Message By Deputy Principal

An educator creates experiences of wonderment and achievement, aspires to nurture empowered learners, administers routines for learning and assessments and responds to the emotional needs of the learners, harnessing multiple skills.

Amidst this complexity is the reality of dynamic classrooms, so aptly described by Donald Schon as the ‘indeterminate swampy zone of practice’ (Schon, 1987). There is no one-size-fits-all approach to lesson design as classrooms are unique. This dynamism requires us to constantly reflect and inquire into what truly works in the classroom instead of maintaining calcified mindsets about how students should learn. And we thrive when we do this in learning communities, building our professional capital through collective problem-solving and learning design.

At the Centre for Pedagogical Research and Learning, we take delight in stewarding a professional learning ecosystem where we systematically design shared experiences for professional learning, steer school-based research and importantly, enable powerful pedagogies.

Believing in the value of professional discourse, we are delighted when fellow-educators participate with us in our PED Talks and The Reflective Practitioner Symposium and contribute to ‘Insights’, our in-house publication.  We learn so much from each other as we articulate our tacit
knowledge and share how we adapt learning theories and instructional strategies
to our context.We term this as the indigenizing of learning theories, building an Asian discourse in education.

Wishing you a good year of learning and inquiring.

Mary George Cheriyan
Deputy Principal, PeRL and Community Engagement