Singapore | 18 January 2016

Brown Bag Session at Hwa Chong Instittution 

I conducted a lunch time session with more than a dozen secondary Teachers at HCI, a school in Singapore. The session was facilitated by Shinglee Publishers. 

In the session I raised the issue of routine cognitive skills being increasing less valuable. 

The World Economic Forum WEF, as reported in the newspaper this morning, predicted that smart machines will 'displace millions of jobs in the next five years'. 5.1 millions to be exact. This is an urgent message for schools, really.

In the session I shared one way of doing guided practice and assigning independent practice. In the demonstration, we provided that angles at the centre is twice that of the circumference for two cases. Then I asked students to say which tasks in (1) are for the two cases that they had proven. And to prove at least one more case before solving the related problems. I left the technicality of the calculations to the students. 

For homework, they were assigned to complete the rest of the page by selecting three "most difficult problems to a lot of people, in your opinion" of the seven available and to solve them in a way that people who have difficulties with them can understand the solution | How to Do Practice

This month, I also conducted a session on activity-based lessons for colleagues at Marshall Cavendish Education.