ABSTRACT
At the heart of Singapore's education success is the unified commitment and alignment of efforts from all key stakeholders – the Ministry of Education (MOE), National Institute of Education (NIE), and schools to our common mission to developing teachers for quality teaching to be accessible to every student in every classroom.
This chapter will outline the roles MOE, NIE, and schools play in the tripartite partnership, and will explicate how it allows for debate on new initiatives and makes provision for research to inform policy, and policy in turn, to be translated seamlessly into schools. Specifically, we will outline how NIE asserts the university role in the partnership in advocating and advancing the frontier of knowledge through engaging in educational research that informs policy and advances theory and practice. In addition, we will detail how NIE facilitates policy coherence and implementation consistency through the preparation of educational professionals, and the honing of pre-service teachers' practice via clinical field experience in schools. We will also examine NIE's synergistic engagement with expert teachers, which involves teachers being seconded to NIE, as well as master teachers from the Academy of Singapore Teachers (AST) co-teaching university courses in NIE, and co-facilitating in the Centre of Teaching and Learning Excellence at Yusof Ishak Secondary School (CTLE@YISS). Lastly, the chapter will look at how the strong partnership enables NIE staff to situate parts of their courses in schools to strengthen theory-practice links.
