Knowledge management, sustainable innovation, and pre‐service teacher education in Singapore

Abstract

In 1997, Singapore's Ministry of Education (MOE) committed itself to an ambitious program of pedagogical reform in Singaporean schools in anticipation of the kind of institutional challenges – particularly those in increasingly globalized labor markets – that young Singaporeans were likely to face in the coming decades. Since then, the Ministry has designed and implemented a series of initiatives that, the authors suggest, will go a considerable distance to achieve its objectives. These initiatives focus on substantial changes in the system of ‘instructional governance’ in Singapore over the past decade, and efforts to change the pattern of classroom pedagogy. But while these represent a good start, the authors argue that these initiatives do not go quite far enough to close the gap between policy and practice. And while the improvement of classroom pedagogy in the long run will depend on the improvement of initial teacher education, it is also the case that, given what is known about the circumstances that optimize professional learning in both pre‐service and in‐service programs, the improvement of teacher education will depend substantially on the prior improvement of classroom pedagogy. How Singapore might escape this conundrum is the central focus of this paper.

Keywords:

• teacher education
• knowledge management
• sustainable innovation
• professional learning communities

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Nicholas Tang, Catherine Ramos, and Jim Albright for their help in the preparation of this paper.

Notes

1. The term ‘instructional governance’ is borrowed from David Cohen and his colleagues in the USA (see Cohen & Hill, 2001; Cohen & Spillane, 1992; Spillane, 2004).