Spaces that invite Teaching for Understanding

I’ve been in Singapore for over a week now, since late on Thursday, February 8, and perhaps it’s not surprising that there has been hardly a moment to catch my breath, let alone time to post to this blog. Singapore is an incredibly well-organized, high energy, efficient place. Traffic flows freely for the most part, along roadways that are beautifully landscaped with green spaces that shade the highway with their canopy and provide natural purification of pollution. Cars are uniformly modern and pristine, which is the result of specific policies and customs, I have learned. The government limits the number of cars on the road by issuing a “Certificate of Entitlement” to car owners. The certificate expires after 10 years, so most owners scrap their car at that time, rather than pay the certificate fee for an old car. The price of the certificate floats, from around $5000 up to $10,000 or more Singapore dollars (which are worth about ¾ of a US dollar), depending on how much demand there is for the limited number of certificates issued in a year. In this way, the government limits the number of cars on the road, while levying a tax that I assume helps them maintain flawlessly smooth highways.

So here’s another car-based story about Singaporean efficiency. Almost all Singaporeans back into parking spaces, in contrast with most Americans who drive in front-first. The advantage of the former is that drivers can take their time backing into the parking space and then are in a position to see better when it comes time to exit. But might they not bump into the barrier or wall as they are backing up, you ask? No, because cars in Singapore are equipped with a little alarm that sounds when the back of their car comes within 10 cm of something behind it. Fewer dents, eh?

I’ve seen so many examples of this orderly approach to making life work right, but let me tell you about one that relates to Teaching for Understanding. Several schools in Singapore are integrating Teaching for Understanding throughout their organization. I’ll write more about their alternative and innovative approaches in another post, but here I want to describe how Victoria School has built support for TfU right into their architecture. The Principal Mr. Low Eng Teong and Vice Principal Mr. Adrian Lim (a graduate of GSE’s TIE program in 2002) applied for funds provided by the Singapore Ministry of Education to support schools in their efforts to enact the Ministry’s education policy called Teach Less Learn More. They proposed to remodel existing classrooms in ways that would invite teachers and students to use them for various kinds of performances and forms of interaction.

These school leaders, who are orchestrating the integration of TfU throughout Victoria School, met with teachers who used the TfU framework to talk about how they would like the walls, spaces, furniture to look and function to support their TfU activities. As Adrian says, “We wanted form to follow function.” The four classrooms that resulted are amazingly beautiful and the invitation to try new participation structures and modes of learning is built right into the environment. The wall between each classroom and the covered corridor next to it is now glass with a large door. Passersby can look in to see learning in action, and the class members can see outside to the school’s large eco-pond or go out to use the inviting table in the corridor.

Inside, the classrooms have varied kinds of furniture that invite creative uses. One room has tables with two bean-shaped, formica-covered surfaces that are hinged so they can accommodate from 4-8 people in varied relationships.
Another room has trapezoidal tables that look like a tangram puzzle and almost audibly asked to be combined in various patterns. Some walls are made of hinged storage units that can fold into the wall with a white-board surface showing. Or they can be opened up, revealing storage and seating space inside and creating a small nook where a group could talk without disturbing groups in the neighboring nooks.

Another classroom lends itself to presentations with a small raised platform in the middle to invite “culminating performances” for the whole class. This room also has curved tracks in the ceiling that allow soundproof curtains to close off three separate spaces where smaller groups might work to prepare a performance. The modular furniture in this performance space is also remarkably flexible. Each module has a bench that easily holds two people working on the table surface. The other side of the table has a back rest with a bench so that two more students could sit facing the same direction as their table mates to watch a performance on the raised stage. Or the second pair can turn around to work with their mates at the table.

Each of the spaces is the same size as the typical classroom in Singapore, but the invitation to invent, interact, recombine, and perform is so much more enticing than the typical single-desks-in-straight-rows configuration. As a bonus, the colors and surfaces are beautiful which stimulates a surprising sense of energy and well-being.

As soon as I saw these spaces, I thought of a paper written by my friend Kate Bielaczyc called Designing Social Infrastructure. Kate conducts design research on the uses of new technologies in schools. In this paper she describes a detailed framework for planning and analyzing how cultural beliefs, practices, socio-technical-spatial relations, and interactions with the “outside world” influence the use of educational technologies. Fortunately, Kate is now working at the National Institute of Education in Singapore and was able to come visit these great spaces at Victoria School designed to support Teaching for Understanding.

This story of envisioning, planning, and enacting a remarkable “form follows function” initiative is one of many innovative and complex school improvement strategies I’ve seen in this small but mighty city state. It illustrates the remarkable “can do” attitude that seems typical of many people I have met in Singapore, which is encouraged by a government with the means and inclination to invest in education.