At the end of Primary 6, students in Singapore schools take a national examination, the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE). Society at large view the PSLE as a highstakes examination. In addition to out-of-class work assigned by mathematics teachers for students to prepare for the PSLE mathematics, parents may also draw on out-ofschool…

Mathematical problem solving remains a struggle for many students today (Celebioglu et al., 2010; Englard, 2010; Gavaz et al., 2021; N. H. Lee et al., 2014; Yeo, 2011). Though intervention studies have reported measured impact on improving students' problem-solving abilities (Gavaz et al., 2021; Gidalevich & Kramarski, 2019; N. H. Lee et al.,…

Teaching towards big ideas provide opportunities for teachers to think deeply about content and pedagogy in order to support their students to see connections in mathematics. However, teachers may not always activate or mobilise their knowledge in classroom situations. This paper looks into how a teacher, Peter, think about the tasks in his…

In this paper, we empirically examine and assess the effectiveness of a chatbot workshop as experiential teaching and learning tool to engage undergraduate students enrolled in an elective course "Doing Business with A.I." in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) at Singapore Management University. The chatbot workshop provides…

It is easy to dismiss the work of "teaching students to apply formula" as a low-order priority and thus trivialises the professional knowledge associated with this practice. Our encounter with an experienced teacher--through the examination of her practices and elaborations--challenges this simplistic assumption. There are layers of…

The more ambitious an educational innovation, the greater the challenge in scaling up. In this paper, we focus on the scaling up of an ambitious pedagogical practice--mathematics problem solving as a regular feature in the classroom. We adopt a long-term approach to continual professional development (CPD) that began with intensive work with one…

This paper reports on one aspect of a bigger project: teachers' design of instructional materials. We found a number of design moves used by the teachers in our study. In this paper, we report three of them: Making things explicit, making connections, and resequencing practice examples. [This paper is the fourth in a symposium of four papers. For…

The phrase 'make it explicit' is a common advice given to teachers. It is, however, not clear to us what this actually means when translated into classroom practice. Our review found that we are not alone: "explicit" is used in different ways in the education literature. This paper explores, through a case study of a teacher who stated…

The Inspiring Teacher of English Award and the President's Award for Teachers are national awards that recognize outstanding Singapore educators. This paper delves into the practices and philosophies of six award-winning teachers, unravelling the intricacies that distinguish their pedagogical approaches. The study is centred around three pivotal…

This paper is an exercise in reflection on my role as a researcher-teacher, while designing and implementing a qualitative study in a secondary school in Singapore. The first study of its kind locally, I designed and taught a bidialectal programme with Singlish as a resource to facilitate the teaching of Standard English. The 8-week programme was…

A case study of calculus instructional material (comprising of lecture notes and tutorial practice worksheets) designed by teachers from a Singapore pre-university is presented in this paper. As textbooks have not been available for mathematics at the pre-university levels, the instructional material was a product of the teachers' collaborative…

There has been much debate over the role of grammar instruction in the teaching of writing -- whether grammar and writing should be taught separately, or in an integrated manner in the English Language writing class. This paper describes an action research project aimed at contributing to this debate through some teachers' reflections on…

When mathematics teachers plan lessons, they interact with curriculum materials in various ways. In this paper, we draw on Brown's (2009) "Design Capacity for Enactment" framework to explore the practice of "adapting" curriculum materials in the case of a Singapore secondary mathematics teacher. Problems from the textbook used…

This is a common experience among education researchers: we notice a surprising instructional move enacted by a teacher. After deeper reflection, we ask, "How many other teachers in Singapore do this?" In this paper, we describe an instrument we designed that is part of the resource needed to answer such questions. [This paper is the…

The aim of this study is examining the relationship between student achievement and bringing interesting materials to the classroom in 4th grade mathematics in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Singapore. This study used TIMSS 2015 data to investigate the relationship between student achievement and bringing interesting materials to the classroom…