Challenges faced by Singapore teachers implementing differentiated instruction

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Global-Local Tensions of Globalized Education

Proposal

In the U.S., differentiated instruction (DI) has gained popularity since the new millennium (Delisle, 2015). In Singapore, responding to a diversifying population and move towards a “student-centric, values-driven” education, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has been encouraging educators to embrace DI (MOE, 2008, 2018). However, scholars have cautioned against seeing curriculum and pedagogy as acontextual (Popkewitz & Rizvi, 2010). They argue that in educational borrowing, we need to understand the social-cultural-political-material influences of origin and destination contexts that educational ideas are taken from and transplanted into (Mukhopadhyay & Sriprakash, 2011; Vavrus & Bartlett, 2012). Indeed, while DI has gained traction outside the U.S.—in places like Turkey (Pilten, 2016) and Hong Kong (Wan, 2016)—few studies examined how teachers have navigated DI in countries beyond the U.S. Thus, this qualitative study aims to make sense of the challenges ten teachers faced in implementing DI in Singapore.

DI principles drove the design of the research and methodological tools, while Alexander’s (2009) “comparative pedagogy” framed the analysis of factors influencing Singapore teachers’ implementation of DI. Alexander’s ideas help deepen the analysis of the educational transfer of DI as it brings to fore culture, history, contexts, and policy in the shaping of teachers’ decisions and actions.

Ten participants from ten different public schools in Singapore were recruited by criterion sampling for teaching subjects, school level, teaching experience, and gender. Over a year, participants completed an online background questionnaire, two interviews, four lesson observations, and eight pre-/post-lesson observation interviews. In total, there were 39 lesson observations. An observation log detailing minute-by-minute teacher practices and observation rating sheet were completed after each observation. In analyzing for challenges, I used interviews as the primary form of data and the observation logs and observation ratings were used to triangulate against the interviews. I conducted “inductive analysis” (Hatch, 2002, p. 161) to create codes that were emergent, rather than prefigured (Crabtree & Miller, 1999).

Preliminary findings indicate that Singapore teachers face three types of challenges. The first is cultural—teachers struggled with DI as it called for a less hierarchical teacher-student relationships and more individualistic focus on the learner. The next is structural—teachers were concerned with the large class size (average 40), non-homeroom system, dense curriculum coverage and high-stakes standardized test expectations in Singapore. The final one is technical—teachers perceived DI as complex, demanding, and were uncertain “whether what I’m [they’re] doing is correct or effective.” In sum, DI took on localized meanings as teachers encounter challenges brought about by local contexts.

These findings spell implications for policy makers and change managers who may be inclined to examine and address teachers’ challenges in implementing educational ideas borrowed from abroad. Teacher educators could create space to dialogue about teachers’ challenges to help them overcome their mental barriers in implementation. On a comparative education front, the Singapore case could offer lessons for other educational contexts, given DI’s increasing popularity (particularly in Asian countries), so that meaningful and sustainable educational borrowing can take place.

Author

• Tang T. Heng, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore