Pedagogical Beliefs and Practices at Republic Polytechnic*
W. A. M. Alwis
Office of Academic Affairs, Republic Polytechnic, Singapore
Introduction
Polytechnics in Singapore are state funded institutions of higher education, established as
Statutory Boards. They have a short history of five decades and were originally intended to
train ‘technician’ or ‘paraprofessional’ manpower for the emerging industrial economy of
Singapore by means of 3-year diploma programmes. As the economy grew and transformed
over the years, along with changing aspirations of the citizens, the polytechnics evolved as
viable pathways of academic advancement, while still serving the original purpose of
preparing GCE O-Level certificate holders for gainful employment.
Republic Polytechnic (RP), the fifth polytechnic in Singapore, was established in 2002. The
academic leadership of the polytechnic took up implementing a system of education that
would potentially yield better outcomes than the traditional lecture-tutorial-exam based
system as a key priority. The result is a unique pedagogical scheme, implemented institutionwide across all diploma programmes. This system has several strategic facets, among which
the ones for promoting learning, curriculum design, and student assessment are addressed in
this paper.
Education Systems and Theories
Educators have been expressing their reservations about conventional systems/methods of
education for a long period. “The Saber-Tooth Curriculum,”1 a witty work first published in
1939, is an impressive early example of an educator’s insight into problems in institutional
pedagogical practices. “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education,” a quote attributed
to Mark Twain, reflects an even earlier assessment. Calls for reform in education have grown
louder over the years. That education is in crisis is heard in industry circles as well as on
political platforms.
Although many agree on the common position that there is a need for reform in education,
the diagnoses and proposed remedies vary widely. Some see faults in teaching methods or in
memory testing at examinations. Insufficient state funding is another commonly cited cause.
There are those who believe that inaccessibility of information is the real reason. There have
been suggestions that a good dose of information technology will cure the ailments of
education. Had been proposed also is exorcising of various models of thought2 that haunt
schools, originating from the likes of the monastery, the military, the production factory and
“the scientific method”. The needs of a knowledge economy and modes of potentially
workable reforms in educational practices have been widely discussed in recent years3.
Despite numerous changes that have been attempted, hardly anything seems to have changed
in the broader spectrum. The basic scheme of lectures, tutorials and semester-end
examinations still dominate the pedagogical landscape at most institutions of higher learning.
Building a solid case for or against any practice of education has never been easy. In
established sciences, any enduring proposition or narrative, which would usually be referred
to as a theory, can be taken as established knowledge, because of the continual and stringent
evaluations that take place. Testing of pedagogical beliefs is usually less direct, and based on
*
Keynote Paper, International Symposium on PBL: Reinventing PBL, Singapore, 07-08 March 2007.
perspectives given by individuals in response to surveys or equivalents, and performance at
examinations. Hypothesis and model testing is difficult when it is about education, due to
diverse issues associated with gathering reliable unbiased meaningful data in sufficiently
large amounts under controlled conditions. The dependability of pedagogical theories is
therefore nowhere near that of theories in established sciences. Given this background, the
academic leadership at RP decided to take a pragmatic approach and proceed with a reasoned
belief system built upon experiences on what had seemed to work better and what not so
well.
Institutional Approach
The broad objectives of education at RP are quite similar to those of most education
institutions in the world. Education is to prepare students for a future wherein they can play a
more effective and contributory role in the community. Making students knowledgeable in
general as well as in their chosen disciplines is a primary expectation. This has to be
necessarily accompanied with getting students to become better inquirers and thinkers. In
view of the basic needs for success in life in a modern economy, one needs to add openmindedness, risk-taking instinct and communication skills as valuable assets. Turning out
caring and tolerant individuals who are team players with a balanced outlook and good values
is a social responsibility of any education institution.
The pedagogical uniqueness of RP comes from the comprehensive holistic way in which the
aforementioned objectives are addressed at RP. The belief system that drives the scheme of
pedagogical practices at RP is centrally held at the institutional level. An expectation is that a
comprehensive set of practices based on a centrally held belief system would enable the staff
to have their academic lives organised around that belief system, thereby enabling the
institution to realise its vision amidst inevitable personal differences and other barriers.
Needless to say that such a belief system has to be compatible with the institutional vision
and also fundamentally credible. Moreover, the belief system has to be sufficiently complex
to allow room for diverse individuals as well as creative developments. When a central
driving force of a strong belief system is absent at an institution, the efforts of any groups of
well-meaning individuals to improve education are likely to yield only patchy outcomes.
All learning engagements of regular modules at RP are initiated by a statement demanding a
response from the students. Collaborative self-directed learning during each engagement
culminating with a presentation, defence and reflection is expected of students. These are
characteristics of problem based learning (PBL) and accordingly, RP presents itself as an
institution where PBL is practiced. Nevertheless, the necessities for promoting learning are
viewed at RP quite differently from other institutions where PBL is practiced, and none of the
PBL ‘steps’ or ‘specifications’ available in the literature are directly adopted at RP. The
association with PBL in this unique manner at RP is highlighted herein because many
educators tend to tacitly accept PBL as the specific method originated at McMaster
University in 1969 for medical education. At RP, PBL is viewed instead as an ideology
which can be put into practice in different ways according to the needs.
Pedagogical Beliefs
Promoting learning:
At the core of RP’s pedagogical belief system is that learning is a personal happening in each
individual, and can be positively and effectively influenced by intelligently planned and
executed engagements. These engagements need to be deliberately scaffolded to assist
students to follow certain meaningful lines of thinking. Formal knowledge at any level is
seldom simple, and usually embedded with diverse counterintuitive concepts and
relationships. In other words, students cannot be expected to discover knowledge all by
themselves. Learners would nevertheless have to assimilate and internalise knowledge in
their own personal ways, instead of just receiving and memorising. They need to gather
additional useful information from sources chosen by them, compare and make their own
conclusions. This level of engagement needs to be focussed, and therefore each formal
learning activity needs to be conducted within a finite time period during which there is no
other serious learning engagement competing for the attention of the student.
Learners would benefit significantly from involvement and engagement in a collaborative
manner with other co-learners. They need to know the goals of any learning activity they are
made to engage with, plan actions for achieving those goals, and be in a position to judge on
their own how well they have achieved the goals at any time during that engagement. It is
better if they are able to take a position on matters related to the knowledge learned. There
should be formal opportunities to challenge others and be challenged by others. Regardless of
its nature, each learning journey needs a conclusion and a reflection in order for it to make a
meaningful impact on the learner.
The learning environment has to be multi-modal, never relying on just one source, resource,
event or act for any aspect of learning. It is necessary to allow for diverse propensities,
orientations and strengths of learners, mature or otherwise. Some learners would respond best
to pictorial, verbal or symbolic modes whereas others possibly to hands-on trials,
demonstrations or social interactions. The planned formal learning activities need to be in a
setting that encourages research, collaboration and other modes of engagement. Learning
may happen due to elaboration, evaluation, debating, defending, collaboration, listening, and
other actions. A student’s learning effort may be driven by the desire to achieve acceptance,
respect, authority, better grades or various personal, social, economic, ethical and other
objectives.
Demanded by this set of beliefs is a pre-planned flow of learning on one hand and a
significant personal effort from the learners on the other, in a single operational environment.
This operational environment has to cater for, on a daily basis, the general educational
objectives of making students better inquirers and thinkers, open-minded and risk-taking. The
conditions therein should demand clear communication and the attitudes of caring and
tolerance.
The central strategy adopted at RP to address these needs is to make the learning process as
humanistic as possible, so that students can make use of their personal skills such as of
noticing things, recognising ideas and patterns, strategising, testing, and preparing
explanatory communications, whenever they grapple with complexities of formal knowledge.
The initial trigger and the scaffolds, pre-planned to introduce elements of formal knowledge,
need to have contextual references so that students can draw from their own experiences and
prior knowledge. The classroom has to be a supervised and collaborative social environment
wherein students are allowed to take charge of matters with which they have a reasonably
good chance of succeeding. At the same time, where students need guidance, there has to be a
planned flow with systematic introduction and elucidation of ideas and patterns.
Receiving guidance has to organically complement self-learning, in such a manner that
moving from one to the other is seamlessly possible at all times. This is a quality to be
achieved by design when creating the scaffoldings, by opening up multiple possibilities and
lines of thinking. A trained facilitator in person is needed in each classroom for reading the
situation in the classroom and making finer adjustments. The facilitator has to be a friendly
yet authoritative person, who participates in discussions with students, allows time for
students to work on their own, and prods and nudges students in desirable directions
whenever felt appropriate.
Workplace needs:
The regular processes in the formal learning engagements need to mirror practices at typical
workplaces to a practicable extent, so that the transition from practices of formal learning to
engagements at work can be as natural and spontaneous as possible. To be recognised is that
most of the knowledge one needs to have in order to do well at a workplace is learnt at the
workplace itself, or at other similar environments. Moreover, no one really knows the future
workplace of any of the students to a level of detail needed to plan a curriculum to match
workplace needs. One can only guess the general nature of a future workplace. The objective
of education in this regard is to learn-enable the students so that they can learn at and from
their workplaces later, more meaningfully, efficiently and effectively. This belief primes
quite a different mindset for curriculum development when compared with what it is when
academics deliberately try to map certain identified academic-elements at workplaces onto
the curriculum.
Patterns of thought and enduring ideas need to be the central focus in the educational
engagements. Actual practices and subject content may be brought into the curriculum, but
only to the extent needed to assist students to assimilate ideas, patterns of thought, and
universals that underpin a broad spectrum of practices. When at their workplaces, the
individuals are not expected to recall facts or repeat procedures addressed in a school
curriculum, but rather find necessary information and assimilate new knowledge to be able to
contribute to the well being of the workplace, inclusive of responding well to situational
demands such as making good suggestions and decisions. The intention of the curriculum
shall be therefore to organise the minds of students, rather than covering a volume of content
expressed as a syllabus. Accordingly, the objectives of the modules in a curriculum would be
better expressed as a set of mental and physical abilities to develop in students, instead of a
set of topics to be covered.
Grading of learning achievement:
It is generally accepted by many educators that the way students respond to any system of
education depends heavily on the methods of grading. Therefore one has take note of the
possibility that the effect on learning due to any change introduced would be minimal if the
grading methods had not changed in tandem. However, for grading of student achievement
the majority of PBL practitioners seem to adopt the same methods and modes found in the
traditional systems of education. In other words, the beliefs about what should be considered
as academic achievement, and how that could best be measured, have not appreciably
changed in those instances, despite having changed the methods employed for promoting
learning. This is partly explained by the fact that PBL theories hardly make any direct
reference to assessment of student achievement. This is a concern especially because in
conventional examinations and their variations such as quizzes, the students who have
memorized a set of pre-prepared answers based on patterns in past examinations have a
higher chance of scoring a better grade than the ones who rely on assimilated knowledge
instead.
The grades awarded by an education institution are supposed to make sense to the academic
community as well as the employers. Two- or three-hour examinations with significantly
predictable patterns are not of the kind practiced for evaluating the performance of an
employee tasked to carry out academic, administrative, procedural or other functions at a
workplace. Possibly as a consequence, the so-called academic ability measured by
conventional examinations is seldom recognized by employers as a reliable indicator of a
person’s ability to perform at work, although they may consider those grades when there is no
other significant evidence to base their decisions about a person’s standing. It is quite evident
that any enlightened approach to education needs to be accompanied by a system of grading
student achievement wherein the grades are practically meaningful and indicative of each
individual’s potential to perform in the future, in academic communities as well as in the
industry. When hiring and granting career promotions to employees, the employers, inclusive
of academic institutions, look at experience, motivation, personality and other indicators of
performance, rather than the ability to write answers to a standard set of questions of the
types seen in typical examination papers year after year. It is therefore desirable to admit into
grading processes certain measurements of the characteristics the employers expect from the
educated, such as being prepared for functioning effectively and learning at the same time at
the workplaces.
Pedagogical Practices
As noted earlier, implemented at RP is an integrated institutional level scheme of pedagogical
practice that applies to all diploma programmes, across all regular modules conducted.
Among the salient features of this system are its one-day one-problem routine, small-group
multimodal collaborative classroom environment, strong emphasis on ideas and values over
methods and procedures, and student assessment by daily grades and understanding-tests. No
scheduled lectures or tutorials are conducted at RP as a formal process of the diploma
curricula.
One-day one-problem scheme:
RP has adopted one working day as the specific time period for active focussed exclusive
engagement on any single formal learning activity of the curriculum. One day is a natural
time period for an engagement that needs to be mentally intensive. The period of rest
available between two working days provides a good separation between two distinct
academic engagements. There is a no-homework policy at RP, which is directly linked to the
belief that there needs to be a clear disengagement from the previous learning activity before
engaging in a new one.
Each regular module at RP is made up of 16 such one-day learning engagements, i.e. each of
which is meant for providing a response within one structured day. Each semester lasts
exactly 80 working days, and modules are scheduled such that a student will engage in
activities of a given module at 5-day intervals in that sequence of working days. Accordingly,
a student may take at most 5 modules in one semester.
No class is allocated more than 25 students. Each class is attended to by an assigned
facilitator who manages the proceedings for the day. Students work in teams of five
(maximum) members on each day. The daily routine comprises three meetings separated by
two breakouts, and ends with a personal reflection for the day. Students, all of whom carry
personal notebook computers when on campus, use the wireless environment on campus
extensively during their daily work. A web-based eLearning platform with fairly
sophisticated capabilities enables students to engage themselves academically in diverse
ways, inclusive of accessing learning resources, making required submissions and receiving
feedback from academic staff, on an anywhere anytime basis.
The first two meetings and the breakout in between lasts an hour each, occupying three
consecutive hours of the morning in total. The first meeting is for students to discuss the
‘problem statement’, draw out prior knowledge with reference to the issues raised, and devise
an initial plan for preparing a response. During the breakout that follows, students are free to
work on their own, possibly according to a plan each team may have set out for themselves.
The second meeting is meant for further elaborations on the issues raised, teaching each
other, and making any strategic re-alignments found appropriate for preparing a response to
the ‘problem’. Next, students get a 2.5-hour mid-day breakout, during which they have to
finalise the team responses to the problem and prepare the presentations.
During the third meeting of the day, in the afternoon, each student team is expected to
provide a response to the problem statement presented in the morning, provide explanations,
defend the positions taken, question each other, and seek clarifications. This meeting ends
with a presentation delivered by the facilitator to close any gaps in the deliberations of the
day and address any important matters not tackled well in student presentations. Normally a
15-minute quiz is conducted before the formal sessions of the day end. Immediately after the
third meeting the facilitator poses a general question about the learning process, meant to
stimulate reflection on the learning process of the day. Students have time till midnight to
provide a response, known as the Reflection Journal.
Structured curriculum:
The graduation criteria for the diplomas are configured such that in order to graduate a
student has to complete 26 regular modules, two projects and two special activities named
Creative Engagement and Professional Profiling.
The requirements for the regular modules are specified in five components. The first
component is for general education and consists of 10 modules, in 5 tracks of two modules
each. This component is common and compulsory to all students enrolled in the regular 3year diploma programmes, and addresses the abilities expected in general by the society from
any individual who claims to have received a tertiary level education.
In the second component, catered for are the universal characteristics expected from the
practitioners of the relevant broad discipline, i.e. a one such as engineering, information
technology or biological sciences. The number of modules required to be completed in this
component varies from diploma to diploma, and range from 3 to 6, in some cases to be
chosen by each student from a specified basket of modules. The knowledge addressed in this
set of modules would usually have a long term meaning and value to the learners while they
advance in their careers over decades in the future.
The modules of the third component are of the specialisation of each specific diploma. The
learning therein would assist the diploma holders to find employment immediately upon
graduation, because of the relevance and currency of the content and practices. The value of
these may however be limited to the short term. The fourth component of the curriculum is
composed of electives chosen by the individuals according to their personal preferences, from
a basket of modules relevant to the diploma. The fifth component is of modules freely chosen
entirely by students from the full collection of diverse modules available at the polytechnic,
and these are limited to either one or two modules, depending on the diploma programme.
The two projects required to be completed under the graduation criteria are for students to
experience research and development in a formal manner under supervision of academic
staff. These projects require students to formulate strategies involving relatively long-term
objectives, carry out planned work, analyse data, discuss and draw conclusions, write a report
and present a defence. The projects are graded by a formal evaluation process.
Of the two special activities of the curriculum, Creative Engagement requires students to
attend talks and take part in hands-on activities on diverse matters outside the formal
curriculum. A point system is implemented to enumerate the engagement, wherein typically
attending a one-hour talk will earn a Passive point and taking part in a three-hour hands-on
engagement is awarded one Active point. In order to graduate a student needs to have
received at least 40 points, with at least 30 Active points and 10 points earned from events
related to the diploma programme of the student. The Professional Profiling requirement
demands that each student study a personally chosen subject of industrial/economic interest
to the society and submit a report profiling that subject. This engagement is supervised and
the outcome is formally evaluated.
Module Grades:
The academic achievement of each student in a regular module is viewed as a status that
reflects the “process skill level” and the “capacity to understand”. To capture these essences,
two separate types of assessments are conducted, with multiple evaluations of each type.
These multiple evaluations throughout the semester ensures that each module grade awarded
is a reflection of a general sustained ability and not of a one-off happening.
At the end of the day, the facilitator of each class evaluates the performance of the students,
gives a written feedback to each student and each team, and awards each student a grade.
This grade, known as the daily grade, is one of A, B, C, D and F, ranging from “excellent” to
“very poor”. Evaluated here is the level of process skills displayed during the day, and not
subject understanding. The granularity of the grading is set at this level of coarseness because
a facilitator’s judgement on process skills exhibited by a student on a given day is unlikely to
bear any higher accuracy to justify a finer grading scale. As there are 16 learning activities
per module, each student will receive 16 daily grades for each module.
The capability to understand the subject matter of the module is assessed using four
understanding tests (UT), conducted at four different time points during the semester. Each
UT is of half-hour duration and comprises several tasks. The strategy adopted to test
understanding is to set each task so that the level of a specific understanding targeted would
manifest in the student response. When setting that task, the examiner determines the kind of
responses expected from someone who understands and does not understand. This may not be
evident to a student who is merely expected to respond. The grade awarded for a UT is one of
A, B+, B, C+, C, D+, D, E and F, ranging from “excellent” to “fail”. The relatively finer
granularity of the grading scheme adopted here reflects the higher level of differentiation
viable in a test with several specific tasks.
The final module grade, awarded as a letter grade from the set of A, B+, B, C+, C, D+, D, E
and F, is determined by the sum of the average of the best 14 out of 16 daily grades and the
average of the best 3 out of 4 understanding test grades. Discarding the two worst daily
grades and the worst understanding test grade allows for uncertainties, eliminates any
temporary negative effects a student may have had due to ‘bad days’ and other incidentals.
The facilitator-bias in the daily-grades is mitigated by adjusting the numerical value assigned
for the daily grades, using a statistical method. Such an adjustment for the grader bias is not
needed for understanding test grades as all the responses to any one task in a UT is evaluated
by one grader. No moderation of grades to modify the mean and variance of module grades at
the final computation stage is permitted at RP as such modifications are believed to
negatively affect the authenticity of the grades and integrity of the system.
Learning Activity Design & Facilitation of Learning:
When designing learning activities as well as facilitating learning in classrooms, one has to
acknowledge that the ways by which humans have collectively built a system of dependable
organised knowledge as well as the ways in which knowledge is packaged as a set of truths in
the textbooks are quite distinct from how an individual would build a personal system of
knowledge within a relatively very short period. Furthermore, how a person would learn
certain complex things like languages and pattern recognition instinctively without requiring
any formal interventions is complementary, but not similar at all, to how one learns
knowledge that cannot be easily acquired in such a natural manner.
Designing learning activities with suitable scaffolds, however, requires a different set of
academic skills than facilitation of learning in classrooms. Facilitation is mostly an
instinctively achievable skill by an academic with sufficient reasoning skills, once a
reasonable alignment with the pedagogical philosophy of the institution had been acquired.
On the other hand, designing functional learning activities is a challenge for most academics.
This is mainly because of the need to understand the deeply humanistic nature of learning,
and to picture what a learner would naturally think upon encountering various things the
activity designer may want to introduce to promote learning.
For example, the teachers who get students to memorise that ∫(1/x) dx is {ln(x) + constant}
are treating that as a lifeless step. If a student can recall this fact a teacher would consider that
the student has learned. However, remembering such a fact does not enable a student to
recognise situations for which this fact could be meaningfully utilised. Getting students to
examine the issue of cooling of a hot coffee cup is a better way to address the learning
desired here. Students can then be led to debate and recognise its parallels in phenomena like
radioactive decay, and the similarity to growth of bank deposits due to interest rates. The
important step is to get students to recognise the pattern where the rate of change of a certain
thing is proportional to the size of that same thing. With this background students would be in
a better position to appreciate the unique exponential family of x-y relationships where y is
always proportional to the gradient dy/dx. Only with such an understanding a learner could
possibly make use of the aforementioned integral if a need ever arises in later life, by
recognising the pattern first. The matter of adding in an unspecified constant to the solution is
another matter entirely, and that needs to be addressed separately, on a separate occasion. The
gradient of an unchanging thing, regardless of its magnitude, is simply nothing. When one is
addressing a situation where the gradient of something is proportional to that same thing, one
has to respect that the phenomenon is immune to the presence of an unchanging component
of any magnitude therein. This idea of ‘an unchanging component of any magnitude’ can
then be understood much easily as the ubiquitous arbitrary constant.
Knowledge acquired in a personalised manner will always be associated by the learner with a
value system drawn from the contexts addressed during the learning engagement. Another
key factor is the effect of labels, which are helpful for communication purposes of an
understood matter, but tend to generate a debilitating effect on a learner when presented
before the learner has understood that matter to a sufficient degree. Accordingly the activity
designer has to be mindful of the values associated with any context brought up in the
activity, and the need to avoid labels that are likely to be unfamiliar to the students before that
point in time. The labels of importance are best introduced via the final presentation given by
the facilitator at the end of the day, for the benefit of the students who may not have
encountered those during their work on their own during the day.
Remarks
Among the major challenges faced by educators attempting to implement novel pedagogical
schemes is the need for ‘strong support from the top.’ This issue is irrelevant at RP, because
the system in operation is ‘driven by the top’ both in philosophically as well as practically.
Due to the institutional nature of the pedagogical approach, the infrastructural and procedural
needs of the system are attended to and advanced purposefully, on an ongoing basis.
A common perception held by many educators is that ‘PBL costs more.’ As had become
evident at RP, this need not be true. Issues of cost-efficiency are managed at RP mostly by
designing the system rationally and engineering the processes with due care. This enables
energies to be directed more to the inescapable issues of education, such as academic staff
development, learning activity design and quality facilitation in classrooms.
The main challenge faced by academics when designing learning activities is the needed
development of contexts to make learning of the subject content humanistic and sensible. At
present there is no available general strategy for this design process. As such, learning
activity design remains a highly creative process, the value of which is to be judged by the
outcomes in classrooms.
References
1. The Saber-Tooth Curriculum - J. Abner Peddiwell, (Harold R.W. Benjamin), New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1939.
2. Creating the Future School - Hedley Beare, London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer,
2001.
3. Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the age of insecurity - Andy
Hargreaves, Open University Press, McGraw-Hill Education, England, 2003.