Tan Jia Xin

Awareness of Early Childhood Issues

Before I had this module, I was generally updated on the current Early Childhood news. However, I usually did not read up to find out more about them. As such, my understanding of the issues might not be as in-depth and comprehensive. Through this module, I had the opportunity to pick a current Early Childhood issue that I wanted to find out more about. I was keen in finding out more about ‘Holistic Development’ as most preschools in Singapore hope to achieve this. I was also curious about the extent of ‘Holistic Development’ being carried out in Singapore since many factors affect how holistic lessons are implemented.

My group members and I worked together to come up with interview questions for the Principal of the centre we were going to. We faced problems when coming up with the interview questions since the topic ‘Holistic Development’ was rather broad. However, we tried our best to craft objective questions that would prompt the Principal to give her honest opinions. We also kept in mind that the interview would most probably be semi-structured since conversations can be spontaneous and lead to further discoveries.

Through the interview, we better understood the Principal’s perspectives of the school’s needs. She brought up a few factors that affected how holistic development was carried out, but mentioned that the most pressing need was lack of manpower as she believed that other problems would lessen if she had more teachers. Initially, my group took this information at face value and started thinking about how we could help to increase the intake of teachers. However, after further analysis of the interview transcript, we realised the skills and knowledge of the teachers was a bigger problem. This is because teachers can always be hired to mitigate the lack of manpower, but they might still be unable to deliver holistic lessons if they lack the skills to do so. Hence, we learnt that it is important to understand and analyse the information given to us to truly figure out the underlying cause of the problem.

Personal Growth

Assignment 1 required an interview to understand the preschool’s needs. As I oversaw transcribing, I familiarised myself with the questions to better understand the flow of the interview. I also prepared a soft copy of the questions beforehand so that I could immediately type the responses in the template. All these preparations helped me feel more confident as I just had to listen attentively and type the information. I feel that this experience has allowed me to be more attentive to details as I had to plan ahead. I anticipated changes to the interview questions since our interview was semi-structured and tried to be more prepared by doing the things within my realm of control first.

Both Assignments 1 and 2 required grouping of information for analysis. Assignment 1 required analysis of interview responses to derive the preschool’s needs. Since the Principal sometimes gave overlapping answers, I used a table to categorise the information. For instance, I highlighted the responses according to their problem areas and grouped similar ideas together before forming connections. For Assignment 2, I searched for academic journals related to the preschool’s needs. Sifting out the necessary information from the many academic journals available online was daunting at first. However, I used the template given by Ms Eunice to sort the information according to each article. Although this process was tedious, it really helped in sorting my thoughts by breaking down the articles.

For Assignment 3, my group split roles to work on different aspects of the project. Unfortunately, when I wanted to help with the website, I just edited the one on our shared Wix account without checking with my members. I was unaware that there was a new website, so I made unnecessary changes to the old website. My lack of communication with the members in charge of designing led to inefficiency as I could have used that time on another aspect of the project. After that incident, I learnt to always keep my members updated. My group members also decided to inform one another in our group chat whenever someone is editing the website to prevent overwriting the changes.