Rethinking the Way we Think

;This year's Redesigning Pedagogy Conference held at the National Institute of Singapore (NIE) is back with a bang, centering on the theme of "Thinking: Time for a Rethink". The Conference has since made its debut back in 2009 and for every year, had successfully achieved its mission of congregating the greatest minds in current pedagogical research trends and practices and diffusing these invaluable knowledge to the rest.

It's unlike most conferences where you would expect keynoters to dwell on rocket science - the selection of papers are mainly focussed on the research-practice nexus. I think this is the main selling point - To apply pedagogical researches in educational pyschology, behavioural sciences, teaching and learning environments, cutting-edge ICT tools into teh context of the Singapore classroom. The volume and quality of discourse really reframed my thinking and perception of education, in particular, the process of learning and what it means for someone to "learn".

Apart from gleaning best practices for transfer to my area of work, as a concerned parent, I pounced on this opportunity to harvest insights to guide ILT's development as well. As one would expect, the Conference saw the recapitulation of a couple of well established themes dominating the educational landscape such as digital learning, flipped classroom concept and collaborative groupthink. A couple of educational luminaries' works i.e. Vygotsky, Piaget etc. were also revisited to rethink how some of these classical theories/principles may be re-applied to the 21st Century classroom.

In the opening speech delivered by Ms Indranee Rajah, Guest-of-Honour for the event, three tenets of this year's Conference theme were highlighted. Firstly, educators must genuinely believe that all students can think. Extending from this fundamental belief, proper structure and conducive environment scaffolds must be developed to  facilitate thinking. Of course, it would be rather superfluous to make the former comment and leave the students to exercise their own thinking. Without proper scaffolding, most of the students are not able to elicit and reflect on the quality of their own thinking. Henceforth, the last tenet emphasised on getting educators to model the thinking process i.e. to teach students "thinking aloud" or to verbalise their thoughts. Having said all these, it's definitely an uphill task that all educators are facing. If you would have noticed, gone are the days where educators focus on domain-specific teaching i.e. teaching of Mathematics/ languages/ Sciences etc. Instead, there is a phenomena shift to focus  on teaching and assessing pedagogical process skills such as meta-cognitive thinking in the form of self-assessment/reflections; design thinking and even reasoning skills i.e. using Paul's Reasoning Model.

Indeed, my mind was invigorated by the intellectual discourse throughout the 3-day conference. Radical research findings were surfaced amidst a pro-conservative educational setting. For instance, someone shared the notion of playfulness as a character trait correlating to better learning and consequently, better academic achievements. Another speaker also highlighted the importance of language as the key to unlocking our minds to participate in 'interthinking'. In a nutshell, language acquisition has a great impact on how human thinks in a group. When an individual conceives an idea, he or she would have to effectively communicate the idea to someone else and that person must understand what is being conveyed before the idea becomes "knowledge".  Building against this backdrop, the speaker then emphasised on the importance of "exploratory talk" or the quantity and quality of "talk" that goes on in a group discussion.  Someone else even suggested that conformity to school system leads to the demise of creativity in our students.

This is a lengthy post. Yet, I would like to encourage parents to rethink the entire notion of learning. Learning is not synonymous to education. Having a stellar education record doesn't necessary means that a child can learn effectively, make sense of the complex world and grapple with the reality. The only way is to teach your child to learn about learning and to think about thinking. These will almost guarantee his or path to success in life  and to remain resilient in the face of adversities.

P/S: This blog post reflects my humble opinions and they are in no way, affiliated to any other sources.