This course had a heavy focus on educational psychology theories on learning and teaching and how they apply in the Singapore classroom context. We began with understanding students’ psychosocial, moral and cognitive development, to understand the learner and how these informs how teachers should interact with them to help them develop further. Then, we learnt about the psychology of motivation and learning as well as proactive strategies to enhance students’ motivation, learning and thinking. Lessons often involved authentic classroom/school scenarios which allowed us to analyse the issues and try to establish theory-practice links, using theory to inform what we would do. Similarly, the first task was a group project where we had to watch a video that highlighted some problems a student was going through at school and at home. We then had to leverage on the acquired theoretical knowledge in order to make theory-based decisions to craft strategies on how we could improve the well-being of the student in their social contexts.

The second task required us to develop a lesson plan based on the theories that we have learnt. I chose to use the lesson plan I wrote up for my project during my School Attachment Programme which was focused on improving students’ motivation in Biology. Using the new theories I have learnt, I adapted the lesson plan which enabled me to reflect on my initial lesson, link my prior knowledge to new knowledge, better synthesize the concepts together student development and motivation and apply this knowledge to a more effective lesson design.