As regular visitors to my website would have read, I recently highlighted the inability of my son’s school to update parents through the Net, whether through emails or the school website. This is despite having suggested it to the school some months before. This got me thinking as to what I would like to see on a school website. I will be looking at it from the communications point of view, that is, communications with the stake holders of the school in mind.

The first thing I would like to see are regular updates of the school website. By “regular”, I mean that information is posted on the school website as soon as possible and not “regular” as in once in three months or even more. This I think is a basic demand of any communication between schools and their stake holders. If Singapore schools are serious about Community and Parents in Support of Schools (COMPASS), then they should make greater effort to communicate about what is happening with the confines of a school. If possible I would like to see daily updates.

Some of you (who may be teachers or principals) out there, may think that daily updates is just too much and impossible. But it can be done. However, for this to happen certain things must change in the mind set of those in schools. The first is a paradigm shift in the minds of those in power in schools. They must be willing to allow their staff to post notices on their own. It means that the website is not the prerogative of one or two people or worse, an external website designer. School principals in Singapore are reluctant to do this because of a fear mentality. They have this fear that someone in their staff will post something silly and the school will have to do some damage control. This fear of damage control means that everything posted to the public has to be vetted by the “powers-that-be”.

This fear of mistakes and need for damage control also stems from the siege mentality that schools have as compared to other government departments in Singapore who are more open to public scrutiny. There is almost an unstated rule, that teachers and school principals cannot be criticized in public. They also cannot appear to be fallible. I guess it is part of a “teacher mystique” cultivated in Singapore in order to ensure the high standing that teachers have. It may also come from their own unconscious belief that they are always right and have all the answers. Schools must be willing to allow their staff to make mistakes and not treat such public mistakes as “disaster movies”. The Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore have long introduced the concept of “learning organizations” borrowed from Peter Senge and others. Making mistakes is a part of the learning process, even if it is done in public. Part of the learning for the staff of the school is how to recover from a mistake. Imagine for a moment, a school where its teachers preach to the students that it is alright to make mistakes even in public, and yet cannot accept that from the teachers. That would be either hypocrisy or schizophrenia. Is it also a surprise that students still do not want to look foolish by making mistakes when they can sense that it is not the school culture to value mistakes? These institutionalized mind sets must be removed.

Once schools can overcome this institutionalized attitudes and mind sets, regular daily updates by all staff will no longer be an issue. The technical problems of allowing everyone to post on the website can be easily overcome. Staff members can be assigned accounts with passwords to access the school website. Sophisticated, yet free and easily available software can be used to design the school websites. Free Content Management Systems (CMS) software like Joomla! are easily available for use and because they are CMS, they can do all that I have suggested. The school can also be less dependent on commercial website designers and take full responsibility for the wesbite’s maintenance.

Once the basic framework of the website is set, all staff can post information relevant to the students online. Parents who used to complain about the “interception” of traditional official communication like letters between the school and them, will not have to worry about it anymore.

Other technical issues like creating automatic email lists and other “new” communication media like Twitter are easily overcome. They can be done easily once the main obstacle to the creation of a communicative school website is removed or replaced. That obstacle is in the minds of those who run a school. It is no longer a technical issue.

“In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours.”

- John Lennon

I have just read a book called “The Outliers: the story of success” (click cover on the right), written by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is a study of success. The writer tries to zero on the factors that leads to success. One of these factors is what he calls the “10,000-hour rule”. In his book, he quoted neurologist, Daniel Levitin, who said:

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being world-class expert – in anything…In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.”

Levitin was again quoted to say:

“…no one has yet to found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

The Beatles, perhaps, the greatest band the world has ever seen, paid their dues in the strip clubs where they played for hours on end. John Lennon described this in an interview:

“We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.

In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

Pete Best, who was the Beatles drummer at the time, was quoted as saying:

“We played seven nights a week (emphasis mine). At first we played almost non-stop till twelve-thirty, when it closed, but as we got better the crowds stayed till two most mornings.”

The last word perhaps about the effect of their time in Hamburg is from Phil Norman who wrote their biography, “Shout!” He wrote:

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back….They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers – cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

What about Bill Gates? He started doing real-time programming since he was an eight-grader back in 1968. Gates said this about that period:

“It was my obsession… I skipped athletics. I went up there (Information Services Inc.) at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.”

By the time he dropped out of Harvard, Gates had been programming non-stop for seven years. As Gladwell puts it, “He was way past ten thousand hours.” We all know who Bill Gates is today.

What about Singapore schools? We make our students sit quietly for hours for much of the school year. We discourage them from asking too much or being curious for most of their time in school. We also teach them to wait for notes and answers. We also trained them to work for individual success. We drill them fully for the examinations for hours. We do these for at least ten years until they are sixteen.

We all know how well our students do in examinations and international surveys like TIMSS!

But, with the ten thousand hours spent on such things, will the Singapore student be able to acquire the soft skills required for life? Will they be creative problem-solvers? Will they be able to learn independently? I believe we know the answers to these questions.

Seems like Marshall McLuhan is right. “The medium is the message”. But at least we have something in common with the Beatles and Bill Gates.

Many years ago, when I was still fairly new at teaching, I attended a course on assessment for History. The course was meant to provide teachers with a better understanding of the marking of student’s History essays. This was before the days of the current History syllabus with the incorporation of the thinking skills. It was conducted at the National Institute of Education (NIE).

What I remembered most of the experience was the lecturer telling us that there wasn’t much to discuss as we all should know how the marking should be done and we would already know what is a good essay. He said that by just reading a good essay we should “know”. Of course, I immediately felt that I had wasted my time coming for the session and it turned out to be just that.

Several years later, when I was with the Educational Technology Division (ETD), I was asked to chaperoned some foreign guests from the ASEAN countries to the NIE. The visitors were all officers from educational institutions from the ASEAN countries. We were going to look at NIE‘s use of discussion forums in their teacher training. We were given an overview by one of NIE‘s lecturers and at the Q&A after the overview, a Malaysian guest asked the NIE lecturer how they assessed the students learning on the forum. The lecturer rather flippantly said that they just read the comments and contributions of the students on the forum and have a “feel” for the correct marks. I remember cringing and shifting uneasily in my seat, when the Malaysian who had asked the question, looked at me and whispered, “What he means is that he is just doing impression marking?” I also remember just smiling sheepishly at him. I was at a loss for words as I knew what the Malaysian guest meant.

A few days ago, I was at a meeting between teachers and parents of my son’s class. Just before the actual meeting started, a teacher for Design and Technology, was complaining to a parent about her son’s portfolio work that was due to be submitted for the GCE O levels. The parent accepted that her son was not doing what he should and asked the teacher what was lacking in her son’s work. All the teacher said was that her son was not doing “enough”. The teacher proceeded to say that her son was over-confident and had thought that he was doing a good job. The parent asked again what was lacking and again the teacher only said that he was “over-confident” and that her son had thought that he had done enough when in reality it was far short of acceptable standards. It, perhaps, never crossed his mind that it wasn’t a case of over-confidence at all but rather the student not knowing how to assess his own performance.

As I watched this last incident, the first two incidents came to my mind. I have come to the conclusion that students in Singapore are, in general, not taught how to assess their own learning and performance.In the first two examples, it seems that even the teachers concerned have no clear inkling of how the assessment of learning is to be done. If teachers have no idea of how assessment is to be done, we can safely assumed the students have even less of an idea of how to do it.

The sad thing is that, the last incident showed that it is still happening today. Teachers mark with some hazy idea in their heads about the assessment standards. Because they are hazy about it, they cannot transfer their knowledge to the students. Students will, therefore, always be dependent on the teacher to assess their performance. The students cannot do it on their own. I suspect this haphazard approach to assessment is still prevalent in Singapore schools. I am sure many students, for example, don’t know why their English language essay is considered good or bad. Sure there will be marks and some comments made on the student’s essay paper but rarely is the student given clear criteria for what constitutes a good essay. Writing essays is a hit-and-miss affair. Students who do well, don’t really know why their essay is good. The poor essay writer also does not know why his essay is good. They are all dependent on the teacher.

Now this might seem normal to some of us but at a time when schools are spouting slogans like “independent learners” and “life-long learning”, how do we expect students to display such characteristics when they are not taught to assess their own learning? How are they going to be taught this if teachers themselves are hazy and vague?

In my view, independent learning and life-long learning will not happen as long as this state of affairs continue. It is just as bad for students to be waiting for an “assessment” from the teachers about their learning, as waiting for the teachers to provide them with ready-made notes.

The independent learner needs to be taught how to assess his own learning. He has to be his own “man in the mirror.” He must be able to reflect accurately on his own abilities and decide what he lacks and what he is good at. Without this skill and attitude, independent learning will only remain an illusion.

I’m Starting With The Man In

The Mirror

I’m Asking Him To Change

His Ways

And No Message Could Have

Been Any Clearer

If You Wanna Make The World

A Better Place

(If You Wanna Make The

World A Better Place)

Take A Look At Yourself, And

Then Make A Change

(Take A Look At Yourself, And

Then Make A Change)

- “Man in the mirror” by Michael Jackson