Abstract:

Ngee Ann Secondary School has established a Professional Learning Community (PLC) whereby all teachers are put into learning teams with the objective of giving teachers the opportunities for collaborative inquiry and to develop and share a body of wisdom gleaned from their experiences

The PLC is built on the research-based Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework as a tool to design, revise and review instruction that helps students develop understanding with focus on pedagogies like Artful Thinking and Socratic Questioning. Using the elements of the TfU framework, teachers in different learning teams plan, execute and evaluate a lesson with the intention of helping students develop good understanding of the subject concepts or topics.

Aside from the face to face sessions, the School has also tapped and harnessed the potential of the Web-based applications in the emerging cloud computing services to develop a collaborative school community with its own identity, Ngee Ann 2.0. The school has adopted Microsoft's Live@Edu at zero cost to harness a suite of applications to collaborate and communicate with department teachers on projects, and stay connected with friends in an increasingly Web-connected world.

Keywords:

Blended approach, Professional Learning Community.