Market-leading organizations habitually innovate, adjust quickly to new business conditions, and seize emerging opportunities before their competitors do. At the Center for Research and Innovation (CRI) a spin-off in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, the focus is on innovations and preparing for the future. This is done by working hand-in-hand with partners to achieve shared goals. While it is a small and nimble organization—one that blends best practices, innovations, and evolutionary change, it stands on the shoulders of giants by partnering industry-leading companies and educational institutions. CRI Singapore explores ways to embrace strategic experimentation by balancing innovation with performance, based on evidence-based practices, and will work to successfully transform ideas into workable solutions, paving the path to scaling greater heights. CRI is currently involved in innovations and research on technologically rich resources and programmes using financial and fintech literacy as the content.
It is a not-for-profit center. It exists to propel innovation and research in practice as the primary mission. It advocates a culture of collaboration which is fertile for the building and growth of a Professional Learning community (PLC) in various specific sectors. A PLC is an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. Professional learning communities operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators.
Highly-effective PLCs understand that collaboration is inherently neutral, and for the process to generate outcomes, collaborative teams must do the right work with a results orientation. The 5 tenets for the CRI Singapore are the 5Cs as follows:
Concerned Learning Planet
CRI Singapore shares CRI-Paris’s vision of a Learning Planet. The very essence of a learning community is a focus on and a commitment to the learning of each student, taking ownership of learning about the earth and all around us. When we embrace high levels of learning for good, the fundamental responsibility of all of us to achieve this shared vision of a learning planet where the members of a PLC create and are guided by a clear and compelling vision of what we can do together in order to help all students learn and take ownership of learning and serving. As a Concerned Learning Planet, we engage in collective inquiry into both best practices in teaching and in learning. We also inquire about their current reality including their present practices and achievements. We gravitate towards building shared knowledge rather than just pooling opinions. We cultivate an acute sense of curiosity and openness to new possibilities. We make collective commitments clarifying what each member will do to create such an organization, and use results-oriented goals to benchmark our progress. We work together to clarify what our students must learn, monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis, provide systematic interventions that ensure students receive additional time and support for learning and extend and enrich learning when students have already mastered the intended outcomes.
A corollary assumption is that the educators and stakeholders must also be continually learning. Therefore, all of us are engaged in job-embedded learning and continuous research as part of our routine work practices, for achieving purposeful results as a concerned learning planet.
Collaborative Culture and Learning Environment
Collaboration is a means, not the end itself. In a PLC, collaboration represents a systematic process in which we work together interdependently in order to impact their classroom practice in ways that will lead to better results for their students, for their team, and for their school, and beyond.
By having strong partnerships with key stakeholders and practitioners, we embed research in our innovations so as to implement evidence-based practices. Our strength also lies in a strong base in subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge, as well as a strong connection to educational research. The development and involvement of educators as researchers, underpinned by evidenced-based learning, enables a collaborative learning environment where educators are also active citizens of the learning planet.
Collective Inquiry Into Best Practice and Current Reality
Besides engaging in research projects, CRI is also into organising Think Tanks, Roundtables, Focus group discussions and building Community of Practice for its partners and sponsors. To keep abreast of current developments in the field and beyond, collective inquiry enables team members to develop new skills and capabilities that in turn lead to new experiences and awareness. Gradually, this heightened awareness transforms into fundamental shifts in attitudes, beliefs, and habits which, over time, transform the culture of the organisation. Sensing the landscape through the notion of social learning will be used as the main orienting theoretical framework for investigations. The version of social learning that we adopt argues that our understanding of concepts and processes is socially constructed through conversations about the matter in question and through grounded and situated interactions (Brown & Adler, 2008; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). The relationship between ‘learning about’ and ‘learning to be’ contributes to ‘deep learning’. Based on Gee’s (2007) definition, they argue that ‘deep learning’ also means learning which can generate “real understanding”, that is, “the ability to apply one’s knowledge and even to transform that knowledge for innovation” (p. 172).
Catalysts for Action: Learning by Doing
At CRI, we are action oriented: we move quickly to turn aspirations into action and visions into reality. We understand that the most powerful learning always occurs in a context of taking action, and we value engagement and experience as the most effective methods of learning. Deep learning requires experience, which requires taking action. According to Mintzberg, it “is as much about doing in order to think as thinking in order to do”. In fact, the very reason that people work together in teams and engage in collective inquiry is to serve as catalysts for action. This involves participating in the practices of the community or through a process of acquiring relevant knowledge and skills “just-in-time-and-just-in-place” to carry out particular tasks (Brown & Adler, 2008; cited in Lankshear & Knobel, 2011, p. 220).
Commitment to Continuous Improvement
The goal is not simply to learn a new strategy, but instead to create conditions for a perpetual learning environment in which innovation and experimentation are viewed not as tasks to be accomplished or projects to be completed but as ways of conducting day-to-day business—forever. Furthermore, participation in this process is not reserved for those designated as leaders; rather, it is a responsibility of every member of the organization. Inherent in this principle is the persistent disquiet with the status quo and a constant search for a better way to achieve goals and accomplish the purpose of the organization. Systematic processes engage each member of the organization in an ongoing cycle of:
The above 5 tenets will position CRI in good stead for results orientation. Ultimately, we all realize that such efforts in these areas (a focus on learning, collaborative teams, collective inquiry, action orientation, and continuous improvement) must be assessed on the basis of results rather than just stop at intentions. As Peter Senge and colleagues conclude, "The rationale for any strategy for building a learning organization revolves around the premise that such organizations will produce dramatically improved results." At CRI, we will develop and pursue measurable improvement goals that are aligned with goals for learning.
References
DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., & Many, T. (2006). Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work™.
When I was approached by the Founder and Director of CRI-Paris, to be a visiting prof with CRI-Paris, there are 2 goals in mind for my visit. They are to share our success stories and experience in Singapore and to make mentoring as a culture of the learning environment here in Paris.
RESEARCH and INNOVATION:
Seamless Learning Environments Research
Authentic Learning Environments for engaging students in learning better
Part 1 : REAL TALE
On the success stories, I would like to provide an overview of what we do in Singapore followed by a selected research that I initiated called Retail Experience Active Learning (REAL). Currently I am into another research called:
Creating a Technology-rich Authentic Learning Environments (TALE): Using a Mobile App to Engage Students in Real World Learning for Elements of Business Skills
The proposed project is primarily inspired by the key findings of the principal investigator’s (PI) prior study – “Retail Experience for Active Learning (REAL)”– which investigated whether students learnt better when they were able to make meaningful connections between the school curriculum and their learning experiences at workplace environment. The study saw a significant transfer of knowledge and skills from classroom learning to the workplace during students’ work attachment and similarly from the workplace to enhancing classroom learning. More crucially, the study argues that experiential learning in work attachments (authentic learning environment) contributes to students’ engagement with academic content (in formal classroom environment). The study also concludes that learning becomes dynamic, co-constructed and socially purposeful when its relevance is taken up at another site of learning which can be in or outside classrooms, or in simulated or non-simulated environments. Authentic learning environments are then places where knowledge is co-constructed and used in socially meaningful ways at a particular environment, context or site. From this perspective, authentic learning can in principle occur in and beyond classrooms. While these empirical and theoretical insights have not directly led to the further research studies, they have inspired the development of a number of mobile applications that are currently being adopted by teachers with their students in the schools in Singapore.
Part 2 : Mentoring & Professional Learning Community
A Shared Vision we have is that we are committed to helping every learner develop as a whole person, fulfil his or her potential and help shape a shared future built on the well-being of individuals, communities and the planet. We would like our students to embrace prosperity, sustainability and well-being. They will need to be responsible and empowered, placing collaboration above division, and sustainability above short-term gain. In the face of an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, education can make the difference as to whether people embrace the challenges they are confronted with or whether they are defeated by them. And in an era characterised by a new explosion of scientific knowledge and a growing array of complex societal problems, it is appropriate that curricula should continue to evolve, perhaps in radical ways. We will explore how best to capture such rich experience and skills of mentors as the transfer of skills pass from mentor to mentee. Will the baton drop?
Networked Learning Communities (NLCs) provides platforms for the sharing and proliferating of enhanced practices by teachers so as to foster the professional growth of teachers and enhance their role as teacher mentors. NLC aims to build a systemic knowledge base of good practices that is continually drawn from and improved by teachers.