ABSTRACT
The future economy requires deep and relevant skills plus a mindset of lifelong learning to adapt to new technologies that alter the ways that consumers and businesses operate in the economy. School-leavers will need to do more than meet content standards to secure jobs. In light of new 21st-century competencies, students need to develop specialised practical expertise, job-relevant skills, and deep learning through more authentic learning environments. Singapore is well known for consistently high performance in international benchmark indicators such as PISA. However, Singapore’s Ministry of Education has sought to prepare students more holistically for the knowledge-based society by deliberately shifting emphasis away from a traditional, hierarchical educational model towards more decentralised student-, teacher-, and institution-driven processes. A raft of new initiatives such as Thinking Schools Learning Nation (1997), Teach Less, Learn More (2004), and 21st Century Competencies (2015) have been implemented. More recently, the SkillsFuture movement (2015) aims to equip all Singaporeans with deep expertise and mastery of creative and critical thinking skills for lifelong learning. With new policy initiatives in place, it is crucial to understand the quality of teaching pedagogies in higher educational institutions that are meant to prepare students for the workplace. Problem-based learning (PBL) is one example of a pedagogical and curricular innovation that has been introduced to prepare students. This chapter thus examines teachers’ approaches to designing problems for a PBL environment within a Singapore polytechnic and explores how PBL serves to bridge workplace and institutional learning. PBL entails recontextualising workplace problem scenarios into accessible forms to simulate professional practice, and a critical factor lies in the design of authentic, industry-based problem scenarios.
