Frameworks
Holistic Education
One of the four strategic goals of Towards SP@60 is to re-emphasise the holistic development of our students so that they are competent, versatile, creative and innovative, imbued with sound values and excel in work and life so as to achieve the desired outcomes of being work-ready, life-ready and world-ready.
SP’s strategy to accomplish a holistic education for all SP students is to place emphasis on the Emotional, Social, Physical, and Intellectual (ESPI) development of our students through a curriculum that emphasises balance and integration between deep technical expertise and broad general education, and embraces a design thinking mindset.
As part of the Holistic Education Framework, SP has developed a set of six graduate attributes: competence, communication and teamwork; creativity, innovation and enterprise; ethics and responsibility; global mindset; personal and social effectiveness. These attributes constitute the “T-shaped” graduate that is sought after in the new economy, as highlighted in the Economic Strategy Committee (ESC) Report 2010.
Key Components and Distinctiveness of SP Holistic Education Framework
The distinctiveness of SP Holistic education is in the inclusion of a General Education Programme in the core curriculum and the adoption of Design Thinking and Multi-Disciplinary Project as a key teaching and learning approach. They provide the horizontal bar of the “T-shaped” graduate.
The SP Holistic Education also incorporates the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) framework, developed by MIT, as curriculum development tool to review and structure our courses and modules, and to shape the SP learning experience in order to achieve our desired graduate attributes. The CDIO framework is summarised as follow:
Academic Schools/Department who have adopted or are adopting the CDIO framework have a head start towards ensuring their courses are Holistic Education-ready.
CDIO and Design Thinking
Used together, CDIO and Design Thinking unleash the collective creative potential of students working in multi-disciplinary teams. They are crucial components in Singapore Polytechnic’s strategy to educate and train innovative, future-ready graduates for Singapore. They develop the following distinguishing attributes in our graduates.
- Empathy: Students do in-depth research on potential end-users in order to identify needs, behaviours and attitudes that help define issues to be solved. The process exemplifies a “People First” approach with attention to issues of ethics and responsibility. Students learn to focus on the social, cultural and environmental angle of innovation, in addition to the conventional technology or business angles.
- Integration: Students go beyond the familiar analytical problem-solving approach to include a more integrative approach that embraces intuition and imagination. Integrating analytical and abductive thinking strengthens the creativity, innovation and enterprise disposition of students. Students learn to deal with conceptual uncertainty, to take risks, to try out probable solutions rather than acting only on “proven” solutions.
- Collaboration: Students of different disciplines (technology, business, design) and points of view are brought together to ensure feasibility, viability and desirability of solutions. Students learn to value diverse perspectives, teamwork and communication, and develop personal & social effectiveness as well as a global mindset.
The Learning and Creative Teaching Framework
Two powerful research-based frameworks underpin the approach to teaching and learning. These frameworks apply across the range of specific teaching competences that comprise SP's Learning Roadmap (login required).
The Learning Framework
The Learning Framework was developed from a comprehensive and critical review of the research literature on human learning from a wide range of fields (e.g., experimental, cognitive and social psychology) and research on best practices in a range of educational and cultural contexts. It is important to note that it does not prescribe specific strategies to use in learning design and teaching, nor is it aligned to any particular perspective or paradigm in education or psychology. The 10 core principles, which are key components of the framework, provide lenses or frames from which lecturers can thoughtfully plan student learning from a solid empirical base. To learn more about SP's Learning Framework click
here (login required).
The Creative Teaching Framework
The Creative Teaching Framework is a SP invention and was developed from extensive research into the practices and styles of highly effective teaching professionals. It is firmly grounded in the Core Principles of the Learning Framework (which constitute the 'science of learning') but provides an additional complimentary framework from which teaching and learning designs can be made even more interesting and creative. The Creative Teaching Framework is often referred to by the acronym SHAPE.
SHAPE refers to:
- Stories told to provide context, understanding and emotional anchors
- Humour used to achieve rapport and provide novelty
- Activities provided to integrate, apply and consolidate learning
- Presentation style (e.g., words, tone, body language - as well as observation and listening) to provide clarity, meaning and influence student attention, beliefs and psychological states
- Examples used to illustrate facts, concepts, principles, procedures
