STU’s Professional

Development Strategy

by Dr Ho Wah Kam

With the recent implementation of major reforms in the Singapore school system, resulting in a much more tangible devolution of authority to the schools and in a need for greater self-evaluation at both the school and teacher levels, STU has fine-tuned its professional programme, based on five interconnected assumptions.

The Assumptions

These are:

That teachers’ professional needs are getting more sophisticated and multi-faceted, which are best met continuously and progressively;

That the professional needs that arise from personal sources have to be reconciled with those needs that arise from the school/institution itself;

That teachers’ competencies are best developed through experience and reflection, both individually and collaboratively (ie. together with colleagues);

That there is a need for a holistic conception of professional development; and

That in the long term, for the benefit of the profession, there is a great need for STU to develop a network of experienced practitioners, academics and researchers, in Singapore and abroad, to provide the resources or the "social capital" for its professional development programme.

The Strategy: Maintaining STU’s Internal and External Relevance

With these assumptions in mind, STU has over the last few years developed a rationale for its programme, which will help to make its strategy explicit. This strategy is reflected in Model A. In brief, STU’s strategy for professional development is best seen as directed at the holistic development of teachers as professionals, encompassing the personal, social and professional dimensions.

Model A

The order of the three dimensions or the priority a teacher gives to each dimension (personal, social or professional) will depend very much on his/her own needs and the nature of the seminar or workshop that the teacher is attending. In the case of the Personal, a workshop or seminar provides something new to the teacher or expands and deepens his/her understanding of the issues/content in the discipline of interest.

Furthermore, part of the value of a seminar or workshop is to provide an opportunity for a participant to interact with others, or meet like-minded teachers from other schools. This dimension is described as Social, which has been the reason for STU using conducive venues to allow participants to meet and interact in comfortable, surroundings. STU relies as much on collegial support in its professional provision

Professional, the term used to describe another dimension of STU’s strategy, refers to the opportunity teacher participants will have of transferring what they have heard or learnt in workshops or seminars to their own professional work or classrooms. How does one transfer all this to the classroom? is always the challenge STU poses to school participants at its workshops and seminars.

Because of its limited resources, STU cannot operate alone, nor is it wise to do so because professional knowledge is expanding at such a rapid rate. As Model B shows, STU has to work with many partners here and abroad. On STU’s trips overseas to the USA and England, it has always made it a point to study the changing trends in education in the respective countries and to learn from these trends and developments and also to scout for new talent so that these experts can be invited over to Singapore on short teaching visits. Only in this way can we (both STU and the schools) keep in touch with what goes on in other countries. In this way, over the years, STU has covered a range of topics, from cooperative learning, multiple intelligences to reflective teaching and the nature of assessment in classrooms. This year, STU introduces in its professional programme teaching thinking skills and school and teacher self-evaluation in the spirit of Singapore’s School Excellence Model (SEM) and the Enhanced Professional Management System (EPMS)

Model B

While STU continues to make these overseas visits to scout for new ideas and new sources, it is conscious of the fact that few idealized imported solutions to pedagogical problems can be expected to work in classrooms without some form of adaptation of the solutions themselves or introducing some change in the classroom conditions in the recipient schools. So, there is a need to evaluate the imported ideas against the wisdom of local practice. This is being done this year, on a trial basis, with the provision of school-based workshops on Cooperative Learning in response to the question – how successfully can Cooperative Learning, based on Dr Spencer Kagan’s ideas of "structures", be adapted to suit the conditions of the Singapore primary classroom or school?

So, in terms of resource provision, the STU strategy deploys the services and expertise of a network of experienced practitioners, researchers and scholars, from both here and abroad, that STU has had contact with over the last few years. This part of STU’s overall strategy is aimed at developing its "social capital".

The overall strategy of STU’s professional development programme is best seen in Model C, when Models A & B merge.

Model C

It is through the strategy outlined above that STU hopes to maintain the internal and external relevance of its professional activities.

STU’s Professional Development Programme for 2004

Based on the strategy as explained above, the professional development programme for this year has been built principally on two main thrusts, as shown in Model D.

Model D

The first Thrust (Thrust 1) covers workshops on managing others and ourselves (eg. ability grouping in schools; self-evaluation for schools and individual teachers; reflective teaching and teacher portfolio writing), while Thrust 2 focuses on different approaches to teaching thinking skills in our classrooms (eg. through Philosophy for Chidren). The Kagan Workshops, which have been the mainstay of STU’s professional development for a number of years now, serve to bridge the two main thrusts this year.