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The 21st century education requires schools to provide students with better support in their learning. One way to facilitate this change is through school-based curriculum development (SBCD). Much in the literature talked about SBCD outcomes on respective key stakeholders in schools, but little has been said about the interactions amongst the stakeholders in the process of implementing SBCD. This study examined the interactions amongst school leaders, key personnel and teachers in implementing curriculum innovation in a newly founded government school in Singapore. The findings reveal that the dialogic interactions amongst the stakeholders were reflexively shaping and shaped by the culture of collective sharing and learning in the school. These dynamic, reflexive interactions were coexisting and interplaying with the chains linking one with another, forming an ecology of dialogic interactions amongst the stakeholders. We argue that with an effective enactment of distributed leadership, top-down visioning could be embraced and practised by teachers, and the ecology of dialogical interactions has great potential to sustain SBCD in schools.

The spread of English as a global language has contributed to the trend of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) through government-funded schemes around the world, particularly in East Asia. In Taiwan, the NEST scheme has been recently expanded because of the national policy for a bilingual Taiwan in 2030. However, the NEST scheme in Taiwan has the strictest selection criteria and the least attractive incentives in the region. As these unfavorable conditions could affect the recruitment and effectiveness of the NEST scheme, this study explored the advantages and challenges perceived by NEST participants through in-depth interviews with 24 NESTs working in Taiwanese public schools to identify the factors that could influence their attrition and retention. It was found that most advantages were associated with the participants' schools, such as the provision of resources and a sense of achievement, rather than from outside the schools. However, most of the perceived challenges also occurred inside the schools, such as the lack of collaboration with colleagues and class sizes. These findings suggested that the issues and agendas at the participating schools had the greatest influence on NEST decisions to stay or leave Taiwan. The implications for policymakers and school leaders are discussed and relevant suggestions are made.

Teachers' consideration may affect their intention to implement learner-centred pedagogy. Literature showed that aspects such as task goal, students' characteristics, teachers' ability, learning environment design, and school shape teacher considerations in teaching analysis. However, the interrelationship among these aspects remains largely underexplored. This study aims to explore science teachers' considerations when designing and implementing learner-centred teaching tasks and the interrelationship among them. Through phenomenographic analyses, the authors identified five categories of experiencing teaching analysis: (a) covering the curriculum contents; (b) preparing students for assessment; (c) accommodating students' characteristics; (d) designing appropriate learner-centred pedagogy; and (e) enhancing students' autonomy and social interaction. Findings suggest that teachers' considerations in the first three categories were limited to the classroom settings, while the last two categories show extension from classrooms to beyond school settings. The authors suggest school leaders and teacher educators leverage teachers' pragmatic reasoning to raise the holistic awareness and extend the horizon of teachers' consideration.

While Singapore has been consistently ranked in international assessments as one of the world's top education systems, it has a higher percentage of low-performing students compared to other top education systems. Increasingly, the Singapore society is becoming more stratified. In 2011, the Singapore education system revealed a new vision -- a student-centric, values-driven education -- seemingly expressing the desire to provide all the aid each student needs to succeed. On the National Day Rally speech 2017, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong declared the Singapore government's intention to provide all children more support at an earlier age to foster social mobility of the nation. Through glimpsing into education policies pertaining to low-performing students in Singapore and examining empirical evidence from local studies and international literature on low-performing students, the author advocates a shift in paradigm and changes of some long-held assumptions such as "one single way to success" and "early streaming for better differentiation" across the three levels of school, education system and society and family to level up low-performing students in the pursuit of the new vision and its goals as well as education equality in the nation.

Theoretically, teacher efficacy beliefs (TEBs) are influenced by the analysis of the teaching task and its context (hereafter, teaching analysis). However, there is a lack of empirical study on the relationships between them. This qualitative exploratory study investigated how teachers related their TEBs to their teaching analysis. Interviews were conducted with ten science teachers in Singapore, who were adopting learner-centred pedagogy in their teaching. Six themes emerged: (a) familiarity with the task; (b) improvability of the task; (c) complexity of the task; (d) compatibility of the task with students; (e) collegiality and (f) structural supports. Findings also reveal the dynamic nature and the contingent aspect of TEBs. Implications for school leaders and educators are suggested.

Although the complexity of identity transformation among Chinese-speaking international students (CSIS) has been emphasized in previous research, there is a perceived linear and causal pattern between studying abroad and being intercultural. This pattern of thinking results in the risk of treating all the CSIS as the same in each cohort of students. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of habitus, in this auto/ethnographic study 3 Taiwanese international postgraduate students were followed for 1 year to elucidate the complexity of their identity transformations. The findings suggest a variety of identity changes resulting from the participants' evaluation of their past, present, and future situations.

Teachers' professional identity influences the way they think and teach. For pre-service non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs), they are at the crucial stage of constructing self-image and self-perception as English language teaching (ELT) professionals, their beliefs about English teaching and learning and their attitudes towards changing teaching contexts. Applying a closed-ended questionnaire and in-depth interviews, this study investigated the impact of Native English Speaking Teachers (NESTs) on 258 pre-service NNESTs' professional identity in Taiwan through the lens of social relationality. The results show that NESTs as significant "others" to the participants have brought conflicting discourses to the ELT profession (the micro-social context) and the policy discourse and the society (the macro-social context). In the micro-social context, the participants encounter contradictory discourses brought by the presence of NESTs in terms of what the participants can offer as opposed to what ideal English teachers should possess. In the macro-social context, the participants face competing discourses caused by the presence of NESTs, in terms of what constitutes good teaching practice, as opposed to what is valued by the government and the major stakeholders in the society. Arguably, the participants' professional identity is shaped through the process of interpreting and conjoining these contradictory and competing discourses. To help pre-service NNESTs construct a positive professional identity to support their professional lives, reforms in teacher education programs should focus on developing the teachers' "non-native" status into resources for ascertaining the needs of the teaching contexts they are operating within.

The status of English as a global language has played a significant role in contemporary language education policies across the world. In East Asia, the hegemony of English has been reflected in a number of central governments' policies of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) to participate in English language education. This paper focuses on the NESTs recruitment policies in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan with the aim of examining how teacher professionalism is represented in these policy discourses and how this conceived teacher professionalism impacts on English teaching and learning in these countries. Through the analysis of policy texts and documents, we argue that teacher professionalism has been assigned a different agenda by the governments who subscribe to "native speaker norms" and legitimise unqualified and inexperienced NESTs in the profession of English language teaching (ELT). These anti-professionalism policies have not achieved the intended consequence of improving students' English proficiency, but have instead resulted in the unintended consequences of damaging the quality of English instruction and jeopardising the professional identity of local non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in these countries. The results reveal an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness of these NEST recruitment programmes.

Background: To help equip students with 21st century competencies, one popular strategy adopted by governments and schools worldwide is to move from less formal to more engaging school environments through School-Based Curriculum Development (SBCD). In Singapore, the governmental call to "Teach Less and Learn More" has galvanised SBCD in schools nationwide. Schools have been given more autonomy and greater flexibility to develop diverse approaches in innovating their own curriculum frameworks.Purpose: This study aims to provide a nuanced, retrospective account of the enactment of SBCD via Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-integrated, theme-based programmes in a primary school in Singapore. The research questions that guide this study are: (1) How do the school stakeholders enact SBCD? (2) How does the enactment affect the school stakeholders?Method: This study looked into curriculum innovation using a retrospective lens and employed a case study approach to examine the enactment of SBCD in the school. Five focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted with the major stakeholders of the school, including two school leaders, ten key personnel and ten teachers across different subjects and grade levels. Thematic analysis of the data was undertaken.Findings: Four themes and twelve associated sub-themes were identified from the analysis of the FGDs. The four themes include experimentation, support, growth and challenges. This whole-school approach to curriculum innovation had a clear focus on mobilizing the school community to tackle the uncertainties of implementing an innovative curriculum. The stakeholders played diverse but intertwined roles throughout different stages of the enactment process, producing strong collegiality amongst the stakeholders. This prevailing collegiality, as embedded in the active participation of the stakeholders in a multiplicity of collective sharing and learning practices, seems likely to help the school achieved desired outcomes.Conclusions: The whole-school approach to curriculum innovation in the case school is promising from the perspectives of teaching-learning and student outcomes, but cannot provide a panacea for all the challenges encountered in the enactment process.

Accompanying the trend of schools moving from teacher-centred to learner-centred pedagogy (LCP) practices, researchers have argued that teachers switching from the one to the other may as a result make changes in their personal judgement of their own teaching competency. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of recent studies of teacher efficacy beliefs (TEB) in relation to the LCP context. We have adopted a grounded approach to review 34 published papers between January 2009 and April 2016. Six themes were identified from our analysis of the findings of these studies to delineate how TEB has been studied in the LCP context. By a comparison with other two influential reviews on TEB research, we have also identified three trends and five issues in TEB research in LCP context. Future research directions are proposed with the intent to engage researchers sharing the same interest in this field.

Professional learning communities (PLCs) as a means of raising the teaching profession are becoming more attractive in education systems seeking to improve school improvement processes and outcomes. The main intention is to increase the individual and collective capacity of teachers so as to support school-wide capacity for teaching and learning. Although international research on PLCs is relatively extensive, covering about three decades, there are still gaps in its research base; specifically on the concept of community and the effects of PLCs. In this article, we propose a research agenda for PLC research that will afford substantive theorization on PLCs which will need to be drawn from robust empirical evidence. In the proposed research agenda for PLCs, we first argue that a PLC is a multi-dimensional construct comprising three inter-dependent dimensions of "community", "learning" and "professional". This precedential task is necessary before investigations on effects or impact (direct or indirect) of PLCs can be meaningfully and reliably carried out. We then propose a research framework for PLCs constituting three aspects: construct of PLCs; conditions-contexts of PLCs; and causalities of PLCs. Finally, we propose six aspects pertaining to methodological rigor to support PLC research.

Developing a high level of efficacy can be challenging to teachers who work with low-achieving students. The authors adopted a pragmatic qualitative research design to investigate the sources of efficacy information reported by five high-efficacy teachers and four low-efficacy teachers of secondary low-achieving students in Singapore. The results show that the psychological sources of information postulated by Albert Bandura (i.e., mastery experiences, verbal persuasion, vicarious experience, and physiological and emotional arousal), are valid but insufficient to explain high teacher efficacy. Three additional nonpsychological sources of information, including teachers' knowledge about students, rapport with students, and previous working experiences, also played significant roles in the creation of high teacher efficacy.

Drawing from Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory, Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy and Hoy (1998) proposed an integrated model of teacher efficacy to aid the understanding of this complex construct. This framework, despite its richness and usefulness in framing teacher efficacy research within the education landscape, is barely examined in the Southeast Asian education context. Acknowledging that teacher efficacy is a context-specific construct, this article discusses three defining features of the socio-cultural context in Singapore, including diversification of curriculum, high-stakes examinations and the culture of collectivism. We argue that these three features present a unique culturally appropriated perspective on the interpretation of Tschannen-Moran et al.'s integrated conceptual framework. These contextual characteristics and their implications to choices of methodological inquiries need to be considered in the application of this influential framework to teacher efficacy research across subject matters, levels and academic streams in Singapore as well as other education systems that share similar socio-cultural backgrounds.

This study adopted a pragmatic qualitative research design to unpack high and low efficacy teachers' task analysis and competence assessment in the context of teaching low-achieving students. Nine secondary school English and Science teachers were recruited and interviewed. Results of thematic analysis show that helping students perform well in exams was identified by both the high efficacy teachers (HETs) and the low efficacy teachers (LETs) as the sacred task, but the HETs perceived more contextual support from school culture, school leaderships and collegiality than the LETs did. Although the HETs showed more confidence than the LETs in instructional strategies, classroom management and student engagement, both the HETs and LETs experienced struggles when their personality traits and beliefs were in conflict with required strategies or imposed regulations. Despite the LETs having a lower level of perceived competence, their hunger for learning reveals that their sense of efficacy could be enhanced if provided with courses that focus on coaching and mentoring experiences.

This study aims to unpack the context, processes and outcomes as the three key components of school-based curriculum development (SBCD) in six different schools in Singapore. A total of 31 focus group discussions were conducted with teachers, key personnel and school leaders in these schools. From the data, we derived a framework of SBCD which consists of five themes centred on "culture of learning". This framework provides an alternative lens to traditional conceptualisation of SBCD by highlighting the nonlinear relationships among the three components. Two recommendations to researchers, policy makers and practitioners regarding SBCD towards sustained commitment for innovation and potential scalability are suggested.

This paper discusses the representation of information literacy and media literacy in the Singapore education discourse as part of its twenty-first century competencies framework. Through examining the conceptual definitions, purposes/aims, and means of these two significant twenty-first century competencies in the global context and the Singapore education policy, the authors argue that despite both information literacy and media literacy have been widely recognized as crucial skills in the knowledge-based economy, they are perceived as separate concepts, given differentiated emphasis, and implemented using similar approaches by various governmental and educational agencies in Singapore. To facilitate the acquisition of these critical competencies, this paper argues that an overarching framework featuring the seamless integration of information and media literacy in school curricula and public education needs to be in place to clarify conceptual concerns and guide its practical implementation.

It has been nearly two decades since the education reform movement initiated in Taiwan in 1994. As a consequence of the lift of martial law, this wave of education reform exceeds previous reforms in terms of scale, initiatives, and impacts. Although the performance of Taiwanese students has been in the leading group of various international rankings, the call for an education system that can cater various needs of students rather than focusing on academic achievement has been recurring in the public debate in Taiwan. How to maintain the existing performance and provide opportunities for students with different talents becomes the center of education reform. This paper aims at exploring the path of education reform in Taiwan with a focus on the shifting paradigm of education since 1994. Two aspects including teacher education and curriculum are discussed. We firstly introduce the social context of the recent education reform movement and then explicate the major trends of education reform and various key initiatives. In the third part of this paper, we map out the trajectory of policies, changes, and implementations in the above-mentioned aspects during education reform with the emerging issues, challenges, and future directions. This paper offers international readers insights on how a well-performed education system attempts to improve itself within a complicated and fast-changing social and political context. We argue that unsuccessful reform attempts might provide more lessons than those successful ones. This paper is based on the discussion of two unsuccessful attempts made by the Ministry of Education to reveal the bumping reforming process in Taiwan.

The 21st century education requires schools to provide students with better support in their learning. One way to facilitate this change is through school‐based curriculum development (SBCD). Much in the literature talked about SBCD outcomes on respective key stakeholders in schools, but little has been said about the interactions amongst the stakeholders in the process of implementing SBCD. This study examined the interactions amongst school leaders, key personnel and teachers in implementing curriculum innovation in a newly founded government school in Singapore. The findings reveal that the dialogic interactions amongst the stakeholders were reflexively shaping and shaped by the culture of collective sharing and learning in the school. These dynamic, reflexive interactions were coexisting and interplaying with the chains linking one with another, forming an ecology of dialogic interactions amongst the stakeholders. We argue that with an effective enactment of distributed leadership, top‐down visioning could be embraced and practised by teachers, and the ecology of dialogical interactions has great potential to sustain SBCD in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Articulating and implementing national development plans (NDP s) has been a popular approach taken by most governments in the world in response to the opportunities and challenges occurring in domestic and international spheres. Since the 2000s the Taiwanese government has launched a series of NDP s with different goals, foci, and tactical approaches. This paper adopts a retrospective lens to examine how English language education has been strategically situated in the NDP s of Taiwan and reflects on both the alignments and misalignments between the unveiled goals of the NDP s and the policies pertaining to English language education of the nation over the last two decades. In the pursuit of the goals of the contemporary NDP of the nation, strategic remodelling of teacher education programmes is needed through: (1) expanding bilingual/all-English programmes within departments; (2) advocating departmental interaction within/across teacher training institutes; and (3) optimising training and teaching opportunities for foreign students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Singapore has been consistently ranked in international assessments as one of the world's top education systems, it has a higher percentage of low-performing students compared to other top education systems. Increasingly, the Singapore society is becoming more stratified. In 2011, the Singapore education system revealed a new vision – a student-centric, values-driven education – seemingly expressing the desire to provide all the aid each student needs to succeed. On the National Day Rally speech 2017, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong declared the Singapore government's intention to provide all children more support at an earlier age to foster social mobility of the nation. Through glimpsing into education policies pertaining to low-performing students in Singapore and examining empirical evidence from local studies and international literature on low-performing students, the author advocates a shift in paradigm and changes of some long-held assumptions such as one single way to success and early streaming for better differentiation across the three levels of school, education system and society and family to level up low-performing students in the pursuit of the new vision and its goals as well as education equality in the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]