Peicai Secondary School

School Culture – Peicai Secondary School

Peicai Secondary School is an average co-ed neighbourhood school that admits students from the three educational streams typical to Singapore, namely the Express, Normal Academic and Normal Technical streams. The intake of students however is not necessarily even as there are usually no more than 2 Express classes per level, which means that the majority of students are from the NA and NT stream. This particular student profile definitely has an impact on the way the school approaches teaching and learning as well as pupil development. Essentially, the management and school leaders do not push solely for academic performance but expend a great deal of time and energy on programmes and activities that can help develop students into well-rounded individuals with character and integrity. For its efforts, the school has been awarded the Character Education Award from MOE for three consecutive years.

With regards to academic side of things, the school adopts a Teaching For Understanding (TfU) framework, encouraging teachers to focus less on content and more on student understanding. In many ways, this is a practical approach towards teaching and learning as Peicaians tend to be rather resistant to content-heavy lessons, particularly when it is the teacher delivering the content. There are 2 key reasons why I think this is so. Firstly, many students do have problems with comprehension and expression, hence too much content-driven learning can be overwhelming for them. Secondly, the students tend to be rather unmotivated when it comes to their own learning, preferring instead to wait for answers for the Express students or to give up completely in the case of the NA/NT students. As such, to counter these problems, the school has worked in practical courses such as Cooking, Basic Business Skills and the like into their NT curriculum. The NA students as well as are offered subjects such as Computer Application and Elements of Business Skills in order to make their experience in school more relevant and engaging. On the flipside however, the curriculum for the Express students has not been the center of much change and innovation and it is up to the individual subject teachers to inject creativity into their classes.

My Attempt at Creativity/Creative Lessons

After the interviews and the many discussions we’ve had about creativity, I came to a sort of basic understanding of what I thought creativity meant, or should mean in the context of the Lit classroom. Essentially I saw it as encompassing two main threads –student engagement & stimulating students’ thinking. As such, I approached lesson planning thinking about how I could deliver the content in a creative way which would then naturally engage students and spur them towards thinking and reflecting upon the key ideas raised in class. This was idealistic and naïve of course as I had (unconsciously!) conflate the idea of creative delivery with student engagement and effective learning, as if it were a natural and continuous progression. As I have come to learn over the past 10 weeks, this is definitely not always the case because there are gaps and disconnects in this process that need to be thought through and addressed. Looking back at my practicum experience, there are 2 key points of reflection that I would like to highlight.

1. ‘Creative’ Lessons = Effective Lessons?

In my first week of actual teaching, I focused more on how to deliver the lesson content creatively and probably didn’t think through carefully enough why I was doing it, how I thought it would benefit students and what I wanted to achieve with it. For instance, in order to introduce the plot of Romeo & Juliet to my Sec 1 students, I wanted them to piece together the story using picture cards. I gave each pair a set of 20 picture cards, an A3 sized sheet of paper and a handheld sign that was red on one side and green on the other. The idea was that I would do a short trigger activity using the movie trailer of Gnomeo and Juliet and pick out key elements of the story with them. Following that, they would sequence the picture cards and paste it in order on the A3 paper. Once everyone was done, I would flash the pictures in the right order and students would show either the red side or the green side of their sign depending on whether they got the sequence right or wrong. At the very end, I would give students an interesting article that summed up the story of R&J in the style of a tabloid.

In my head, the lesson was creative because it had an element of the novel in it, it was engaging and interactive and it got students thinking about the story and the key plot elements without me feeding them the answers first. In retrospect, it might not have been the best way to introduce the story because the students would have been more confident and excited about the task had they already run through the summary of the story first. I was going for a more guiding discovery approach where they would analyse the picture cards to deduce the sequence of events but that turned out to be pretty challenging for the students and in the end, the red-and-green sign couldn’t be used in the vibrant way I had hoped because students didn’t really want to reveal that they had gotten the sequence wrong. That was when I realized that there was a disconnect between my ‘creative’ lesson and my understanding of the class. I had not properly grasped their ability and should have provided more guidance before giving them the task.

(Work in Progress!)