Megan Ang

Awareness of early childhood issues

The topic I chose to work on is Holistic Development. I believe in the importance to develop the whole child and equip them with the skills and competencies that will prepare them for opportunities and challenges in the future. With strong emphasis placed on academic performance in Singapore, I wanted to find out the possibility of implementing a holistic curriculum in preschools. From the interview and questionnaire, I learnt that implementing a holistic development requires teachers to have a variety of skills to conduct lessons of the different domains. It is also reliant on external factors such as parents’ expectations. From the feedbacks gathered from the principal, I learnt that flexibility in carrying out action plan is important. For example, even with the guided inquiry approach, some domains such as Language and Literacy and Numeracy are teacher-directed to meet the expectations of parents, which is also an issue in the centre.

Personal growth

Through the assignment, we communicated within the group, with the Centre principal and teachers to find out their perspective on holistic development. The interview with the principal was first conducted, following by the questionnaire for the teachers. The principal and teachers had differing views on the needs of the centre in implementing a Holistic development. There was much information from the interview and questionnaire. I learnt how to organise the information by first grouping them into categories, with a given header. The collated views were different from my personal view as well. When narrowing down to which need to focus on, I learnt how keep an open-mind and put aside my personal perspective and be chose objectively. I sieved out quotes of information from the centre principal and teachers which stood out as the critical issue to focus on. I saw the importance to consider the views of both parties to ensure objectivity.

The Capstone Project honed my critical thinking skills. By understanding the purpose of each step, I could better tackle the demands of the task. For the literature review, information from different literatures, with differing perspective, had to be gathered. With many sets of articles and information, it was confusing to highlight the important points. I used one article to cross-reference to the others to make connections and saw how the points in the different articles supported or contradicted each other. Reading each article in isolation was challenging as I was unsure which information would be relevant. As such, I used a table and highlighted important phrases that supported the topic, and made connections to the perspective. As I read more articles, I discovered that even with the same key words, different articles conveyed differing meanings. Hence, I learnt that not all information can be taken on surface value.

My team and I worked on the topic of holistic development, and the approach used by the centre is the Guided Inquiry approach. As Guided inquiry is a new approach, there were limited resources available. I found it challenging to find frameworks and guidelines to support our action plan ideas. With the suggestion of the principal, my team did further research based on inquiry based learning instead. To better understand the approach and curriculum of the school, we communicated with the principal, where she shared about how different domains are intentionally taught differently. For our action plan, we initially wanted to carry out a physical workshop. However, we re-evaluated its feasibility and effectiveness, due to the teachers’ time constraint and required manpower, logistic and cost. Hence, we came up with an online workshop instead, which is more sustainable as well. The learning process taught me how to be more analytical to ensure our recommendation can better support the centre, teachers and children.

The Capstone Project focused on a step-by-step process, with one task supporting the next. The skills learnt in this project can better help me in my internship, such as having a plan and purpose for each step. Other skills such as being objective and being flexible are also important for internship to ensure observations and analysis made are unbiased.