Was out for dinner with some NIE classmates on monday, told them about the question I directed to PS2 during the teachers conference. Our discussion inspired this post. I actually told this to Dr Chee, my MAIDT lecturer whom I consider to be a great teacher, before - that I'm beginning to doubt that all the large scale "innovation" policies leads to better learning on the students' part.

I've come to this idea through my own experience and observation that meaningful learnings take place in a classroom not because of some fancy policy implementations. Rather, they take place because of the teachers, who decided to take charge of his/her classes and really spend the effort and time to create a conducive learning environment, and design lessons which are meant to let students learn something meaningful (not fanciful). And this is true no matter what the education system is like, no matter what era we live in! Through the ages, what really matters most in education is the teachers.

This conforms with Lipsky's theory on street-level bureaucrats. In the end, no matter what policies have been passed down from the top, it is the teachers who interpret whatever they want of the policies, and implement whatever they wish (to a certain degree of freedom, though bounded by administrative checks).  We can think of this as being a problem, as good policies may end up being corrupted - like fanciful gimmicks to impress especially during directors or ministers visit - but it also mean that as long as there are good teachers with good intentions, there will always be pockets of students who will benefit from their teaching, no matter how stupid the system is! In the words of my good friend Laycheng (who's a great teacher), "the teacher is the king in the classroom".

And perhaps this is where we should start when we talk about innovations. I know that current policy also believes that innovation should be ground-up, but somehow even that becomes a sort-of top-down directive. People begin to pretend that they are doing some ground-up innovations. Indeed, it is my belief that such an unnatural setting will not lead to a conducive environment for ground-up innovations. What then will provide such an environment? I'm afraid I do not even have an idea ... at least not yet.