional competencies. All that's really learned from young good habits as well. So I guess one area in which I can illustrate the Goldilocks principle, which is a very common thing that parents are also asking teachers about, which is managing the use of devices, right? Whether it's their smartphones, being on the internet, social media, gaming. Very common. We can try to apply the Goldilocks principle here, which is that extremes are not helpful. I think it's very instinctive, right? We all know that you don't give the child unregulated access. Sure. On the other hand, you don't impose a complete ban, right? Otherwise you'll have a meltdown. So the internet, I mean, just like a lot of other technology that we see, is really a very rich resource, very neutral tool, right? It's neither good or bad, it's just how you use the tool. So one way is for our parents to be able to set boundaries and structures and limits. The younger they are, the more structures you put in place because they haven't learned self-regulation yet. But you have to also explain and rationalize with the, the child about those boundaries and why they're there, and then slowly release, right, as they grow up. So getting that balance right at different ages, even as they grow, and maybe even different during different times of the year requires that fine-tuning and that Goldilocks, not too much, not too little, but just right. So that's one way we hope that parents will use that principle, not just this, but many other areas as well.

It's a great example. I mean, I know it as a parent myself, constantly navigating that, trying to encourage.

And we don't get it right all the time.

Not at all. We definitely do not. Yeah, absolutely. But in, in a way it relates very much to this, the second kind of balancing act I wanted to ask you about, which is the structure and agency piece for learners. And I think what you're talking about there, that idea of slow release and, and kind of trying to encourage that self-directed learning, which is what we want ultimately for these adaptive thinkers and these inventive thinkers. But they can't do that from a top-down, we're gonna tell you how to do this position. They need to learn it themselves. But I think, how do you— I mean, that again, that's another one, particularly for teachers now in schools, finding the right balance of that where, you know, when do we give them more agency? When do we kind of have more structure? How do you navigate that tension?

With great difficulty. I think we're still struggling with it. I think our teachers are very clear, you know, what they need to get done during a lesson. And the tendency is you want to be efficient, so you manage everything. But we know that actually student agency is very important if you want to continue to have intrinsic motivation in the child. If you want self-directed learning, you have to activate the student's agency choice. So even at young ages, there's during play while they're learning, right, learning through play, and the teacher sets up the environment. It's not done without structure. You have to set up a certain a purpose, a goal, a structure in order to achieve it. But yet you must allow the child to make a few mistakes, and that's part of the learning process, to choose which activity he wants to do first, etc. So it is a balance that we're trying to get. Maybe I illustrate one area that we're sort of calibrating this. Even in our adaptive learning system, we have found that you actually need to put the child in the driver's seat. So the child has to have a say to say whether I want a harder question, I want to override it even though the system recommends me that I take this learning route, but no, I want to challenge myself. So we allow that agency to be designed into the system and we think that helps the child really own their learning and when they own their learning, they're more likely to learn. So skills and competencies are such that you really need to get get the student to want to pick up that skill because it's a matter of practicing it to incorporate into your skill set. In other words, that becomes even more important, the agency to adopt it.

Yeah, it's so true. And I've been having some conversations recently with academics around educators as kind of designers of the landscape of affordances, right, and constraints in a way. So this is kind of an ecological dynamic approach where actually if the educator sees themselves as creating a space in which there are certain structures and constraints and affordances for those young people, and then there is, as you say, that element of, of agency with, for the young person to be able to navigate those. But there is still a level of control that the educator is affecting by designing that, those spaces. And when I say spaces, doesn't have to be just physically, there can be conceptual spaces. But I think there's something really powerful in that idea that educators almost shift the way they see their role as, you know, if they're designing those spaces that allows for both structure and agency to coexist, I think.

Yeah, I guess one example would be project work, which we have in our A-level system for 17, 18-year-olds, which the IB has the extended essay and so on, and they project work, something that we think is a very important vehicle for developing 21st century competencies because it's a very rich, complex task. So we decided we would free up totally, right? So let the student choose with his group what task it would be and just give certain frameworks and parameters for the selection of the task. Because the most important thing really is not the actual content of the task, but the opportunity to learn and exhibit each one of the 21st century competencies. So again, there's agency, but there's a bit of a structure as well.

Yeah, no, that's great. And I mean, there's always the, the age-old problem of the content versus skills argument as well, that tension. So that was the third one I wanted to ask you about, because obviously, you know, you'll get many educators who will say, well, young people can't, they can't develop complex competencies without without knowing some stuff about the world, right? So it's, you know, again, it's this, it's this slightly overly polarized either/or, and clearly people are not talking about an either/or most of the time, but there is still a tension there around how much knowledge do they need about the world in or before they can start putting into practice some of these skill frameworks and, you know, they can acquire and develop those skills in different contexts. Because, you know, they need to know things about the world. So I mean, again, particularly I think historically Singapore has been quite knowledge rich in the way that its curriculum has worked in the earlier days. But as we said, since '97 and 2010, as you've been developing those ideas, that must be a balance that you continually have to try and strike.

So we believe that you can't be equipped with these competencies and skills unless you deliver it through a discipline or a knowledge base, right? How do you have analytical thinking unless you have a knowledge or discipline to deliver it through? But we've realized that if we are too much content, there's really no time for you to develop the skills. So we've been cutting our content since the late 1990s. We've been cutting it. It's cut so much that in some of our subjects, it's actually narrower than the IB. Yeah. So it's, it's been a challenge. So we've had to make sure that's calibrated. So one thing that the generation of teachers lament is we don't even teach the solar system anymore in our curriculum, but because the kids learn it through just reading, right, and watching television, etc., so they pick it up anyway.

Yeah. And I mean, how much of that is coming from that efficiency mindset that you mentioned a moment ago? I mean, it is sometimes as a teacher— I mean, I'm a teacher myself. You know, there is sometimes a tension and you feel like you've only covered that thing, done that thing, and efficiently ensured that thing has happened if you have actively taught it. But that's, as you were saying there, that's clearly not how most young people are learning. They're picking these things up through, as a byproduct of reading something else or through, you know, through their own investigation and inquiry. So it's, it's some of, sometimes it's a, it's a kind of an existential question that teachers have to to check with themselves about, as you said, slowly releasing some of that control?

It is a tension that will plague every teacher, I think, for as long as we are teaching. There's every temptation to make sure that I'm responsible and I, you know, make sure that my, my student has every advantage. And so I try to teach everything, and maybe just not, not just once but twice over, right?

Sure.

But I guess there is this is needing to assure our teachers through role models, the master teachers, you know, really showing the way to give assurance. So in our teacher evaluation, we also need to be able to assure them. Maybe the school climate and culture also has to have the assurance from the school leaders to the department heads. And we also need to show the teachers, and we have this new system which is a teacher work attachment. So we send teachers anywhere they want. If they want to be attached to a private company like Google or a logistics company, right, or Grab, they can go there for a month or a few weeks and see what's happening in the real world, right? And then perhaps when they see with that perspective that actually that you have to keep learning and that there isn't a requirement for a huge body of knowledge, then they might start changing their belief system. And I think it starts from there, having that belief system about what's truly important.

Yeah, that's interesting, giving them opportunities for that kind of real life inquiry as educators. Yes, that's great. And then lastly, I mean, in a way you're touching on some of it there, that kind of accountability point. But as you've talked about the kind of coherence through some of that centralized direction you have in Singapore. How do you balance that, lastly, in relation to kind of giving schools and school leaders more autonomy over the way that they perhaps implement some of the national curriculum or just, you know, make certain policy decisions within their school? Do you see a tension there between local autonomy and more centralized direction?

So one of the ways in which we think these 21st century competencies can be delivered is is through the school-based curriculum and not through a national curriculum. And we know that every school has got their niche areas, right, their special programs that they've developed over time, areas in which they have very strong perhaps ways in which they're partnered with industries and they've created a, a solid program that they're proud of and that is very unique to them. So we're telling our schools, you can pick whichever 21st century competency you want to focus on, pick whichever signature program that you have, and just make sure that is designed in there, right? And yeah, so it's up to you. So we're giving them full autonomy to decide what is it that they want, how they want to do it, and then we'll just give them some equipping, some training to be able to do that. So that enables them to use their strengths and that's something that they have developed over time as well. And they can also fit much better to their profile of students, what they think their students will need, because every school is slightly different, right? The students coming to them are slightly different. So it's important for them to make that decision and not for the ministry to make that decision what's critical for their profile of students.

Sure. Yeah, that's fascinating because, I mean, again, it connects with what you were saying about the different classes those three classes being different. I mean, it's the same thing in school. You have a particular combination of adults and children and connections and networks, and it is a unique kind of constellation of people in that context. So it's interesting to allow some of that uniqueness to flourish is great.

Yeah, we think that when schools have that, again, that autonomy and the agency, they'll do a much better job than if they had to enact a script from from the Ministry of Education.

You've got to get away from the scripts. Yeah, no, amazing. That's beautiful. Thank you. I mean, this is so interesting. And lastly, I'd love to just ask, you know, what are the things that you're currently kind of particularly focusing on? There's such, such ambitious vision that you've got in, in all of this work. What are some of the, the things that are in a positive way kind of keeping you awake at night is in, in wanting to kind of develop and do better and always just improve? So some of the kind of challenges that you might be facing around some of this work or some of the just hopes you have for it in the future?

Well, this is quite an ambitious vision already, so we probably need to give ourselves some time to achieve it.

Sure.

There are some mindsets that we still need to change, so that keeps me up at night. Those mindsets that are still prevalent in some parts of our system, for example, the, the need for them to feel that they have to get the academic grades in order to get to university. So that seems to be a mark of success that everyone thinks it's critical. And that sometimes can get in the way of learning all the other competencies that are important. They're not mutually exclusive, right? We don't think they're mutually exclusive. But if you spend most of your time on the academic pursuits, neglecting what you do in the sports field where you learn a lot of 21st century competencies, if you neglect what you learn perhaps in the arts or perhaps some of the leadership opportunities that you have in school, if you reduce your time for that, then you're not going to be able to get that holistic development which is actually going to bring you even further in life. So that's something that we do need to continue to persuade everyone of the need to where you're going to put your time as a student. I think we didn't need to get to the student, we need to get to the parents as well.

Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, there's, as you said earlier, lots of influences in the system, but that kind of cultural change takes time, as you say, right? It's not going to happen overnight and it's, but it's a fascinating story and thank you so much for sharing it. Really, I really appreciate your time and hearing about all the amazing things you're doing. Thanks, then. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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