Pedagogy

Portfolio - Pedagogy

I very strongly believe in the transformative power of technology for education. Previously, I worked as a teacher from 2016 - 2019, took a year off to pursue my Masters degree in education technology, and subsequently worked in curriculum design at the Ministry of Education from 2020 - 2023, where, aside from my official duties, I worked to promote data literacy among students and teachers. Although I have moved on to working on research in machine learning, I still intend to work on technology that assists teaching.

Contents of this page

Educational philosophy

Early experiments with integrating technology into the classroom

Anonymous lecture engagement

Smartphones engagement

Online collaboration with shared documents

Data Analytics in the classroom

Education for Data Literacy

Guiding philosophy for the Physics A-Level Curriculum

Professional Development of Teachers to build Data Competencies

Resource development for teachers

Large scale analysis of student data

Formal research in pedagogy

Educational philosophy

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My beliefs in teaching boil down to two main aspects: understanding and choice.

Learning should never be in a blackbox; teaching should be couched in fundamental axioms and real-world contexts, with the logical relations between these and the theoretical constructs fully explained and internalised. Therefore, educators need to consider not only the 'correct' knowledge structure, but also the students' internalised knowledge and how they interact with new information. This applies to the learning of theory, where student should understand the underlying systems, as well as epistemology and the Nature of Science - that students should critically question how, and why, evidence relates to claims.

Furthermore, students can and must be given the opportunity to take ownership of their learning. We should allow students the chance to fail in a safe context and to see the outcomes of actions taken (or not taken).

These beliefs are the underlying foundation that supports the work described below.

Early experiments with integrating technology into the classroom

Here, I outline work that was done from 2016 to 2019. At that time, schools in Singapore generally did not use much modern technology for teaching. These experiments must be contextualised in a traditional classroom/lecture setting. I am proud to say that some of my innovations continue to be in use at the school now.

Anonymous lecture engagement

One major flaw of traditional lectures is their top-down didactic nature. However, they are convenient from a manpower perspective. I always believed that lectures need not be one-way; tools such as mentimeter can be used to get responses from the audience. However, these tools are still initiated and controlled by the lecturer, as compared to an active classroom where students can voice up anytime. In a lecture context, the single-channel nature of voice communication means that there are limitations to the number of students who can voice up, and the mass audience poses a social barrier for students.

To bypass these issues, ever since I began teaching, I used something that would now be considered commonplace after videoconferencing became a standard tool during the COVID years. Making use of the ubiquity of smartphones, I provided a backchannel via Google Forms that students can access anytime, with a short URL on my lecture slides and a QR code on the lecture notes. Any incoming messages goes to a Google Sheet that I can monitor (some messages are shown in the screenshot here).

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Smartphones engagement

I strongly believe in making use of how every student now has a high-powered device in their pockets.

Smartphones for data collection

I highly encourage my students to use their phones during class. Recording demonstrations or experiments allows students to review, to pause and slow down videos, and so on; I'm happy to see students also collaborate and share this recorded content with each other.

During my time with the Ministry of Education, we also worked on further promoting the use of smartphones as a data collection tool, using apps such as PhyPhox. I produced a range of resources, such as the following e-worksheet: https://sites.google.com/view/air-column-resonance/. My team conducted workshops to train Pre-University teachers to conduct classroom activities where students analyse data obtained from smartphone sensors to demonstrate physics principles.

Since it is anonymous, students have no qualms to use it anytime to ask questions or give feedback, and because the backchannel runs simultaneously, I can flexibly adjust my lecture progress to address the questions or feedback. This allows me to more accurate gauge understanding, catch unexpected misconceptions or gaps, and allow students to better feel that they have been heard, thus improving engagement.

Smartphones for media access

While teaching, I pioneered the idea of flipped and blended learning for practical activities.

Traditionally, the difficulty level of hands-on activities is bottlenecked by whether or not students can follow the instructions to perform these activities. Teachers will often have to demonstrate and troubleshoot on an individual student level. To bypass this issue, I prepared videos demonstrating the activities and troubleshooting common problems, and sent this to the students beforehand to watch before attending class. During class, they could also use their smartphones to view the videos, freeing me up to take more of a facilitation role.

I believe the school is still using this form of Just-In-Time teaching, by preparing troubleshooting steps or additional resources and linking them via QR codes placed at appropriate parts of the worksheets. This becomes a form of scaffolding, where stronger students can simply follow the instructions directly, while weaker students can get additional support on their own through the QR codes at anytime, whether in class or out of class.

Additionally, I set up a collection of bite-sized (15-30s) how-to videos for basic lab techniques, and hosted these videos on Instagram. I believe the school is also still using these as a reference page for students.

Alternate routes of engagement

Finally, social media is another possible route to bring learning into students' daily lives.

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Online collaboration with shared documents

I made heavy use of Google Suite in my teaching. For example, submission of Google docs makes it easy for me to provide detailed feedback on student work.

More interestingly, Google Sheets facilitates sharing of experimental data between groups of students, and allows them to easily analyse trends and discrepancies between their data - which results in a clearer picture of the scientific theory being studied, as well as acts as a microcosm of real-world scientific research processes.

The screenshot here shows an actual working document from a class activity, where the students split into four groups to independently investigate different parameters. This shared document was then used for a follow up discussion where the students then figured out the mechanisms for the unknown phenomenon they were exposed to.

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Data Analytics in the classroom

Inspired by propriety tools such as Learning Catalytics, I wanted to try this approach in my classroom, making use of the tools freely available to me. In the end, I opted for using Google Forms with printed worksheets.

This is the workflow for the session:

Students work individually on the multiple choice questions in the worksheet, and submit their answers through Google forms
Using the data, I shuffle them into groups that maximise diversity of answers within each group
Students then discuss their answers in the group, and come to a final consensus, which they then submit through Google forms

I've only had the opportunity to use these a few times, but the results were excellent. I paired the questions with self-reported confidence ratings for two-tiered MCQ questions. While the results from individual work were often quite diverse across both answers and confidence ratings, through group discussion, the vast majority of groups came to the correct answer with high confidence. Throughout the activity, I did almost no direct teaching - the students mostly worked out the answers on their own.

More recently, I worked on a project looking at parsing student knowledge. You can read more about it in the Data Analytics part of my portfolio.

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Education for Data Literacy

While working at the Ministry of Education, I pushed for several key initiatives based on my beliefs in epistemology and the Nature of Science.

Guiding philosophy for the Physics A-Level Curriculum

I was responsible for a number of changes to the upcoming A-Level Physics curriculum. These include:

Conceptual understand of physics

On a macro level, re-framing the entire curriculum in terms of axioms and applications - that the majority of high school physics can be framed in terms of three core concepts: rates of change, causes of change, and metrics to quantify change. These core concepts are taught in the early chapters under kinematics/dynamics, forces, and energy/power respectively. The rest of the syllabus then becomes the application of these core concepts to a range of physical contexts.
On a micro level, I re-wrote the chapters on waves/superposition and quantum to move away from a disparate list of phenomena, so as to express the chapter narrative as the outcomes of some unifying concepts.

Introduction to Data Science

I worked towards promoting changes to how practical work and experiments are conducted in the A-Level syllabus, moving away from menial pen-and-paper skills and towards (1) understanding of data and (2) using more modern tools such as spreadsheets to process experimental data. This would sync up with the Personal Digital Learning Programme under the National Digital Literacy Programme, where all students would be equipped with suitable electronic devices and the skills to use them.
- To support this, I also pushed for the clarification of theoretical concepts among the teaching fraternity, such as "Digital Literacy" or "Data Competency", as well as pedagogical terms such as "Blended Learning" v.s. "Flipped Learning", to support clearer communication of approaches for teaching with technology.
- I also prepared and taught Professional Development courses for teachers to better equip them in this regard, as outlined below.

New approaches to lesson development

Finally, I spearheaded the digitisation of the Teaching and Learning Guide (TLG), pushing for an easily-accessible "e-TLG" that can be updated live, instead of a physical or soft-copy document sent out to teachers with each update.
I also developed workshops to develop new skills in teachers - see the next section on Professional Development of Teachers!

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Professional Development of Teachers to build Data Competencies

For teachers to be able to guide students in developing data competencies, they need to have a strong foundation in handling data themselves, from both a technical and theoretical perspective. To this end, I volunteered to prepare and teach a range of courses for professional development, including:

Workshops

1. Data Competencies for Science Teachers

A blended-learning course for pre-university science teachers, comprising:

- Full day face-to-face workshop to firstly discuss the underlying mathematical and epistemological principles behind data science and statistics, and then engage in guided hands-on practice in applying these to sample datasets.

Topics covered include:

- - Unpacking data science and digital & data literacies
  - Understanding models and variation
  - Hypothesis testing
  - Accuracy, precision, reliability, and validity
  - Data Visualisation and Data Analysis
- Following an apprenticeship model, I then provided three weeks of asynchronous online guidance while participants work on a project applying their learning to a chosen context relevant to their daily work.
- Participants then share with the community by presenting their projects to their peers, and engage in discussion with each other. In doing so, we hope to build a stronger awareness and understanding of data-driven approaches in the teaching fraternity.

2. Simulating and Stimulating Physics

I developed and taught part of the content for this annual workshop conducted by the Curriculum Planning and Development Division (CPDD) at MOE:

- Methods to develop and evaluate models that describe real-world data
- Methods to create simple simulations of real-world data to demonstrate scientific concepts

See an example of content developed for this workshop: https://sites.google.com/view/iterative-numerical-modeling/home

Seminars

Data Science in Physics Practicals:
- Workshop for National Institute of Education (NIE) Trainee Teachers on digitisation of science practical work, focusing on the introduction of spreadsheets for students to perform data analysis.
Presenting Data:
- Seminar for MOE CPDD Officers on approaches to data visualisation and how appropriate visualisation can support analysis.
Chat(ting) about GPT:
- Seminar for MOE Curriculum Planning and Development Division (CPDD) Officers, introducing the concepts and mathematics behind traditional and deep learning approaches in Natural Language Processing (NLP), contextualising this in terms of traditional science and math concepts to enable teachers to explain NLP to students as part of science education in the classroom.

If you are interested in any of these workshops, please contact me using the form at the bottom of this page

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Resource development for teachers

During my time at MOE, I also worked on modernising and streamlining resource access for teachers. To enable teachers to more easily access lesson materials, reference materials, and other resources across a range of platforms, I set up a scalable searchable database with materials tagged with appropriate labels, set up for easy access from smartphone.

Additionally, I put together a number of e-worksheets, templates, and tools to support teachers in conducting lessons involving data handling in real-world scientific contexts. For example:

e-Worksheet for Waves and Superposition: https://sites.google.com/view/air-column-resonance/home
Resources for Nuclear Physics: https://sites.google.com/view/nuclear-phys-sample-resources/nuclear-physics

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Large scale analysis of student data

Finally, I also conducted my own experiments into laying the groundwork for future use of AI in learning. You can read more about it on my portfolio page for data analytics. I also took the initiative to perform analytics on national-level student data, but these are confidential.

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Formal research in pedagogy

I recently did a project proposing a new framework for Adaptive Learning Systems (ALS), with the intention of eventual integration into MOE's national-level Student Learning System (SLS) portal. You can read more about this project on my page for data analytics by clicking this link.

Additionally, as part of my MA degree in Education, I completed a study documenting tech-related cultural changes in response to COVID-19. This was a decision made at the dawn of the COVID-19 crisis, when educators worldwide were struggling to respond to this massive paradigm shift. I felt that it was necessary to catalogue the early responses to COVID-19 and how this affected teaching and school culture. Of course, in hindsight, it is easy to point out the massive changes that COVID-19 brought - such as increased acceptance of flipped and blended learning. This project captures the ground-level perspective of teachers going through these changes, and how prior school cultures affected their ability to adapt.

This is an outline of the study on responses to COVID-19:

Understanding the motivations behind measures taken in response to ensuring continuity of education during COVID-19 school closures in Singapore

Supervisor: A/Prof Freydis Vogel

Dissertation submitted for MA Education (AY2019-2020)

Abstract:

An interview-based exploratory study was conducted to understand the factors affecting Singaporean teachers’ technological and pedagogical choices to ensure continuity of education during nationwide school shutdowns during the COVID-19 crisis. The sample demographic was restricted to teachers of physics or applied mathematics at Junior College or Polytechnic level. While some trends from the literature were observed, there were also surprising nuances, such as the interaction between assessment demands, institutional and social support structures, and technological acceptance. Factors relating to interactivity, synchronicity and human presence also deviated from the literature, with extremely extensive use of flipped-classroom methods, and both teachers and students prioritising both interactivity and synchronicity but not non-verbal communication. Finally, online teacher-student and student-student social interactions revealed complex outcomes that diverge from prior literature.

Portfolio - Pedagogy

Educational philosophy

Early experiments with integrating technology into the classroom

Anonymous lecture engagement

Smartphones engagement

Online collaboration with shared documents

Data Analytics in the classroom

Education for Data Literacy

Guiding philosophy for the Physics A-Level Curriculum

Professional Development of Teachers to build Data Competencies

If you are interested in any of these workshops, please contact me using the form at the bottom of this page

Resource development for teachers

Large scale analysis of student data

Formal research in pedagogy

Portfolio contents