Graduand Teacher Competencies

The Graduand Teacher Competencies Framework (GTCF), recently revised, provides a solid integration of the new V3SK model and MOE’s competencies framework of beginning teachers. In this framework, there are three dimensions of performance that beginning teachers are supposed to take into account and fulfill, namely:

 

·       Professional Practice

·       Leadership and Management

·       Personal Effectiveness

 

Professional practice is something that is important for all beginning teachers to cultivate as we represent the very frontline of our nation’s efforts to ensure that we educate a new generation that has the necessary intellectual and moral capabilities to survive and prosper in the new and ever-changing set of challenges to come in the 21st century.

 

To do so, developing each and every student in a holistic manner is necessary, and something that the teacher should take responsibility and pride over. Firstly, it means that the teacher has to educate every child with the correct set of ethical and moral values. There is no set curriculum for this, but this is simply done through the everyday teacher-and-student interactions.

 

Another aspect that is important for the teacher to cultivate good habits of mind in his or her students. For me, this means the ability to question received knowledge, rather than simply absorbing and incorporating information passively. In the new world that threatens to overwhelm all of us with an overload of knowledge, the emphasis is now no longer on the accumulation of knowledge but the ability to synthesise and critically assess all received knowledge. This is something I personally feel most strongly about.

 

Finally, a big part of the professionalism, particularly of a beginning teacher, is to ensure that he has the necessary subject mastery in whatever curriculum subject he or she is teaching. Just as the teacher teaches his or her students to question, so must the teacher be prepared to be questioned by his or her students. The beginning teacher has a primary responsibility to ensure that he or she is absolutely prepared to impart upon his or her students the necessary and correct content knowledge to students. After all, despite all the current emphasis on critical thinking and questioning, it is still the subject matter of the curriculum subjects that is the vehicle through which students can exercise, practise and cultivate positive habits of mind and the ability to be critical.

 

The next aspect of the V3SK is Leadership and Management, and this pertains to the beginning teacher less as a conduit of knowledge but also as a team-player in the school, organisation and any work teams he or she finds himself in. It means that the beginning teacher has to understand the environment he finds himself in, the school culture of wherever he is posted to, and also be able to have high levels of interpersonal effectiveness in dealing with all of the stakeholders in Singapore education - students, colleagues, subordinates, superiors, parents, and the media. As the beginning teacher rises through the ranks, he or she will also have to play a role in supporting the induction of new teachers, and develop leadership skills on the go in an increasingly fast-paced environment.

 

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the beginning teacher is supposed to have high levels of personal effectiveness. To be able to be a good team player to his colleagues and a good role model for his students, this quality is arguably the most essential to cultivate and a pre-requisite to the other two abovementioned competencies. Personal effectiveness means that the beginning teacher has to know himself, and be in tune with his personal teaching philosophy, moral and spiritual bearings, as well as all other beliefs. In addition, he has to possess immaculate levels of personal and professional integrity, be able to adapt too ever-changing work and societal conditions, and also be able to understand and respect people around him – be it students, colleagues or superiors.

 

In all, this is a highly demanding and challenging set of criteria that beginning teachers are expected to fulfill, and as a beginning teacher myself, it might not be easy to be able to accomplish all these lofty ideals. What is personally within my own control is the domain of personal effectiveness, and this will be something I have to consciously work on as I begin my journey as an educator. While I will make mistakes and do certain things sub-optimally, what cannot be compromised is my personal effectiveness, and it is only with high levels of personal effectiveness that I can proceed to learn from my mistakes and experiences and become an even better teacher. As a graduand teacher, I hope to develop high levels of professionalism in my career, staying true to my teaching philosophy and ensuring that I am an exemplary role model to my students both as an educator and a human being.

 

 

QLK520: Communication Skills E-Learning Exercise

          I believe this module definitely contains aspects which are highly applicable to my future teaching career. Thus far, I have gone through the  pronunciation module; and the vocal production, oral communication, written communication and classroom communication modules online. 

          There are aspects of the course which I personally find not as useful in practical terms, even if theoretically they are all relevant and applicable. For instance, I find that the continued emphasis on "standard" Singaporean English slightly disconcerting. While I agree that teachers have to hold themselves to high standards of professionalism especially with our speech and communication, the "standard" English which this module insists upon may not always be applicable in the classroom. When a teacher is trying to build rapport with their students or are speaking to their students individually, speaking in a manner that represents social distancing could be counterproductive to whatever the teacher is trying to achieve. In addition, the many tips and tricks from the vocal communication skills are instinctively very useful, but I personally feel that it will be hard for some teachers to change their ingrained speaking habits, given that speech is such an instinctive part of our daily lives.

           Of course, there are various pointers which I find that I can apply to my teaching in future. I find that the classroom communication module highly useful, especially the portions about questioning techniques and dealing with discipline issues – a reality for all teachers. As a beginning teacher, such practical tips will definitely help me become a better teacher as I begin my service in schools. 

         I also personally find the blended approach one that is very effective. In modules which are classroom-based, the temptation exists for student-teachers to be too focused on the instructor, as well as be hampered by other practical issues such as fatigue and lack of concentration while the lesson is ongoing. While the immediacy of feedback and vibrancy of discussion afforded in the classroom is beneficial, learning online allows for more content to be covered. I find that I learn better independently, being "forced" to evaluate the available materials on my own and thus actually covering more content than I might otherwise have in the classroom. In addition and importantly, I am able to manage my time and cover the online modules in my own time, something which is very useful given our unceasing commitments and assignments for all our modules. This allows me to concentrate better when I embark on my online modules. Of course, I understand that this may not always be possible for me to apply to my classroom teaching is possible, given that younger learners would probably require the scaffolding that is provided in the classroom setting.

          In all, this communication skill module does hold many important and useful tips and tricks which I can apply to my classroom teaching in future, even if some of them may not come instinctively. Personally, I have saved many of the websites' content for my own consumption and revision in future, and I am sure they will prove to be highly valuable as I work through whatever problems I may encounter in future.

Edward

My Reading Biography

For my first post, I am going to re-post my "reading biography" that I have written as part of an assignment for QCR520 (Aims and Approaches to Teaching Literature). It is part academic, mostly personal, and provides just a little peek as to what makes me tick as a literature student (and now, teacher-to-be).

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Ed is Not a Good Reader (or is he?)

How should I put this... I don't like reading that much.

I know some friends who would stay up way past bed-time, risking the wrath of their parents by not going to bed and reading with a tiny light underneath the sheets and cranking their myopia indices. It would be a romantic little anecdote of myself I might proudly own, but I was already an Internet-enabled kid rather early for our generation – having a dial-up Internet connection and a 286mhz computer running Windows 3.1 back in the day. As is endemic amongst the overly-connected children today, I had – and perhaps still have – a nonexistent attention span.

Yet from time to time something comes along that grips me, and those are the times I follow through with my reading. I remember reading Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in Primary 3, and also Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. Then there were a few Roald Dahl books like Matilda, Esio Trot, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, BFG, James and the Giant Peace; and other classics like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations (both abridged). These occupied me through the rest of Primary School, similarly imaginative; and more light-hearted, more fun, and thus easy to get through. And then I got my first Playstation in 1999.

The secondary school years constituted a little black hole reading-wise. I was too busy being a teenage boy – football almost everyday after school, chasing girls, LAN games with my friends even when I hated them (they took too much time to become good at and it was no fun sucking at it), and the occasional studying. I hated literature class too, since I never bothered reading most of the assigned books. But I remember loving Taming of the Shrew and just feeling such intense anger and frustration (a personal connection!) when discussing I'm The King of the Castle in class. I just chalked it off as "oh yeah the books were nice" instead of "hey I love reading". With whatever spare time I had left, I would come to collect way too many football magazines and Garfield comics. The former gave me my first dream of wanting to be a sports journalist/analyst (a dream which I live on a very amateur level occasionally now), the latter cultivated a love for dry wit, wordplay and subtle humour. I always tell people that the Garfield comics are so smart, but people looked at me weird. So not a black hole exactly, but certainly a lack of "literary" reading.

Not much changed in Junior College – I was still a teenage boy messing about. But it was here I started really enjoying literature classes, because I was afforded the freedom of interpretation never allowed in Secondary School. It all began when I went for a mid-year exam having never read Measure for Measure and managed to score so well it really intrigued me. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was the only A-level text I read in full, and it is perhaps easy to see why. Looking back now, it is a little bit strange that I loved the subject but while I did not hate reading, I could always easily find something else I'd rather do.

Then came the intermission years during National Service when the brainless nature of it all made me recoil and determined to keep my mind sharp. My reading had no method to it – books on self-improvement, real estate, religion (i loved Norman Mailer's On God: An Uncommon Conversation), foreign exchange markets, Newsweek, the stock market, Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars (semi-academic) and bond investments, and I also picked up Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. I can't really describe why but James got me really loving the American faux-Victorian style. I then picked up John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and to date it is still my favourite novel. Here I decided (yeah, based on two novels I loved) to give up my place at SMU and do literature at NUS, and take up the MOE Teaching Award. (oh god why...)

The NUS years – best years of my life. I never thought I could keep my head in something for so long, but I worked extremely hard, never asked for a deadline extension, and truly enjoyed every bit of it. I still did not complete most of the set texts, but most of those (and "outside" books) which I did read I could not put down, and I think it was more the enterprise of mining for meaning and relating it to the real world that captured my attention. I developed a critical edge, loving anything that deals with human inequality, society and power struggles – Marxism, postcolonialism, feminism, critical theory, Bakhtin, Brecht, Baudrillard, new historicism yada yada. I came to appreciate contemporary texts, finding anything from James Joyce or before too baroque and alienating. 

To include that customary list, here are of my favourites from my uni days and beyond (present).  

• Three of Coetzee's novels that were set texts (Disgrace, Diary of a Bad Year, Waiting for the Barbarians) 
• Two more of Coetzee I read out of love (Life and Times of Michael K, Summertime)
• Things Fall Apart by Achebe -> such simple prose, with many teachable bits.
• Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow -> for the lover of the absurd
• Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss; the Rame and Fo plays; -> Brechtian theatre, another favourite area of mine
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh and The Enchantress of Florence by Rushdie (which I worked on for my thesis and I have nothing but awe and reverence for)
• Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger -> continuing my exploration of South Asian lit outside class
• Abraham's Promise by Philip Jeyaretnam -> on Singapore and Operation Coldstore. was not available anywhere in Singapore and I had to get it imported from Hawaii.
• Disgrace by Alberto Moravia, got me interested in the "voyeurism in family/person breakdown" genre. also led me to read (devour, really) Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (I have a precious copy signed by Franzen in London) and Simon Mawer's The Glass Room 
• Arthur Philips' The Tragedy of Arthur -> I can't recommend this enough. It is about the "discovery" of a "new Shakespeare play". Explores narcissism and tragedy within the context of an unheard-of Shakespeare play (reproduced in full glory) to pore over. 
• Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall -> Tudor drama and court intrigue
• The Economist -> recently just got a subscription. news/analysis that is both comprehensive and in bite-sized bits. you would enjoy this if you are anything like me.

As I mentioned in my class introduction, I have my fingers in way too many literary (and non-literary) pies at this moment – all of which are interesting without having me truly hooked. I could come up with so many excuses for not reading enough now, most of them at least semi-valid. I am waiting, wanting to experience again that rush when I simply have to finish reading something.