Are you an IP student but you feel like you are not doing well in school? Do you feel like your teachers are not teaching you enough for the exams?
As tutors in a tuition centre in Singapore, we often get firsthand information from students on how they experience the schooling system, including their struggles and worries. In recent years, one of the biggest issues our students expressed to us was that of self-directed learning.
What is self-directed learning?
Self-directed learning is an umbrella term that puts the responsibility of learning on the students rather than the teacher. Students may be tasked to do their own Internet research on a topic and come up with a presentation, or conduct their own experiment and summarise their findings. In self-directed learning, the teacher is not doing the teaching, but rather serves the role of a facilitator.
Problems our students face with self-directed learning
Depending on the school, teacher, and curriculum, self-directed learning can be executed in many ways, to varying degrees of independence. According to our students’ experiences, some of them feel like they are not getting enough guidance from their school teachers. They are expected to learn by themselves or from their friends, which is not always comprehensive enough to cover the syllabus’ learning objectives.
To those students who have experienced a more structured form of education before, moving towards more freedom and flexibility in self-directed learning can be a test of their discipline and resourcefulness. Some of them have no idea where to look for information, or still expect their teachers to give them all the information on a silver platter.
How Future Academy helps students
The schools that use self-directed learning methods most heavily are the IP schools like RGS, NYGH, HCI, RI. Despite known for being the ‘brightest of the bunch’, some of these students may still struggle and fall behind their peers because of the difficulty in adjusting to the learning methods.
School-exclusive classes
Catered specially for these students, we have exclusive classes such as IP Math Tuition for selected IP schools to help them grasp the content and conceptual knowledge which schools may not teach explicitly. Our exclusive classes are paced according to each school’s syllabus, with revision sessions before each school-based assessment.
Consolidate learning
For students who feel lost doing self-learning, we provide structured frameworks which help them contextualise and summarise their learning. This way, they can always have a checklist of what content and concepts they need to have for their exams, even while engaging in self-learning in school.
Regular progress reports
Our students can get direct feedback from tutors, thanks to our small group tuition that allows tutors to build rapport and have close observation of our students’ work and learning attitudes. Parents will also be kept in the loop via our regular progress reports, which includes comments as well as suggestions on how parents, students, and tutors can support the child in learning.
Conclusion
To all those RGS, HCI, RI, NYGH students out there – don’t struggle alone! Let us help you meet the demands of your curriculum with smart study techniques and well-packaged learning materials. We provide a range of subjects from Sec 1 IP Science tuition to IP Physics Tuition.
There’s absolutely no shame in asking for help. We welcome anyone who wants to do well and do better! Get in touch and have a chat with us to schedule your class ASAP!