There is a driving school in Singapore where they don’t give you a chance to drive a car. The only instruction that you will get from them is when they will ONLY TELL you how to drive. Will you enroll in such a driving school? I think the answer is clear. Yet there are many such schools in Singapore, where the teaching of skills is just by mere telling.
Recently, my son who is studying in one the polytechnics in Singapore, had an assessment for a communications module in his course. In the assessment, he was required to speak for about three minutes. I believe he was able to do that quite easily but he also described how some of his classmates struggled with the assessment. He described how they struggled for words, spoke in monotones, in short end up looking like very incompetent speakers. That got me and my son into a discussion about the module and the assessment.
I asked if they were taught how to speak during the course of the module. He initially told me that they were taught to speak but when I probed further it was clear that they weren’t. What actually happened was that the lecturer only outlined what are the aspects of good communication. The lecturer only gave an outline of the art of speaking but in theory only. When I probed my son, there was no opportunity to practise what they had learned during the module. Yet the students were assessed through an actual public speaking exercise.
In my view, this is just like learning driving through verbal instructions and perhaps some written notes. It would be unheard of and no one will take such a driving school seriously. Yet similar practices are being done in Singapore’s “educational” institutions. Worse no one seems to take notice of it, much less mind it. The situation is just incredible. You don’t need to be an expert on education to know that in order for someone to master a skill, you need lots of practice in that skill. Such skills are known as “procedural knowledge”. Robert Marzano
“Learning procedural knowledge requires the learner to perform a process or to demonstrate a skill, that is , to take some action.”
These skills can be mental or physical skills but the teaching of such skills are characterised by a breaking down of the skills into logical smaller steps and the learning and teaching of these steps are accompanied by repeated practice until mastery is achieved.
What had happened in my son’s class was a pretense at teaching a skill. If my son did well, it is IN SPITE of the teaching. If the other students struggled with the assessment, it is because of the poor teaching. No excuses ought to be given for this.
This may not happen in some aspects of the Singapore school experience. We know Singapore teachers are good at drilling the students to the test. But this applies I believe only to the acdemic subjects where they will face written examinations at the end of the year. However, where the soft skills are concerned, usually, it is a case of the “non-driving” driving school. Yet, it is these soft skills that at the most basic level, employers are seeking from the graduates of Singapore’s educational institutions.
Even local Singapore employers have been complaining of graduates who are academically bright but unable to fit into the work environment which demands skills far beyond the rote-learning and memorizing often demanded in Singapore’s educational institutions.
In case, you are still wondering if such a driving school exist in Singapore, the answer is they don’t. But you can find similar ones in our highly rated educational institutions.
