Cleverlands Page 15

  Professional Development

  The way in which the career ladder is structured and worked through allows for teachers to make autonomous choices too. Teachers in Singapore are entitled to undertake 100 hours of professional development a year. They use this allocated time to address their personal development needs, which are identified by the teachers themselves in partnership with their line manager. They can go to workshops and courses during the school day, and the schools both organise the necessary cover and pay for it; each school is given a ring-fenced ‘manpower grant’ every year specifically for this purpose. As I said, teachers also have more non-teaching time during the school day than the OECD average, and there is designated timetable time for professional learning and discussion.

  The courses and workshops on offer are varied and intelligently designed. They aren’t all given by Master Teachers at the AST (even in a small country, 16 people delivering all the training would be a stretch); the Institute of Education runs professional courses and degrees, there are the Curriculum Planning and Development Divisions at the MOE that run training on curricula for different subjects, and the AST is the biggest of seven academies with varying subject specialisms.

  The Master Teachers told me that they never run one-off workshops – all are part of a series of at least two, allowing for teachers to apply what they learn and feed back. This avoids the common problem where professional training is seen as a day to sit back, drink tea and let someone else do the talking (if you are being cynical) or even the problem of people having excellent intentions but then not implementing what they learnt in their classrooms. If they know they’ll have to feed back on it, they are reminded to practise, and also have the support of other teachers and the trainers in working through any unexpected issues they face in their implementation.

  If other countries had free, high-quality professional development courses that teachers could get cover to go to (as they do in Finland too), lots more teachers would be clamouring for it. Even those that aren’t naturally so enthusiastic would become more so if this professional development was effective at getting you the knowledge and skills required to move up the career structure (and therefore pay scale), as it is in Singapore.

  So the teachers come into the classroom after one year at the National Institute of Education, and they have many years of training and improvement ahead of them. But what about now? What about when they aren’t actually very experienced yet? And what about the teachers who just aren’t that great, who haven’t progressed up the career ladder after several years? Isn’t that a bit risky?

  Well, all these teachers have a mentor and have colleagues to work on their planning with them in weekly planning meetings. But what they also have – which seemed to play a role in making sure all lessons were of at least a minimum, decent standard – are teachers’ guides. Students have good quality textbooks too, of the same high quality as those found in Finland, but many of the teachers also have accompanying books that contain a whole host of useful information and advice, which are crafted by individual schools and subject departments, and contain:

  Objectives for the lesson

  Common misconceptions children have about this topic

  Suggested questions to get them thinking

  Assessment questions to help figure out what they’ve understood

  Suggested activities

  Having a book like this when I was teaching secondary science would have saved me so much time. Even if you were to follow these tips and utilise the student textbooks, and not do any planning, your lesson would be boring but well-constructed. If you were to use these tips as a springboard, allowing you the time to make the lesson your own and modify it to suit the particular needs and interests of your children it could be well-constructed and exciting. As an experienced, veteran English teacher of 20 years, Madame Ng does the latter. ‘I don’t use the textbooks that much – I make my own resources based on trial and error over the years.’ The teachers’ guides act as a catch-all, catering brilliantly to the lowest common denominator, but not limiting great teachers to a set lesson structure.

  Singapore’s education system got me thinking harder than anywhere else. I puzzled, I read up, I even went back and conducted additional interviews when my flight stopped over there on my way back from China, before it all clicked into place. The system produces spectacular results in reading, maths and science, the policies are ever so sensible and carefully thought through and the teacher training provision seems excellent. Vocational education is well-funded and leads to low unemployment rates, and introducing sophisticated career structures that offer teachers incentives, time and support in developing their practice could suit countries in which professional development is ineffective, or only available for the most dedicated of teachers. Offering teachers sabbaticals in which they work in the civil service designing curricula and education programmes is also an idea that might transfer well to a Western context, and might ensure that such programmes are workable and beneficial when implemented in the real-life context of a school. In these ways I found the Singaporean system to be very well run.

  However, when you spend a bit of time in this system, and you also see the less shiny side. Children’s futures are decided at a young age based on results that are heavily influenced by private tutoring, and an intensely competitive structure piles pressure on students at all levels. Would you want this in your country? Perhaps you would; you could certainly do worse than a system that ensures all its young people graduate with useful skills. But you can’t simply implement the same policies elsewhere and recreate the Singaporeans’ success, because some policies will most likely have different effects in different places. If a Western country were to introduce streaming or school selection at such a young age, for example, they may not find that it incentivised all children to work harder and raise their game, as it seems to in Singapore. This is because more people in Western countries believe intelligence is fixed, and would therefore be more likely to assume that failure in tests and allocation to bottom sets was something they had little control over, rather than something they could change through putting in more effort. Let’s look at this important psychological difference in more detail in the country that has had the most cultural influence on Singaporean attitudes to education – China.

  SHANGHAI

  Chapter 11: The Confucian Mindset

  A clumsy bird that flies first will get to the forest earlier.

  (Chinese proverb)

  Aside from a faltering chat in Mandarin with the taxi driver from the airport (during which I reached the heady heights of communicating that I was a teacher, and he asked me for a tip), my first encounter with a Shanghainese resident was with a six-year-old in a Snow White outfit singing ‘Let it be’ from Disney’s Frozen. Her mum Michelle, a portrait photographer, had been happy to have a Brit to stay for a few weeks to help teach her daughter English. I sang along, and we bonded. She seemed just like a six-year-old girl anywhere else; making friends on the swings, enjoying English games like ‘find me a… shoe’, but getting bored after 20 minutes and letting me know about it. The only obvious difference between Angel’s life and that of a middle-class British child of her age was that Angel had not yet started school; she did, however, attend kindergarten, as well as other private classes, including piano and painting.

  The differences in home life became more obvious when I was invited to stay with Jenny – one of the teachers I had the pleasure of meeting – and her wide-eyed 14-year-old daughter, Angela. On the day of my arrival Angela showed me her room, which she’d kindly given up to let me stay in. We’d discussed our shared love of Adele, and in her broken, but very impressive English, she was talking me through the ending of Sherlock, Season 2, when Jenny’s sing-song voice called out from the other room: ‘Angela, it’s time for your homework!’

  Angela had to do a maths paper that night, in addition to her English homework. These took her three-and-a-half hours, which Jenny
told me quietly in the kitchen was typical of an evening’s homework. Sometimes, it was four hours, but Angela got on with it diligently. This hard-working approach was typical of the students I met in Shanghai. Sophie, now a graduate student studying pharmacology, was just a little older than Angela when she left China for Toronto in Canada to attend high school, so she was able to draw out some of the differences between Chinese and Canadian students: ‘The work ethic is different. In China it doesn’t matter if you have a good grade or not, you are expected to put a lot of effort into your study. You also treat people who have good academic grades as being your role model, and you try and get to the same standard as well.’

  Now, there are obviously school-based reasons why children in China have so much homework, and I will come to these later on. But in this chapter I want to share with you the more fundamental origins of the Chinese work ethic, which exist to this day but go back thousands of years. This work ethic goes above and beyond the competitive Chinese school system; it crosses borders. Chinese immigrants in other countries take it with them, and set their children extra homework when American or British schools don’t provide ‘enough’. Chinese graduation and encouragement cards even have more of a focus on the importance of hard work and continued self-improvement than American cards do (‘Congratulations on your hard work’ versus ‘celebrating your exceptional brain’133), suggesting that in part, at least, this focus is cultural rather than being solely a product of the education system.

  This work ethic extends to other East Asian cultures too – Taiwan, Singapore, Japan – and I believe that this additional effort made by East Asian students, and the way in which they apply this effort, is a significant contributor to their PISA success. But despite the deep-rooted cultural causes of this approach, I believe some of it (as much as we’d want of it) could be adopted or learnt by Western families, schools, and even education systems.

  Failure is the Mother of Success

  Let’s go back to Sophie’s statement, ‘You also treat people who have good academic grades as being your role model, and you try and get to the same standard as well.’ This is something that came up in other conversations I had during my time in China – the identification of students that are doing particularly well and everyone else’s aspiration to be like them, either through the use of particular strategies, or through working harder. The point is: they believe it is possible. The Chinese students believe more than the Americans do that ‘studying hard’ contributes to success, and academics have argued that it is this belief in effort that accounts for the achievement gap between those of Asian and American descent.134 This emphasis on effort over ability is something that’s associated with Confucian philosophy, and its influence is felt not just in China, but all over East Asia.

  It isn’t just studying hard that helps, though; it is the way in which they study hard. I had some students in England who were very proud of themselves for copying out pages of the textbook, or who would revise only the things they found easy and skip over those they found tough. East Asians tend to do the opposite; they use more self-regulated learning strategies such as rehearsal (‘I practise repeating things to myself’), elaboration (‘I try to understand how the things I learn in school fit together with each other’), monitoring (‘I check to see if I understand the things I am trying to learn’) and planning (‘I try to plan out my schoolwork as best as I can),135 and they persist for longer when they are faced with a challenge.

  Stevenson and Stigler – psychologists who studied Japanese and Chinese education in the early 1990s – recount an experiment they attempted to carry out on persistence in Japanese and American children. Their intention was to give students from each country a maths problem that was unsolvable in order to see how long they would keep attempting it for.136 However, Stevenson and Stigler weren’t able to complete their study, because the Japanese teachers convinced them to drop it after trying it out with a few children. They’d found that the children refused to give up, and had carried on attempting to solve the problem for far longer than it was fair to let them try for.

  Other studies have shown that not only do East Asians persist longer in the face of challenge, they are also more likely to seek it out.137 Not only that, they are actually spurred on to work harder in the face of failure – the opposite reaction to typical Western students. Heine and colleagues conducted a study on this strange phenomenon, by giving Japanese and Canadian students a test of creativity called the RAT, in which they had to come up with a word that connects three words they are given (for example, the word ‘dream’ connects the words ‘day’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘sleep’).138 The difficulty of the test was deliberately altered so that some students received an easy version and some received a harder version, and after taking the test, the students were asked to mark their own test against a mark scheme, which also contained information about how other students had done. The students with the harder tests therefore believed that they’d done significantly worse than most people, whereas the students with the easier tests believed that they were really rather good at it compared to the rest of the population.

  The interesting bit was what followed. As often is the case in social psychology experiments, there was an element of deception. Students were told that the next task was to complete a test of emotional intelligence using the computer, but a few minutes into the task, the computer ‘crashed’. The experimenter pretended to be distressed by this, and said they’d go and sort it out, but that the students could work on another RAT test if they liked, as they may be a little while fixing the problem. The length of time the students worked on the new RAT test (this time containing a mixture of easy and hard items) depended on whether they’d succeeded or failed the first time – but in opposite directions for the Japanese and the Canadians.

  Figure 5: From Heine et al. (2001)139

  Canadians who had done badly in the initial test spent less time on the new test than their peers who had succeeded. They spent more time on the task if they believed they were good at it – they were motivated by success. But for the Japanese students, doing badly at the first test meant they actually spent longer on the new test than their more successful colleagues – they seemed to be motivated by their failure. This is likely to be the case for Chinese students too. In a study measuring performance rather than effort, Ng, Pomerantz and Lam found a parallel effect – Chinese students’ performance improved after failure; Americans’ did not.140

  A Clumsy Bird that Flies First Will Get to the Forest Earlier

  What can explain these underlying differences? Why would students from one country be consistently trying harder in the face of challenge or failure than students from another? The expert in this area is a woman called Jin Li, who wrote a book (more than 10 years in the making) about cultural learning models in the East and the West.141

  Many years previously, before she completed her doctorate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Li arrived in the United States from China and signed up to be a substitute teacher in Vermont, and then Pennsylvania. As someone who had been educated in Chinese schools, with peers who worked hard at their studies, what she discovered in American classrooms initially shocked her: ‘What struck me the most was that they were not the least bit interested in learning the content of the already minimal English tasks… My perplexity deepened; the idea of the richest nation on earth inhabited by so many students not wanting to learn really threw me for a loop.’ This led her to spend many years studying the question that we are interested in: what could explain these differences?

  According to Li, the way we think about learning in the West is based on a long-standing intellectual tradition that began with the ancient Greeks. Three of its central ideas that are particularly relevant to our question are that:

  human curiosity about the world is the inspiration for knowledge,

  the individual is the sole entity for inquiring, discovering, and ultimate triumph, and

  learning pr
ivileges those who have superior ability.

  It follows that if one isn’t curious about what one is learning, one will lack motivation to learn; that the reason for learning is primarily individual benefit and that whether or not you are good at learning will depend on your individual attributes, which are relatively fixed.

  Research on American children and adults’ conceptions of intelligence and ability give support to the existence of the latter idea – and these ideas about ability being fixed become stronger as children grow older.142 However, the same suppositions are not found in East Asian cultures. East Asians are less likely to view people as having innate differences in abilities and more likely to view achievement as a product of effort rather than ability.143 Hess and colleagues found that Chinese mothers were most likely to attribute their children’s failure at school to a lack of effort more than any other factor, whereas this option was selected the least by American mothers when asked the same question.144 Heine and colleagues designed a questionnaire asking Japanese and American students what percentage of intelligence was due to effort, and what was due to talent or innate ability. They found that, on average, European Americans saw effort as accounting for 36 per cent, Asian Americans saw it as accounting for 45 per cent and the Japanese saw it as accounting for 55 per cent.145