Singapore fares extremely well in international surveys of national education standards in Mathematics and Science (Marc, 2007). Besides that, Singapore was in the top 3 of the 1999 and 2003 TIMSS survey (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, 2004). Due to these acclaimed recognitions, Singapore has remained one of the more popular choices for foreign students to pursue an education. Hence the education sector has always been an area of emphasis where constant improvements are sought after in seeking to bring about a higher quality education.
Despite the high standards of Singapore’s education, complaints still arise on graduates’ lack of communication skills when they graduate and start to work. These communication problems in the workplace was brought to light by a research conducted in 2000 by the NUS Centre of Development for Teaching and Learning (CDTL) that showed that employers find employees lacking in communication and interpersonal skills (Employers' Survey, 2000). One of the sectors that is highly implicated by these communication problems is the education sector.
One of the wake-up calls that alerts us to the presence of a problem in terms of teachers’ communications skills would be the increasing number of complaints filed against school teachers. For example, miscommunications can occur at various levels such as students misunderstanding their teacher’s comments, parents complaining about teachers without fully understanding the situation, teachers misinterpreting the intentions of parents etc.
A recent report on a particular History teacher in HCIS (Hwa Chong Instituiton) receiving complaints on how he yelled at students for making small mistakes has shed some light on the problem of communications in the education sector. From this report, there seemed to be an apparent mix of interpretations of this teacher’s actions where parents felt unsatisfied with his actions while most students on the other hand did not read much into this teacher’s actions and even indicated that his yelling acted as a motivation to keep them focused (Yip, 2010).
Besides that, an interview conducted with a senior teacher (ST) from Marsiling Secondary school further highlighted the presence of this problem as well as possible causes for its occurrence. We understood from the interview that despite the communications skills course provided in NIE, not much focus is given to interpersonal relations. The teachers mostly go through a 6 module crash course right on the job when they enter teaching of which one of the modules is on interpersonal relations. However, the ST explained to us that through her years of experience, she has observed that this is an ineffective way of teaching interpersonal relation skills as the duration is too short and the intensity of the course is too high for the teachers to grasp and retain much of what is being taught. This also applies to what is taking place at NIE. Her view was that interpersonal skills take time to learn and master. Therefore, if we want to produce educators who are effective communicators, we need to start early, that is preferably in NUS itself.
Overall, it is obvious that the lack of the interpersonal skills among school teachers is a prominent one and should be solved as soon as possible so that it will not negatively impact Singapore’s education standards which will subsequently hinder our efforts to attract more foreign students and in providing a world-class education.
As the most established university in Singapore, NUS is responsible for producing future leaders, equipped with the necessary skills for the working arena. From the NUS’s president message, NUS has done her job greatly in “creating, imparting, and applying knowledge” (Shih, 2008) to her students. It is clear that NUS graduates are well-equipped with all the academic knowledge important for them to perform in their job. Hence, many people have always regarded NUS as the best university in Singapore. However, this title is being challenged as SMU (Singapore Management University) is rapidly gaining reputation because of their implementation of modern teaching methodology which stresses the importance of communication and which also sets aside 50% of the grade for project work and class participation. Thus, SMU students are far more confident than their peers at the two older national universities. This success is also beginning to translate in the job market where the students from NUS (the grand old university of Singapore) have recently (2007) begun to complain that they feel disadvantaged during job interviews when competing against their peers from SMU (Marc, 2007). Thus, it is important that we do not remain complacent and take actions to embrace the changing needs of the workforce and prepare our NUS graduates accordingly.
This is an even bigger problem in faculties like the Faculty of Science (FOS) because too much focus is put solely on academic knowledge. Unlike students from the School of Business where compulsory communication modules in the business context are offered, communications modules in FOS are not compulsory. Besides that, unlike students from Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences where assessment is based largely upon class participation, presentation as well as the term paper, students from FOS have relatively lesser opportunities to present themselves. This is because the assessment is mainly exam-paper based. Hence, communications problems, namely interpersonal skills due to the lack of professional social interaction become a major problem for Science students who subsequently mostly enter MOE.
