Cleverlands Page 14
However, a choice between equity and high employment figures is not inevitable. Bol and van de Werfhorst suggest that there might be a ‘sweet spot’ that would allow countries to both reduce educational inequality and unemployment. The extent and specificity of a country’s vocational programmes – its vocational orientation – is not what drives inequality; the age and extent of its selection onto different courses does. But it is the vocational orientation of a system, not the early selection, which leads to high youth employment. Is it possible to reduce the extent of selection in a system and simultaneously increase its vocational orientation? You bet it is, because these different features come into play at different times.
The authors explain that the extent of selection is something which distinguishes education systems from one another in the early-secondary phase, whereas the extent and nature of vocational education is usually something that distinguishes systems at the advanced stages of secondary and tertiary education. So although few countries do it (hence the overall appearance of a trade-off) you can have the best of both: limit selection in the early stages and benefit from reduced inequality, and enhance strong vocational education in upper-secondary and tertiary education to reduce unemployment. Singapore has the latter down to a tee – this analysis suggests that other countries can learn from their expertise in this area at the upper secondary level, without having to make a compromise on equity by introducing selection onto different courses at a young age.
Chapter 10: Attraction, Career Ladders and Working with the Psychology of Motivation
A strong sense of purpose or belief in what you are doing is a powerful motivating force.
Gan Kim Yong
Excellent Teachers for All
What do we think might help explain the relative PISA success of lower attainers in Singapore? It cannot, of course, be attributed to any one factor. The high value that Asian cultures place on education surely plays a part, insofar as parents from varying backgrounds still push their children to aim high and study at home; many teachers go above and beyond and do remedial classes after school for children who are falling behind, and the Ministry of Education (MOE) has recently put more and more ‘levelling-up programmes’ in place to address the needs of these learners. Having a reason to continue in school even when you’re not academically inclined must help with students’ motivation too.
The most significant thing the MOE has done to make a difference to all students, though, the lower performers included, is to attract and develop a high-quality teaching workforce. I saw an advert for teachers in the paper one day as I was riding the spotlessly clean metro. I assumed at first that it was advertising some designer or other – six good looking men and women, all wearing stylish outfits entirely in black – posed across the second page of the paper. I looked more closely at the lady in the middle, with a sleek bob and a silk scarf flying out behind her, and saw written above her head:
Ng Hui Min
Teacher, Catholic Junior College
MOE teaching scholarship (overseas)
London School of Economics, UK (Economics)
Master of Science, University of Oxford, UK
It was advertising teaching scholarships. In order to attract ‘high flyers’ into the profession, the government offers top-scoring 18-year-olds the opportunity to apply to have their degrees paid for (in Singapore or overseas) in exchange for a four- to six-year ‘bond’ or return of service, teaching in the nation’s state schools. This is an extremely popular route, for obvious reasons (another scholar on the advert had been to university in France; an exotic adventure for a Singaporean teenager) but also because it comes with additional career opportunities such as sabbaticals working in the Ministry of Education on policy (which would be an exotic adventure for someone like me.)
Teaching isn’t ‘naturally’ an attractive profession in Singapore – in the 1980s there were significant teacher shortages, which were plugged by employing expat teachers from New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain – but the Singaporean government has worked hard and does work hard at making teaching attractive with scholarship programmes, decent pay and salaried training. Nevertheless, they can’t offer scholarships to every trainee teacher, and they don’t currently have enough graduates applying to ensure that all of their teachers are graduates; some enter a two-year teaching diploma straight out of junior college or polytechnics. This might seem surprising – that in such a high-performing country they take in teachers who don’t have even undergraduate degrees – but they approach the challenge of forming an excellent teaching force using a different model from many countries. According to Ho Peng, former Director-General of Education:
I think we are a deep believer of lifelong learning. At the pre-service level, we cannot teach our pre-service teachers everything that it means to be a good teacher. We have to encourage our beginning teachers to come by and be involved with continual learning and in-service courses, and there’s plenty of professional development opportunities for them, and I think the access and the support is… an envy of many countries.127
Chris Husbands of the Institute of Education in London recently contrasted Singapore’s approach to initial teacher training with England’s, which is going through a period of deregulation where schools can take the leading role in preparing teachers. ‘In Singapore, the government is clear: the improvements in teacher training since a low point of low morale and shortages in the 1980s have been driven by improving teacher training through the National Institute of Education,’ he says. ‘I was in Singapore working for the government a few weeks ago and no one could believe what we [in the UK] are doing in terms of deregulation.’
I was privileged to be able to attend a lecture at the Singapore’s National Institute of Education with ‘Prof. B.’, a kind and indomitable lady who modelled the kind of ‘tough love’ demeanour that all teachers aspire to achieve. The class of teacher trainees was small, no more than 20, and they were learning about teaching maths to early primary-school children. I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so that children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher–student relationships – ‘you can’t touch their brain until you have touched their heart’.
Let me elaborate a little on the teacher–student relationships that surprised and tickled me, and then I’ll get back to explaining how Singapore has a different model for developing great teachers. Singapore is a top-performing East Asian country, so I suppose I went in with certain stereotypical expectations – that teachers would be authoritarian, stern, scowling at children for interrupting their lectures. Many of the classrooms I visited were actually full of laughter. One primary class I observed were presented with the question, ‘Sally has lost 5 kilograms, and is now 60 kilograms. What was her former weight?’
One boy’s hand shot up. ‘55 kilos,’ and he explained why he thought so.
The teacher paused and considered. ‘What do we think?’ she asked the class.
‘Not right,’ a few called out.
‘But what was good about his wrong answer?’ (expecting a point about his approach).
Another student quipped, ‘She’s lost more weight!’ Cue teacher and children collapsing into giggles.
In another classroom, the class rules were stuck up on the wall in a child’s writing. The offenses and subsequent sanctions had been agreed on as a class under the guidance of the teacher. The last offence on the list read: ‘No playing with paper balls’ punishable by ‘Mr Lieu will throw a paper ball at the person’. I
n the next classroom, the motivational sign made by the pupils and stuck above the blackboard said, ‘Study Hard, Play Harder, Eat Hardest’. But I digress…
Career Ladders
I was telling you how Singapore develops great teachers despite not all of them having degrees. Unlike the many systems where you have the same status of ‘Qualified Teacher’ after your initial teaching qualification as you do after 20 years in the classroom, the Singaporeans recognise in the structure of their system that initial teacher training is only the first step. After a one-year induction period where you are mentored in your school and evaluated to ensure you are up to scratch, you are considered a qualified teacher. But you do not yet have the skills required to be a Master Teacher, or a Specialist Teacher or, for that matter, the Director-General of Education for the whole country (the pinnacle of the teacher’s career structure). Your pay increases annually for the first three years of your career, but after that, the only way to get a pay rise is to move up one of the available ladders – the Teaching Track, the Leadership Track or the Specialist Track.
Figure 4: Singapore’s Teacher Career Structure
The positions in each of these ladders require different skills, expertise and knowledge, and there is a comprehensive teacher development structure parallel to the career structure, run by Yoda-like experts who have reached the heady peaks of ‘Master Teacher’. So you can’t achieve a certain position without having completed certain training: some of which anyone can undertake, some which you have to be accepted onto. This means that despite there being different routes into teaching initially with varying levels of prestige, anyone can move up the ladder and have a successful career if they have the talent and put in the effort.
Moving up the career ladder also brings you extra responsibility, which is reflected in the higher salaries. Depending on the stream, you may be mentoring less-experienced staff, running pedagogy-focused committees, or running training across schools in your area. This works because there is much more going on in a teacher’s day in Singapore than teaching and individual planning/marking. Teachers work extremely hard but, just like Japanese teachers, they have less actual teaching time than the OECD average, so more of their time can be spent planning with other staff and learning from each other.
I was privileged to meet three of these Master Teachers at the Academy of Singapore Teachers (AST), one of the many centres for professional development in Singapore. The AST is housed in an old school building, which has now been entirely given over for the purposes of teacher development. The Master Teachers hold many of their workshops here, and some of the teacher networks meet here too. It was established in 2010 to build a teacher-led culture of professional excellence; a mission that it seems to be achieving. Some teacher networks, I was told, exist without the AST’s knowledge – teachers just get together to discuss particular pedagogical topics and share best practice across schools. Even the networks that are led by the Master Teachers are not instigated by them (with the exception of the networks of school principals). Teachers approach them after workshops they have attended and ask them to come and share their expertise, based on their own development needs or the needs of their colleagues. And of all the workshops offered at the AST, none are compulsory, but they are still in demand.
I can hear policymakers in other countries thinking, ‘how the hell do they do that?’ Why aren’t more teachers in all countries voluntarily forming networks and seeking out training opportunities? Are Singaporeans naturally conscientious? Perhaps, but the system helps. It removes all barriers to teacher learning, allowing teachers’ intrinsic motivation to drive these positive effects, and is also structured so that it adds a little external nudge for those that need it (i.e. you don’t move up the pay scale unless you’ve put the effort in to improve your teaching).
Working with the Psychology of Motivation
This would be a good time to revisit the psychology of motivation. When discussing teacher conditions in Finland, we heard about intrinsic motivation, and three things that have been found to support intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery and relatedness. Intrinsic motivation is the motivation to do an activity because you find it inherently enjoyable or interesting, and has been associated with all sorts of positive things, such as creativity, problem-solving, cognitive flexibility and persistence.128 The ‘opposite’ of intrinsic motivation is extrinsic motivation, which for a long time was defined as the motivation to do an activity in anticipation of an external reward, or to avoid a punishment. This was seen as unhelpful to productivity, as although the promise of an external reward might lead to an initial increase in effort, it was found to lead to a decrease in intrinsic motivation, making the activity less inherently enjoyable even after the rewards had stopped.129
Type of motivation
Definition
Associated with
Intrinsic motivation
Acting because the action is inherently interesting or enjoyable
Creativity, problem-solving, cognitive flexibility, persistence
Extrinsic motivation
Acting because the action leads to a separate desirable outcome, like a reward
Initial increase in frequency of action, but leads to longer-term decrease in intrinsic motivation
Table 1: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation – the original theory130
Over time, this theory was refined when it was realised that there are other types of extrinsic motivation which don’t have the same negative effects. Let’s take the case of a teacher who is marking some Year 8 exam papers on her sofa after dinner. Take it from me – marking is not inherently enjoyable to the vast majority of teachers. Therefore, she is not performing this task because she finds it inherently enjoyable or interesting, so it cannot, by definition, be intrinsic motivation that is causing her to do it. But neither is she doing it because someone has promised her a reward, or threatened her with the prospect of extra lunchtime duties if she fails to complete it. She’s doing it because she cares about the children and their education, and recognises that her marking their work will advance their learning. So what kind of motivation is it?
Ryan and Deci’s more recent research suggests that there are actually four different types of extrinsic motivation, which fall along a scale, ranging from autonomous to controlled.131 At the controlled end is the external ‘carrot and stick’ type, which would include rewards and sanctions, and at the autonomous end, right next to true intrinsic motivation, is ‘integration’ – where the goals of the activity (helping the children learn) are the same as the individual’s goals. Between these two lie ‘identification’ where the individual consciously self-endorses the goals of the action, and ‘introjection’, which is motivation due to the desire for approval from others (see Table 2).
Type of motivation
Reason for action
Source of motivation
Intrinsic motivation
The action is inherently interesting or enjoyable
Internal
(autonomous)
Extrinsic
motivation
Integration
The goals of action are the same as individual’s goals
Internal
(autonomous)
Identification
The individual consciously self-endorses goals of action
Somewhat internal
(somewhat autonomous)
Introjection
Desire for approval from others
Somewhat external
(somewhat controlled)
External
regulation
Compliance with external rewards or punishments
External
(controlled)
Amotivation
Non-compliance
No motivation present
Table 2: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation – the updated theory132
Where schools or education systems can find individuals who are already intrinsically motivated to do
the work required, or who already have a strong sense of purpose and belief in the importance of education (and who have therefore internalised the same goals as the school), good things come of it: positive work-related attitudes, effective performance, job satisfaction and psychological well-being.
In order for this to happen, teachers need to feel that they are autonomous, and they are performing certain actions, like professional development, because they want to, not because they are being forced to. This is what makes Singapore’s teaching career structure so clever. With the exception of countries with the benefit of high selectivity on entrance to the profession (like Finland), there will always be some teachers in a system who aren’t quite as motivated to improve their teaching practice as others. Until recently, the English solution to this has been for senior teaching staff and management to run observations of teachers which end in a grading from a scale of 1–4, where 1 is ‘outstanding’ and 4 is ‘unsatisfactory’. Whether these labels lead to further reward or sanction has depended on the school, but the result is that many teachers feel externally controlled and externally motivated to prepare for or respond to these observations. This affects all teachers, the ones who would be working on developing their practice anyway, and the minority that wouldn’t.
By building in a career structure which is tied in to high-quality training, teachers’ observations in Singapore become something that helps them to make the next step forward in their career. For already intrinsically and internally-motivated teachers – those who will work their socks off to provide the best education possible – this structure recognises their efforts and provides a framework to help them with something they’d be seeking to do anyway. For those who care but are not quite as fired up, it gives them an extra nudge to put in the effort for the sake of their career development. For those few who are in the profession for entirely the wrong reasons, and don’t make an effort to improve their teaching over the years, it prevents them from receiving salary increases past a certain point, and in some cases from continuing in the profession at all. These few bad apples are dealt with, without the imposition of a controlling system that makes everyone feel rotten.