At the Rulang Primary School, a 2,100-student public elementary school specializing in robotics teaching, teachers looked at me somewhat puzzled when I asked whether letting a 7-year-old child know that she is the worse of her class isn’t putting too much pressure on her too early in life.

“No,” school principal Cheryl Lim shrugged. “We rank them in a way to tell them that this is their ranking at this point in time, and that they can do better next year. It’s not to tell them that they are the worst in their class.’‘

~ Quoted from “Singapore’s obsession holds lessons for us all”, Miami Herald

No, the above example is not what I would like to see in Singapore schools. I would love to see instead teachers and principals doing something a little differently. In Guy Claxton’s book, “What’s the Point of School?”, he suggested that teachers should be seen by students to be engaged in their own learning in their subject areas. He provided some examples.

Learning the bagpipes

Claxton tells the story of a school principal, Peter Mountstephen, in Bath, England. At the start of the school year, Peter would stand in front of the school assembly and try to play a new musical instrument he has never played before. In a previous year, he tried to play the bagpipes, and after that he made an awful din trying to play the violin. Amidst titters from the students, he then publicly commits himself to learning the instrument in that one year. He then talks about the “learning muscles” that he would have to employ to to learn the new instrument. He talks about the need for perseverance, the commitment to practise, courage to ask for help and other learning muscles. After that, every once in a while he would show everyone the progress that he is making on his violin. He will also talk about the problems that he is encountering.

Peter doesn’t just stop there. He would make it a point to meet the students of the school. He would ask them what they think would be difficult for them in that particular school term and also discuss what they can do to try and overcome them together with the class teachers.

Claxton also suggested, for example, that an English language teacher puts up his drafts of his own poems for students to see his progress with them. A science teacher may for example, keep an experiment of his own going in one corner of the lab and keep his students informed maybe even involved in his experiments. A design teacher may wish to showcase his efforts to solve a problem. A PE teacher may want to show his students his attempt to learn a new skill.

Just imagine a school with staff with such an attitude. What do you think was Peter trying to do? How will children in such a school regard learning? What do you think the learning environment will be like in such a school?

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