I must admit, I'm quite surprised that of all the keynote speakers, the best turned out to be the 2nd Permanent Secretary. She was eloquent, funny, and able to connect with the audience of teachers. She also came out as being honest rather than bureaucratic, and some of what she said and her responses to questions surprised me.

A main focus of her talk was on the changes that are happening in the education landscape. There are mainly four points:

1. Options - in the form of paths and choices
2. Autonomy - for schools
3. Motivation
4. Quality of interaction

She also shared many examples of successful teachers and ideas, including video clips, teachers' powerpoint slides and reflections. Overall, the message is not that different from what has been passed down over the past few years - changes and innovations.

PS2 also talked about examinations, which was one point that I disagreed with. She felt that examinations is a way to assess how well a student has learned, and how well a teacher has taught. What I feel is, that is what assessment is supposed to do, not examinations. We use different forms of assessment to find out whether teaching is effective and learning has taken place, and examinations is only one of such tool. Indeed, I've discovered that if I really want students to do well in examinations, I shouldn't teach well. What I need to do is to:

1. Teach prescriptively. For example, tell the students there are 4 type of differentiation questions instead of leading them to find out. In all topics to teach, focus on what can come out of the exams, instead of why we are studying these topics, and how can they be applied in real-life. Give them a clear structure, prepare them for exams (not life).
   
2. Drill and practice. It doesn't matter whether they understand, give them lots of examples and show them the solutions, then give them lots of questions to do. Monkey see, monkey do. Who cares whether they know what's the point of doing binomial expansion? Or quadratic functions?
3. Be nice to students. Give them what they want, provide them with notes and everything, keep and file their assignments for them, spoon-feed them to let them know you care. It doesn't matter that in real-life, people won't do that. It doesn't matter that they will never learn how to take notes for themselves, how to organise their own learnings. As long as they do well in the exams.

Dont' be mistaken, I do most of those above as well, but I believe that it should be done so that students consciously learn to be independent, rather than to cripple them with prescriptive help.

During Q&A, someone (guess who) asked the PS2 how can we sieve out innovations that are really useful and sustainable, from those that are simply play-acting. A record of successful innovation in someone's work review can turn out to be accounts of nightmares and immense stress for thousands of other teachers in their diaries (teachers usually don't keep blogs - even if they do they don't record such things [there are consequences...]). Her reply was candid:

1. To inspire people, a lot of fancy examples are given, the idea is to encourage innovation and once things get started, no matter how "wayang" the initial stage is, at least it gives people something to scrutinise and say "I can do better than that". My worry is that wayanging becomes a habit and a culture, and becomes acceptable and thus the norm. When things run out of hand, how do we clean up the mess?
2. There is sufficient wisdom in the senior management to figure out the real innovations and the wayangs. My take on this is, you never know. Messages always get filtered along the way, whether it's coming down from the top, or going up from the bottom. Also, there are many unscrupulous and servile people around whose only skill in life is to sweet-talk and paint a rosy picture of everything. How do dynasties fall?

But at least, I feel that her answers were satisfactory, though I hope she will think more about this. Going from the applause after the question was posed, it's probably in the mind of many teachers, and is potentially morale-affecting.