‘Tough love’ and care spurred this educator-mum to graduate at the top of her class

When Ms Eunice Chew returned to the National Institute of Education (NIE) to begin her master's programme in Jan 2018, she was a newly-wed who had evening classes, assignments and presentations, and a day job on her plate.

Fast forward to Dec 2021, it was a mother-of-two who turned in her dissertation and had amassed a slew of distinctions, while juggling work and parenting duties.

After she gave birth to her first child in 2019, the passionate educator could not wait to get back to class. Although she was on maternity leave, she was already raring to return to the classroom.

The 34-year-old recalls how kind her lecturers were upon her return. One of them even took the time to get her up to speed with the classes she had missed.

“There was a lot of understanding and trust. I think as an adult learner, that’s very important,” says Ms Chew, who emerged as a top graduate.

She is no stranger to NIE, having done her Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the tertiary institute over a decade ago. Even then, the warmth from the NIE faculty members made an impact on her.

“The faculty members still keep in touch with me, and one even gave me toys for my children. The sense of care I felt at NIE really touched me a lot, and I felt I would be well supported in my next learning journey there – even through the tough times,” recalls Ms Chew.

At NIE, graduate students have the leeway to take a part-time master's programme and complete it in a duration of up to four years. For Ms Chew, this flexibility helped with balancing her work, study and later, family.

In the first two years of her studies, she cleared all of the courses, which left her two full years to concentrate on perfecting her dissertation – on some days, this meant studying until the wee hours of the night. "I just really enjoyed making sense of things and digging deeper. There was a fire in me that pushed me to do better," she says.

The variety of graduate programmes at NIE provides educators with the flexibility to pursue their interests. For Ms Chew, instead of delving deeper into her subject, Mathematics, she decided to keep her career options open by taking the broader Master of Education in Curriculum and Teaching.
 

Likening the programme to a food menu, she explains: “I wanted to choose the menu that had as many choices as possible, and NIE offers a lot of dishes that cater to my varied interests, where I could gain delicious insights as well.”

“Ultimately, the NIE master’s degree is recognised, and the programme I enrolled in has been sharpened over two decades. So there are so many years of knowledge put into creating it,” she adds.

Among the faculty at NIE are household names – these include published authors, education changemakers and leading researchers like Associate Professor Leonel Lim and Ms Christina Lim – which made Ms Chew even more eager to “pick their brains”.

“I would ask a lot of questions – during class, after class and even during breaks. Even though there may not be an answer, my faculty members were still willing to listen and engage me,” she says.

The faculty members’ profound understanding of the Singapore education scene was also useful for Ms Chew, as the relevance helped her make better sense of her newfound knowledge.

For example, instead of just teaching mathematical concepts by the book such as formulae and equations, she is now very intentional in ensuring that the students also know the real-world applications that can help them in the workforce, be it computational thinking or calculating purchases.

The faculty members were also forthcoming with their critical yet constructive feedback on Ms Chew’s dissertation – what she calls “tough love”.

“They were very patient, but they were also very honest about all my errors. Yet, they’d always say, ‘Take care, Eunice, we understand what you're going through’. Everything was focused on how I could improve my dissertation and I really appreciated the concrete ideas to keep me moving forward,” she shares.

Her chosen dissertation topic explored how educators can cater to diverse learners, using technology such as an online learning portal. This approach to teaching tailors the lesson to individual student’s learning abilities to achieve the same learning goals for all. “A timely study in response to the advancement of technology in the era of the Covid-19 pandemic,” adds Ms Chew.

Instead of just a static online worksheet, this could be augmented with interactive quizzes that can give automated immediate feedback to help the students self-assess and learn at their own pace.

Other affordances of the online learning platform include embedding hints in the questions and allowing comments from peers for students to learn from one another, as well as offering choices for content and other media formats such as images, videos and audio for learning and work submission.

As a result, Ms Chew received the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Book Prize for her dissertation, as well as the ASCD Gold Award for her outstanding performance as a top graduate in her programme – accolades that she says would not have been possible without her lecturers and professors.
 

Although Ms Chew has concluded her studies, her passion for learning and education has not waned. Building on her dissertation topic, she continued working with an NIE professor and a team of peers to bring it to life.

Leading the project, she and the team conducted test runs with other educators and their students to show how diverse learners could benefit. Through these outreach efforts, Ms Chew  says that opportunities can be explored to better support teachers to harness technology for their students, and even incorporate it in educator training materials.

Armed with what she has learnt from her masters and with a recent promotion to a managerial position, Ms Chew hopes she can have a greater impact on shaping education.

“If I can guide fellow educators on how certain things should be done to better impact students, and if each educator impacts many students per class, you multiply everything and the ripple effect is so much greater,” she says.

While she contributes to fellow educators, Ms Chew is still hungry to learn more. On the cards is a PhD study at NIE. But, for now, she is getting ready to become a mother of three.

The application exercise for NIE’s graduate programmes Jan 2024 intake is open from now till July 4, 2023 for coursework programmes and July 27, 2023 for research programmes. Visit this website for more information.