Background: A general shift towards competency-based curricula has meant that, for quite some time, skills including critical thinking have been central considerations in educational policy reform internationally. However, what happens at the policy level is only one aspect of change: gaining a deep understanding of how new curricula are…

This study examined the performance gap of principals' leadership influence on teachers' capacity to enact a 21st century skill curriculum at Singapore School of the Future (SFS). The purpose of this study was to apply the gap analysis problem solving framework (Clark & Estes, 2008) to identify root causes of the knowledge, motivation and…

The practice of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has been known to be troublesome to teachers. (Webb & Tierney, 2020). The authors argue that a mentoring approach based on threshold concepts in SoTL has the potential to lead to more confident conceptual border crossing by new entrants to the SoTL of English communication. A…

In this work, we report the emergence of the Hands, Head and Heart framework that arose within the curriculum review for subject knowledge courses for primary school pre-service teachers in the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Through an initial grounded analysis of a survey of pre-service teachers and faculty focus group meeting data,…

Basic science educators play a significant role in medical and health professions curricula, particularly in the biomedical science components. Although the shift from basic scientists to educators seems promising, no study has yet explored the transition process from the perspective of basic scientists themselves, especially in the early stages…

Definitions of teaching quality differ across jurisdictions and have evolved over time. Drawing on a study of five high-achieving countries with strong supports for teachers' professional learning and practice, this article describes the perspectives on good teaching rooted in standards for entry, preparation, and practice. These nations…

Past work on mathematics teachers' content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has resulted in mixed findings about the strength of the relationship between and development of these constructs. The current study uses data from the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) to examine the relationship between…

In this paper, we examined teachers' understanding of electrical concepts such as power, current and potential difference based on how these concepts were applied to understand the relative brightness seen in bulbs of different wattage under different connections--series or parallel. From the responses of teachers to a concept question, we…

In this article, the authors investigate 6 Singaporean geography teachers' understandings of climate change education. The findings indicate that the participants held very different beliefs about the primary purposes of climate change education, in spite of the highly centralized national curriculum and the unambiguous state support for the…

This study explores the use of a corpus of classroom discourse data (Singapore Corpus of Research in Education or SCoRE) to facilitate the professional development of English language (EL) teachers in Singapore. A survey was first conducted to probe the knowledge base and belief system of EL teachers in three key domains: epistemology, pedagogy,…

A school-based professional development programme (SBPD) aimed at developing secondary school mathematics teachers' competencies to teach mathematical modelling in Singapore is presented and evaluated in this article. The SBPD is characterized by two key features--content elements to develop teachers' knowledge and skills, and transformative…

As former and current STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) school teachers in Singapore, we explore the challenges we both experienced while teaching at different STEM schools. Through this article, we make a case for the teacher preparation programs locally and around the world to give more attention to a changing education…

This article presents the results of a comparative study of the content in selected teacher education programmes for primary and lower secondary teachers in Canada, Denmark, Finland and Singapore. First and foremost, the study is a comparison between teacher education programmes in, on the one hand, Canada, Finland and Singapore, all of which…

Institutions assess teaching effectiveness in various ways, such as classroom observation, peer evaluation and self-assessment. In higher education, student feedback continues to be the main teaching evaluation tool. However, most of such forms include characteristics of good teaching that the institutions deem important and may not adequately…

In this article, we explore the mathematical content knowledge of one entire cohort of pre-service teachers (N = 107) through analysing their performance in a Secondary Mathematics Audit that was developed for the International Comparative Studies in Mathematics Teacher Training that was initiated by the University of Plymouth. We study how their…