SINGAPORE — Generating timetables for Secondary 1 students at Edgefield Secondary School used to take 20 minutes. This year, the process took six hours, because of a new model for classes that is based on subject-based banding.

If you ask Mr Peter Ong, 39, a mathematics teacher who oversees the timetabling team, the effort is well worth it, because students will each get a personalised timetable.

The personalised schedule is part of the school’s reorganised form class model.

This year, all Secondary 1 students in Edgefield Secondary — regardless of the stream to which they belong — are grouped together in their form classes.

School principal Lee Peck Ping said that students are mixed in the ratio of 5:2:1 for Express, Normal (Academic) and Normal (Technical) streams respectively.

The move comes a year after it rolled out subject-based banding for some of its academic subjects.

From 2020, the Ministry of Education (MOE) will progressively put into effect full subject-based banding in secondary schools for all subjects, not just for English, Mother Tongue language, mathematics and science. 

With the full roll-out, schools “can also explore reorganising their form class beyond academic courses”, MOE said, like what Edgefield Secondary is doing with its Secondary 1 cohort this year.

At Edgefield Secondary, students in form classes will together take subjects such as art, music, physical education, as well as character and citizenship education — this will take up slightly more than 40 per cent of their academic time.

For other academic subjects, students will break out into their respective bands, depending on whether or not they have chosen to pursue higher-level subjects.

The change in the way form classes are structured means a change in the way timetables are done.

At an arranged visit to the school for the media last Thursday (Feb 28), Mr Ong said that his team started work on the new timetables in November last year.

With the help of a programmer, they ran multiple permutations of the timetables to arrive at one that would work for students and teachers.

To date, the team is at “version 108” of the timetable, Mr Ong said.

They took into account various factors and the key ones included making sure that no student had to spend more hours in school because of the new model, as well as ensuring that no teachers had increased workload.

Mr Ong said: “We imagined that if we were a student and we took on the timetable, how would (we) feel? We didn’t want them to move about too much.”

With the new “block model” timetable, when students move, it is just to two locations — either their form class or to their subject classes.

As for the teachers, Mr Ong and Mr Lee both noted that they were positive about the changes. Mr Ong told reporters that there are fewer teachers needed to handle classes with the new form class format and timetables.

Last year, when subject-based banding was first introduced at the school, it took 11 teachers to support the teaching of a subject. This year, 10 are needed.

Students would be “pulled out” from classes into separate classes last year, depending on which subject band they take.

Mr Ong noted that sometimes, teachers saw just “two or three students” for each class. This meant that extra manpower was initially needed to run these classes.

Not only was it less efficient, it had another effect.

“The students (might be thinking), ‘Why am I being pulled out of the class?’,” Mr Ong said.

NEW METHODS OF TEACHING

The new model of sorting students would help to “blur the boundaries” across streams, Mr Lee said, adding that the school “believes in embracing all learners”.

For teachers, it also presents opportunities to try out new methods of teaching. The principal added that his teachers have gone for training on how to engage students in classes where there are differing abilities.

Science teacher Seow Tzer Yeun, 31, said that in redesigning class materials and teaching methods, he has done more to demonstrate certain scientific concepts.

“Questioning becomes very important — how do you make the students discuss (a topic), even though they start off with different abilities?” he said.

There is a lot more group work during class time now, with different methods of assessing students.

For students who need more help, worksheets will have “more guidance and pointers”. Students with higher abilities will have more open-ended worksheets on the same topic, and the class regroups later to discuss it.

With the mixing of students from different streams in classes, Mr Seow said: “I might not even remember who the Normal (Technical) or Normal (Academic) student is in my classes.”

It is a similar experience for Secondary 1 student Muhammad Abid Muhamad Zahid, who told TODAY that when he first entered Edgefield Secondary, he did not realise that students were grouped together from different streams.

“I only knew (about this) when it was the second week (of school), but by then I had already made many friends already, so we just ask each other out of curiosity.

“That did not stop us from playing together... we did not compare,” the 12-year-old added.

The co-operation among the pupils across streams was evident in most of Abid’s classes.

In the design and technology class, which the form class takes together, Abid’s classmate from the Normal (Technical) stream helped him with cutting materials using machinery, because Abid was weaker in the subject.

It is this “peer support” that school principal Lee hopes to build on, that students in each class help one another.

Abid said: “They say that Express (stream students) look down on (Normal stream students). (When) you are friends, you’ve bonded together already... you won’t compare with others.

“There is no such rule that you have to only be friends with people from the same stream.”