Beyond the classroom: 8 teachers receive top honour for helping students flourish

SINGAPORE – In his fourth year as a science teacher, Go Jun Hong learnt from his school leaders that a former student was struggling to cope in junior college.

Though academically outstanding in secondary school, the student missed the structure and support he was used to and had difficulty adapting to a more demanding curriculum.

Calling it a wake-up call, Go began rethinking his role as an educator and what the end goal should be – to help students grow and flourish beyond the classroom.

“We prepared him for the examinations. But beyond that, he couldn’t cope by himself... And I thought that was really sad,” said Go, currently the head of applied sciences and information and communication technology at Woodgrove Secondary School.

Shifting his focus to holistic growth, Go realised the importance of understanding students’ unique needs and challenges to support them effectively.

This meant looking beyond visible behaviours for underlying issues.

For example, when some students are persistently late or absent from school, many assume they are ill-disciplined, he said.

“I realised that with almost everybody I spoke to who presented these sorts of behaviours, they usually have some backstory. Even if I were in their shoes, that’s probably the best that I can do.”

Now in his 13th year as an educator, Go, 39, mentors teachers to design more purposeful student development experiences, and helps form teachers build classroom environments where students feel enabled and cared for.

He was among eight teachers who received the President’s Award for Teachers from President Tharman Shanmugaratnam on Sept 3 for their outstanding work. Established in 1998, the award is the nation’s top honour recognising educators for their excellence and dedication in nurturing the young.

A total of 5,125 educators from 308 schools and seven post-secondary education institutions were nominated by school leaders, colleagues, parents and former and current students.

For Go, understanding students’ needs means looking beyond their behaviour.

He shared the example of a student he encountered in his former role as a year head. The student was always 15 minutes late for school. Instead of reprimanding the Secondary 1 boy and instructing him to wake up earlier, Go spoke to him to understand what was going on in his personal life.

The student shared that his family lived in Johor Bahru, and his father would not drive him to the immigration checkpoint. So, he would wake up at 3am every day and walk a long distance to the checkpoint as there was no public transport available.

The school reached out to the parents and got the father to commit to driving the boy to the checkpoint every morning. Later, it also helped source local accommodation for the student on weekdays.

“Children have unique circumstances and needs, including what success means to them. Now I ask myself, ‘What is useful for this child?’, so that I can help them,” Go said.

The recipients were selected from 18 finalists by a panel chaired by Darryl David, chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Education. The panel included representatives from the Ministry of Education, post-secondary education institutions and the wider community.

Award recipients will be able to participate in an overseas learning programme and share their learnings with the education fraternity. Award finalists will receive a grant to attend either overseas or local conferences, seminars or courses.

Teaching life skills from P1

After a pupil in Hafizah Mahmud’s Primary 1 class approached her to complain about being pushed by a classmate, she thought about how to turn the incident into a teachable moment for all her pupils.

The senior teacher, who is also an award recipient and specialises in the learning needs of lower primary learners, knew what happened was an accident and wanted to teach her young charges how to resolve minor matters on their own.

The next morning, she showed her pupils images of a man describing a small molehill as a large mountain.

She asked the class what would happen if someone exaggerated a story repeatedly.

“Some of them said it’s like the boy who cried wolf, a story they had heard before,” she said.

Other responses included being ignored, not being believed and losing friends as a result.

“If I just tell them these reasons, they will not absorb them. But if it comes from them, they can internalise it better, and then they will remember,” said Hafizah.

Though lessons like this are not part of the English and mathematics curriculum, the 45-year-old has spent most of her 20 years at Si Ling Primary School finding creative and relatable ways to teach her pupils empathy, confidence, communication and leadership.

She said that in her first few years as a teacher, she was startled to find children entering Primary 1 at vastly different levels of readiness.

“I realised that what happens in the first few years of primary school is very important.”

If a child repeatedly experiences difficulty, it can lead them to think they are not good in that subject, and once that belief sets in, learning becomes harder, said Hafizah.

“I became increasingly interested about how we can intervene early, while protecting children’s confidence and their joy for learning,” she added.

This meant spending hours building character, teaching them how to look out for one another, and paying close attention to how her pupils were learning so that they remain engaged in lessons.

Though it is a challenging process, Hafizah said that when teachers consistently make the effort to build a classroom environment where students find purpose in learning, even at Primary 1, and are explicitly taught the language for effective communication, they can become learners for life.

“When my kids move on to upper primary, most of them become prefects,” she said. “Other teachers can tell that they were from my class because they know how to articulate and express themselves, and take charge.”

She added: “To me, it’s not just about helping them catch up academically, but also helping them believe that ‘I can learn, I can improve, and we all have something to contribute’.”