‘Encourage students to have productive failures’

SINGAPORE — As the world gets increasingly complex, students must be taught to react positively to failure, said Acting Minister for Education (Schools) Ng Chee Meng yesterday.

Addressing about 2,000 teachers at a conference organised by the Academy of Singapore Teachers (AST), Mr Ng cited the example of a Princeton University professor who published his “CV of failures” earlier this year — detailing the degree programmes he did not get into and the academic positions and funding he failed to secure — to show his “invisible failures”.

“As teachers, when we allow our students to stumble from time to time, encourage them to have ‘productive failures’ and in the process develop their emotional and mental resilience, we would have helped them to prepare well for the future,” said Mr Ng.

As schools are where students pick up important cues on what is valued and important, the minister said teachers’ priority should be on developing character.

Students should also be encouraged to experiment and refine their ideas on what it means to be successful, said Mr Ng. But an over-obsession with grades and outcomes would run counter to this, he added, echoing Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s remarks last year that children need to be given space in the curriculum “for their minds to wander”.

“In other words, we must find the optimum balance between what can be measured — grades — and what can only be observed — values and character,” said Mr Ng.

In his speech, Mr Ng also touched on the importance of sharing best practices as professional learning and collaboration can substantially impact the quality of the student’s learning.

He highlighted the example of art teachers coming together to learn from artist-practitioners and taking back their new skills and knowledge to try out creative teaching strategies in schools.

Ms Serene Lin, subject head for art at Greendale Secondary School, for instance, bought her students ice cream and challenged them to draw it before it melted to hone their observation and sketching skills.

In a pre-conference session on Monday, Mdm N Viyaya Rani, a Master Teacher for Geography at the AST, guided at least 50 geography teachers in adopting conceptual teaching instead of content-based teaching for the subject.

“We look at concepts — what is it that is enduring in the content that we learn, that we can transfer within topics and even across disciplines,” said Mdm Rani.

“Facts are important, but (it is) more important to organise them in a conceptual framework that gives them connection, that gives them transfer of meaning and understanding.” LAURA PHILOMIN