WINNERS OF THE INSPIRING TEACHER OF ENGLISH 2013

Primary School Category

Mrs Sangeetha Sivanesan

Da Qiao Primary School

Mrs Sangeetha Sivanesan

To Sangeetha, every child can learn and flourish. She uses cooperative learning strategies such as "Round Robin" and "Think Pair Share", as well as formative assessment strategies that allow for peer evaluation and students to reflect on what they have just learnt.

Sangeetha also feels it's important to encourage pupils to participate in non-academic language activities in order to instil a love for the language in them. She made full use of the opportunities as an EL Coordinator and Library Coordinator to organise such activities. Among many of her well-received efforts are the Spelling Bee competition, the "DQPS Amazing Race" and a poetry recital performance by primary two pupils.

Secondary School Category

Mrs Anne Kingsley-Lee

CHIJ St Theresa's Convent

Mrs Anne Kingsley-Lee

Anne's philosophy of teaching is in making every student understand that their viewpoint matters. To this end, she uses questions to draw links between every student's contributions to class discussions and helps them verbalise their thinking. While doing so, she also looks for ways to lay the foundation for critical thinking and help students grow their capacity for reasoned argument.

To help facilitate this, Anne ensures that she always has an idea of how she can strengthen the quality of reasoning that goes on in lessons before stepping into the classroom. This involves preparing questions or activities that provoke thinking and hold students accountable for their views. Anne hopes that students will leave her classroom with an understanding of how such questions can be used in the larger conversation of life.

Ms Vanessa Heng

Nanyang Girls' High School

Ms Vanessa Heng

Vanessa believes that reading and talking about stories encourages one to be more attentive to a writer's craft. Literature thus becomes a way for one to learn about language. It is this idea that reading good writing is the precursor to learning how to write well that helps her to prepare her Language Arts lessons.

As some students might struggle to understand the deeper motivations of the characters that they are analysing during Literature classes, Vanessa makes use of excerpts from their own favourite books to show how similar motivations can be found in characters they are familiar with. In doing so, they pick up new skills in class and find new meanings in old stories. By cultivating her students' interest in stories, she encourages them to take a greater interest in writing about their own experiences and finding truth and meaning in them.

Junior College and Centralised Institute Category

Mr Patrick Sum

Anglo Chinese Junior College

Mr Patrick Sum

Patrick has sought to make his GP classroom a safe and laughter-filled space where students can grow in confidence and skills as they find their personal voices with informed opinions about an increasingly complex world.

While teaching, Patrick always holds the assumption that each of his students has some background knowledge that they can bring into the discussion. And by sharing the way he or his own family and friends respond to different issues, he hopes to scaffold his students' own ideas and help them gain perspectives as they come together in small groups to share their own reflections.

Patrick firmly believes that any pedagogical innovation must be relevant to his students. For example, General Paper shares several linguistic comprehension skills with the Humanities, especially Literature. Hence, for his students who are more inclined towards the Sciences, he would adapt certain Scientific and Mathematical approaches to help them engage with language and issues with greater ease. Some of the ways that he has come up with include correlating vocabulary with Chemistry's pH scale to improve their paraphrasing skills, or by making use of mathematical symbols or Venn diagrams to demonstrate how geopolitical and social issues often overlap in their causes, impacts and consequences.

Ms Laureen Toh

Catholic Junior College

Ms Laureen Toh

Laureen is an advocate of approaches that are inquiry-driven, inductive and anchored on concepts. She achieves this by organising panels for her classes, where external guests would come into the classroom and discuss various topics with them. For example, a discussion on issues dealing with Media would involve journalists. As a result, her students become fully engaged in exploring different perspectives.

Laureen also guides her students to always examine their own thinking and challenges them to confront and justify their views by ensuring that they are willing to ask "what makes you say that?" or "what significance does this have in relation to our society?". By doing so, she situates what goes on in the classroom to a much wider context, thus helping her students become transformative thinkers.

Mr Tan Wah Jiam

Hwa Chong Institution – College Section

Mr Tan Wah Jiam

Wah Jiam's philosophy of teaching English revolves around three concepts – the love of language, a strong foundation in basics, and practical application. While teaching, he takes the opportunity to highlight intriguing features of the English Language and tries to convey to his students a sense of joy in using the language well.

In terms of having a strong foundation, he emphasises having a wide vocabulary as a key factor of mastering the language. He believes that having more words at one's fingertips would mean that one can better conceive and express ideas.

Wah Jiam also prefers using real-world tasks in teaching English, as compared to abstracted grammatical exercises. His belief is that while abstracted exercises tend to be useful in the early stages of learning, achieving mastery would involve learners moving on to practical and applied activities.