Toward distributed pedagogical leadership for quality improvement: Evidence from a childcare centre in Singapore

Abstract

This article presents findings from a representative case study of a typical childcare centre in Singapore that achieved an emerging level of quality certification despite being under-resourced as a non-profit centre. Like other centres, it was navigating a climate of early childhood care and education (ECCE) policy reforms and teacher shortage. Given that quality rating has existed for a few years, the study aimed to explore centre-based conditions that could hinder or facilitate teachers’ distributed pedagogical leadership and the development of a community of practice – both assumed to be necessary for teachers’ continued learning and improvement of centres’ practices. Qualitative data were generated across 10 months through observations, individual interviews and focus group discussions to journey with the teaching team as they negotiated relationships and built a shared vision for their practices. Results are presented here as three overarching themes that explicate: (a) the inevitable influences of the national context of the sector’s workforce; (b) organisational culture and power relations; and (c) pedagogical vision. These illustrate the intricacies involved in centre-based quality improvement work, signalling the need for more investigations into the everyday realities of ECCE reforms as experienced by teachers-as-learners and leaders.

Keywords

Early childhood care and education quality improvement contextual influences distributed pedagogical leadership teachers-as-learners and leaders

Introduction: Early childhood care and education (ECCE) in Singapore

In Singapore, public investments in ECCE have increased in the last few years in response to a global call (Heckman, 2011; OECD, 2006) to raise quality and professionalism in ECCE so as to enhance young children’s learning and mitigate the negative effects of disadvantaged home circumstances. The sector has been enhanced by the formation of a singular government body – the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) in 2014 to oversee both full-day childcare centres and the part-day kindergarten programmes. For decades, both types of licensed services were regulated by different government agencies, serving different purposes, and inevitably dichotomising the ‘care’ and ‘education’ of young children. Historically, childcare centres were first regulated by the Social Welfare Department in the 1950s to serve disadvantaged, low-income families who needed their children (including toddlers) to be cared for, fed and cleaned while they were away at work (Khoo, 2010). In contrast, kindergartens were initially set up by churches to promote religious values as well as prepare pre-schoolers for academic learning in primary school and were previously regulated by the Ministry of Education (MOE) (Khoo, 2010). Consequently, qualified childcare teachers in Singapore today have found it a challenge to replace their ‘babysitter’ image as childcare centres continue to provide custodial care and a planned curriculum (from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily). The national requirement for infant ‘educarers’ and early childhood ‘teachers’ remains lower than that for primary/secondary schools, at the certificate and diploma levels (pre-undergraduate degree) (ECDA, 2020a) (See Table 1 for more details about the training requirements).

Table 1.

Early childhood teacher training requirements in Singapore.

Occupation and required qualification	Total number of training hours	Practical component (supervised teaching practicum)
Infant ‘educarers’ are required to have a minimum of 10 years of formal education and a credit in GCE ‘O’ level English Language; and obtain an ECDA-accredited certificate in early years (qualified to work with children from 2 months up to 3 years of age)	600 hours	200 hours
Preschool teachers (L2 certified) are required to have a minimum of 5 GCE ‘O’ level credits and obtain an ECDA-accredited diploma in early childhood teaching (qualified to work with children from 18 months to 6 years of age)	1200 hours	300 hours

Source: SkillsFuture Singapore (2019).

Concerted effort is needed within society to raise childcare teachers’ professional identity, and for the community of teachers to have a stronger commitment toward continued learning and pedagogical agency. But the reality of childcare work can cause teachers to experience monotony due to the repetitive, labour-intensive nature of the work: full-day childcare programmes often require teachers to be involved in 2 to 3 hours of routine care activities such as showering children, preparing them for snacks and meals, and naptime within regimented schedules determined by the use of shared facilities that typically cater for 90 to 120 children ranging from 18-month-olds to 6-year-olds. The average childcare centre has a staff strength of 12 to 20 teaching and non-teaching personnel, led by one centre director or principal.

Some centres are independently owned while others are part of a larger commercial franchise or a chain within a non-profit organisation. With the exception of fewer than 30 kindergartens that have been set up and run by the MOE since 2014 and mostly co-located within primary school grounds (MOE, 2020), all the 1800 plus childcare centres and kindergartens are located as stand-alone educational settings, either within public/private housing estates, within the grounds of faith-based institutions, or in commercial buildings.

The diversely populated city-state of Singapore has been known for its competitive economy and a well-resourced, high-achieving bilingual primary/secondary education system (Luke et al., 2005). It is a little-known fact that ECCE and special education sit on the margins of the national education system, and, for decades, have been offered by a largely privatised sector with minimal government regulation in a competitive market (Lim, 2017; Poon et al., 2013). This has led to the existence of some 600 operators offering wide-ranging practices and fees. Not all operators receive government funding, although all families with young children are eligible for childcare subsidies.

Of late, the government has announced its interest in investing more in ECCE, to encourage mothers’ participation in the workforce as well as to attempt to reverse the trend of a falling fertility rate (Meng, 2016). As a result, the proportion of government-funded ECCE operators has now increased to form about half of the entire sector, and there are new childcare centres being set up annually despite a 10% to 20% attrition rate in the ECCE workforce. ECDA aims to increase the number of childcare places in the sector, to cater for 200,000 children by the year 2023. To date, the sector remains short-staffed and reliant on migrant teachers from the region (e.g., Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, China, Taiwan) or career-switchers re-training to become ECCE teachers. Recent government initiatives have aimed at raising the professionalism and status of ECCE with a competencies framework for ECCE educators (Government of Singapore, 2020), nudging the sector to pay teachers fairer wages and provide more career development pathways.

Aside from these initiatives, operators receiving government funding must meet higher expectations in terms of quality provision, beyond basic licensing requirements. Quality indicators for leadership, staff management, curriculum and pedagogy are measured through a rating scale (for ECCE programmes serving children from birth through age 6) that was created as part of the Singapore Preschool Accreditation Framework (SPARK) (ECDA, 2017).

Purpose of study

This case study focused on the context and conditions within an average-sized childcare centre that was aiming to improve its overall programme and pedagogical practices after having obtained SPARK certification at an emerging level. Against the national background of prioritising quality improvement in a nascent ECCE sector, this case study of a non-profit childcare centre in Singapore explored and identified specific aspects within the centre’s context and forces within its wider ecological conditions that affected teachers’ distributed pedagogical leadership and the development of a community of practice – both assumed to be necessary for teachers’ continued learning and improvement of organisational practices. This study thus addressed the overarching question: What were the conditions afforded within the context that would affect teachers’ distributed pedagogical leadership and the centre’s quality improvement?

National context of quality improvement: The need for teacher learning

The ECCE quality discourse worldwide has created significant debates around how ‘quality’ should be defined, and by whom, if quality should be sought as the end-goal of ECCE programmes, and if there should be universalised benchmarks at all (Jones et al., 2016; Moss, 2016). This paper assumes that the process of building a quality discourse within any community should be a meaning-making, co-construction process involving all teachers and other stakeholders, to ascertain what is of value for young children now and in the future (Dahlberg et al, 2007; Moss, 2016). While useful to a limited extent, national frameworks and quality accreditation cannot provide individual centres with specific guidance for their unique needs and contexts. Hence, the pursuit of ECCE quality programmes must lie within the capacity of every professional, working in collaboration within each centre to make sense of how best to cater for their communities.

As Singapore embarks on plans to improve the quality of ECCE programmes for an increasingly diverse population, research must generate discussion about the goals necessary for ECCE to enhance teacher education and professional development (PD). Within Singapore’s highly competitive education system, tension exists between the stated policies (more child-centric and values-based aspirations) and the beliefs and attitudes held by parents and ECCE professionals (skewed toward school readiness), and this could undermine implementation efforts or erode the intent behind the ECCE reforms (Lim-Ratnam, 2013).

In Singapore’s ECCE sector, the notion of PD is relatively new as it was only introduced by the ECDA through the Continuing Professional Development Masterplan (ECDA, 2013). The masterplan provides structured pathways for ECCE staff to develop and update their professional knowledge, skills and dispositions, and teachers were encouraged to participate in a minimum of 20 hours of PD per year.

However, according to published reports on centre-level curricular practices, Singapore ECCE practitioners’ PD opportunities are few and far between (e.g., Ebbeck et al, 2012). And the Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project focused mainly on half-day kindergarten programmes (Bautista et al., 2016, 2019). No known published work explores the ways in which Singapore childcare centres have embarked on quality improvement, or how they promote centre-based innovation and teacher learning, or negotiate the national SPARK certification process. This paper aims to contribute toward the field’s understanding of the specific conditions that can be found within the situated context of a small-scale non-profit childcare centre as it navigates increased national attention on ECCE quality and professionalism.

Framing the study: Hierarchical leadership versus distributed leadership

Any process that aims to improve teaching and learning requires a collective responsibility that is devolved from the school principal to teachers and coaches (e.g., Spillane and Diamond, 2007). Within a national climate of ECCE reform in Singapore, we have chosen a conceptual framework that allows us to analyse leadership as collective effort because our case study childcare centre had a mixed team of experienced and novice teachers who were local and foreign, all led by an experienced, yet newly hired, principal who had to be inducted into a new organisational work culture and processes.

Despite the growing collection of teacher leadership studies in the last 2 decades (e.g., York-Barr and Duke, 2004; Wenner and Campbell, 2017), literature on leadership remains heavily centred on the principal’s position and role (Neumerski, 2013). The traditional view of leadership that is built on bureaucracy and is reliant on individuals’ traits and characteristics was a product of the Industrial Age and is not suited to the current Knowledge Era (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). Entrenched within the psyche of ECCE practitioners in Singapore is this hierarchical view of leadership. This traditional paradigm of leadership would lead to a bureaucratic orientation with an implicit distrust among school leaders and teachers (Tschannen-Moran, 2009). More empirical research is needed to support the ECCE sector’s quality improvement from a distributed leadership perspective that views teachers as leaders and acknowledges the unique characteristics of ECCE settings.

This study also assumed that distributed leadership supports teacher learning, and that teacher learning is key to any education reform (Lieberman and Pointer Mace, 2008), being social rather than individual in nature, ‘rooted in the human need to feel a sense of belonging and of making a contribution to a community’ (p. 227). Teacher learning is highly dependent on experience and practice as people learn from and with others like apprentices in everyday situations (Lave and Wenger, 1991), solving everyday dilemmas that occur in classrooms and educational settings. The following section delves into a related concept of distributed pedagogical leadership which grew out of the recent ECCE literature most relevant to our study.

Distributed pedagogical leadership

This study assumed that centre-based innovation and curricular reforms involved all teachers as pedagogical leaders and learners (Heikka et al., 2019). Traditional conceptualisations of ECCE leadership have been borrowed from both corporate and primary/secondary school literature, with comparatively little theorising within ECCE due to the field’s historically low level of professional status, professionals’ reticence toward holding positions of authority and the limited opportunities for ECCE professionals’ career development and growth (Ebbeck and Waniganayake, 2003; National Research Council, 2015). In the Singapore primary/secondary schools’ context, instructional leadership has been associated with school principals’ roles – a qualitative study of Singapore’s primary school principals (Nguyen, et al., 2017) found that while there was generally a co-existence of hierarchy and heterarchy within instructional leadership structure and practices, hierarchy was still a dominant model. This is also reported in Bush and Ng’s (2019) study about distributed leadership in the similar context of Malaysia.

In contrast, a more realistic and sustainable way of achieving educational improvement and reform is to conceptualise leadership as purposeful activities and interactions that are distributed across individuals and situations (Gronn, 2002; Muijs and Harris, 2007). Linked to this idea, distributed pedagogical leadership in ECCE settings emphasises teachers’ roles as autonomous pedagogical decision-makers, thereby enhancing their PD and curricular reform within institutions (Heikka et al, 2019). Pedagogical leadership refers to teachers’ ability to lead professional learning and pedagogical improvement within the community of practice in ECCE settings (Heikka et al., 2019). Professional learning amongst teachers is enhanced especially if there is a culture of trust and collaboration and a shared vision (Muijs and Harris, 2007). While much has been written about the concept of distributed pedagogical leadership in recent years and across different educational settings (Boe and Hognestad, 2017; Heikka, 2014; Heikka et al, 2019; Male and Palaiologou, 2017) more research is needed to investigate the setting-based conditions that support distributed leadership and its influence on teacher learning and actual pedagogical improvements.

Heikka et al (2019) identified five interdependent dimensions of distributed pedagogical leadership (p. 4):

enhancing shared consciousness of vision and strategies (i.e., teachers involved in strategic planning);

distributing responsibilities for pedagogical leadership (i.e., encouraging participation, providing sufficient resources);

distributing and clarifying power relationships between the stakeholders (i.e., teachers sharing authority in decision-making and developing leadership tasks);

distributing the enactment of pedagogical improvement within centres (i.e., designing leadership functions with teachers who facilitate pedagogical reflection and learning within teams); and

developing a strategy for distributed pedagogical leadership (i.e., teachers co-create procedures, structures and plans for efficient practice of distributed leadership).

A recent review of teacher leadership research (Nguyen et al., 2020) has revealed that teacher leaders exercise their leadership role through trusting relationships where they can influence others. Earlier, Muijs and Harris (2007) found that, for teacher leadership to be successful, it needs to be a ‘carefully orchestrated and deliberate process’ (p. 129), with the following key supports:

there must be a shared culture: an agreed set of norms and values for collaborative practice between teachers;

a high degree of trust and positive relationships between teachers and leaders; and

the existence of structural changes such as:

time set aside for teachers to meet, plan and discuss

rich and diverse opportunities for continuous PD

informal and formal acknowledgement of teachers’ efforts to nurture their self-confidence to act as leaders.

When there is hierarchical leadership, teachers are less likely to be curriculum thinkers and learners as they are typically required to implement narrowly conceived and carefully scripted standardised curricula (Abbate, 2010; Alexander, 2004). ECCE practices in Singapore must keep up with new revelations about children’s learning capabilities (Rushton et al., 2010; Sigman et al., 2014). Concomitantly, ECCE teachers must become as motivated as young children about learning to (re)define what quality ECCE means to them, and to keep improving their practices for a Knowledge Age.

Methodology

This 10-month investigation employed an exploratory, interpretive case study design (Merriam, 2009) to describe and understand the complexity of change processes created by various mechanisms of quality improvement in a purposefully selected childcare centre. Investigations were conducted in full compliance with the university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines.

The case ‘ABC Centre’ is representative of centres in non-profit chains with a headquarter (HQ) office determining much of the human resource, finance and curricular policies. Like most childcare centres in Singapore, the centre was licensed to cater for children from 18 months to 6 years of age. ABC Centre had obtained SPARK certification in 2016 but had subsequent changes in its staff composition. A newly appointed principal was tasked to continue the centre’s improvements and work toward subsequent SPARK certification by the year 2022.

Participants

Participants in this study comprised of the principal, Ms B, and eight teachers (five teaching in the English language and three teaching in the Chinese language). Participants’ characteristics are presented in Table 2. During the 10-month period of data collection, Ms B was individually interviewed three times. The teachers were individually interviewed and participated in focus group discussions. Participating classes were observed with advance notification and consent from their teachers.

Table 2.

List of the participants.

Participant	Nationality	Qualification	Work experience in ECCE by the time of 1st interview	Work experience at the focal centre by the time of 1st interview	Work status by the end of the year-long project
Principal (Ms B)	Singaporean	Master’s degree	18 years	5 months	Left the centre
Chinese Teacher 1 (C1)	Chinese	Bachelor’s degree	2.5 years	1 year	Left the centre
Chinese Teacher 2 (C2)	Chinese	Bachelor’s degree	9 months	6 months	On the job (as a full-time teacher)
Chinese Teacher 3 (C3)	Chinese	Bachelor’s degree	3 years	2 years	On the job (as a full-time teacher)
English Teacher 1 (E1)	Singaporean	Diploma	29 years	10 years	On the job (as a full-time teacher)
English Teacher 2 (E2)	Singaporean	Diploma	23 years	23 years	On the job (as a relief teacher 2018–2019; back full-time in late 2019)
English Teacher 3 (E3)	Filipino	Bachelor’s degree	3 years	10 months	On the job (as a full-time teacher)
English Teacher 4 (E4)	Filipino	Bachelor’s degree	1 year	7 months	On the job (as a full-time teacher)
English Teacher 5 (E5)	Filipino	Bachelor’s degree	2 years	6 months	Left the centre

Note: E2 rejoined as a full-time teacher in late 2019, when the project was completed.

Context of change at ABC centre

ABC Centre was part of a 40-year-old non-profit childcare organisation with a mission to provide affordable, quality programmes to families with diverse needs. The organisation had applied to receive limited government funding as teachers’ salaries were raised across the sector. As a recipient of government funding, however, the centre would be subjected to external quality rating every few years. Quality assessment has more curricular and pedagogical focus than the basic licensing checks. ABC Centre first experienced quality rating in 2016, meeting assessors’ expectations at an emerging level.

When invited to participate in this project, Ms B had joined the organisation for just 3 months. Even though she had had 18 years of experience in the sector as teacher and principal in a large government-supported kindergarten and childcare provider, she was new to this organisation’s mission and work culture. She was hired when the previous principal had retired, and she learned that the centre had at least two teacher vacancies that were not permanently filled for months. However, she was drawn to the organisation’s broad mission to support low-income families, and she was committed to improving the quality of the centre.

Ms B emphasised the importance of curricular and pedagogical improvements and teamwork. According to the strategic planning shared by her in the first interview, she made it clear that the mission of the centre was to ‘serve the community regardless of race, belief or religion, with love and compassion and provide quality programmes, facilities and services’ [Source: Documents]. To achieve this, the core values perceived to be important for all stakeholders, especially the principal and teachers, are ‘confidence, competence, compassion and respect’ [Source: Documents].

Data collection

Data from multiple sources were obtained to establish data triangulation (Yin, 2014), as follows:

non-participant observation records of everyday centre-based activities (e.g., indoor and outdoor activities, child arrival/departure routines, mealtimes, transitions throughout the day, staff meetings, family events);

individual, semi-structured interviews and other informal conversations or email communications with Ms B;

individual, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) with teachers; and

relevant curricular and pedagogical documents (e.g., strategic plans, lesson plans, curriculum guide, pictures of the physical environment, field notes).

The primary researcher visited the centre once every month from December 2018 to November 2019. At each visit, individual interview/focus group discussion, non-participant observation and document collection were conducted. In total, three individual interviews with Ms B, individual interviews with seven teachers, and two focus group discussions (one each in Chinese language and English language) were conducted. Individual interviews and informal conversations with Ms B and teachers were conducted based on observations.

Data analysis

Non-participant observation field notes and interview transcripts were coded within NVivo 11 and analysed through an inductive approach – these data sources were chunked into smaller units of meaning related to the research purpose or those that have emerged with significance during fieldwork. Creswell’s (2014) guidelines for qualitative data analysis provided a guide: read through the transcripts, labelling portions of each transcript as emerging codes and categories by referring to the research purpose/conceptual framework, to aid in the eventual tabulation of themes culled from the multi-level structure of codes/categories.

In analysing the interview transcripts and observations, distributed pedagogical leadership was disaggregated to teachers’ involvement in collective decision-making, seeking out information or experiences, identifying gaps, and various (lost) opportunities to initiate activities or ideas (Muijs and Harris, 2007). In addition, we also considered setting- or organisation-specific conditions as well as broader, sector-wide ecological conditions that would have influenced distributed leadership enactment and power relationships within the team (Heikka, 2014; Heikka et al., 2019). Similarly, focus group interview transcripts were interpreted according to the study’s conceptual framework, considerate of the communicative dynamics of each focus group session (Krzyzanowski, 2008). Documents generated in the study were used as supplementary data for triangulating against the interviews and observations.

Trustworthiness and authenticity

The eventual report had to be believable and applicable to both ECCE practitioners and academics (Schwandt et al., 2007). Strategies to ensure the credibility of the study’s interpretation included: triangulation across multiple sources of data, prolonged engagement within the site, a search for disconfirming evidence, and member checks with the principal on the preliminary findings (Schwandt et al., 2007).

Results

In this article, three overarching themes are presented to explicate the conditions that supported or hindered distributed pedagogical leadership:

sector workforce: the macro context of teacher shortage, dependency on migrant teachers, and the historical lack of opportunities and expectation for teachers to develop as pedagogical leaders;

organisational culture and power relations: explores the organisational context with its rules and resources, the working relationship between new and existing staff, and with parents; and

pedagogical vision: reveals how and if the team attempted to construct a shared vision and strategies for pedagogical change.

ECCE sector workforce

This study found that the possibility of distributing pedagogical leadership was inevitably hampered by a shortage of qualified teachers, a condition that many centres are likely facing. In addition, the teachers expressed a desire to have more practical coaching and learning opportunities as the national curriculum and skills competencies framework promoted new expectations for responsive pedagogies and enquiry- and play-based curricula.

Staff shortage

ABC Centre experienced both a staff shortage and significant teacher attrition. As indicated in Table 2, there were only seven or eight teachers in the centre, which could not meet the demand of five classes (one per age group) based on the state’s licensing requirements (ECDA, 2020b). They needed two more teachers. Also, the centre had vacancies for a clerical staff and a cleaner, both of which were crucial for the centre’s proper functioning.

Hence, the teachers’ workloads increased as the principal needed them to share the burden of administrative tasks such as ordering food and teaching resources for the children and centre cleaning chores, in addition to teaching across different classes and age groups instead of working with a fixed age group in a homeroom.

One of the teachers commented on the additional tasks that were distributed by the principal:

Each teacher is given an assignment, [to be] in charge of something in the centre, for example, like for me, I am in charge of health and safety [for the whole centre], to make sure that the first-aid boxes are all up to date, make sure the electrical appliances are all working, that kind of thing […] different teachers have different things to do. That also takes up our time. (E1)

Other teachers also shared similar sentiments that these administrative tasks prevented them from devoting enough energy toward curricular planning and reflection. Another teacher (E2) reported that there is no teacher in the class for the 5-year-olds, so she came in at certain hours to assist them.

Shortage of teachers also led to reduced time for children’s outdoor learning as the team were concerned about children’s safety without adequate adult supervision when outdoors. The ECDA requirements stipulate at least 30 minutes outdoors daily, and a minimum of two adults to be present when outdoors (ECDA, 2020b). The Chinese teachers were concerned that there were some outdoor activities planned ahead, but if there was only one teacher that day, they would not bring the children out without a partner teacher and they would have to replace that outdoor activity.

The high teacher turnover rate also resulted in more new teachers than experienced ones at ABC Centre. The newer teachers included non-Singaporeans who came from the culturally and linguistically different contexts of China and the Philippines. Also, more than half of the teachers had less than 2 years of teaching experience and needed more training and support although they had the required qualification. This finding was confirmed by the principal and teachers:

‘I cannot blame them because the teachers here are very new, [with inadequate] teaching skills.’ (P2)

‘[…] even the teachers are confused and unsure and not yet stable so for the current situation, we are not ready to be levelled up’. (Focus Group Discussion [FGD])

Teachers’ apprenticeship and ongoing professional learning

Given the minimal national requirement for ECCE, it was no surprise that the teachers wished there were more apprenticeship and learning opportunities available to them, especially on-site learning and coaching. The fact that more than half of the teachers in the centre were newly hired within the same year meant there were very few teachers in the centre who could play the role of coach or mentor.

Only E2 as an experienced teacher seemed to play such a role even though she was a relief teacher who worked 3 days per week:

As a relief teacher, I guide the teachers because they see me as an experienced person, and how I speak to the parents […] I tell the teachers, ‘When you see your child’s parents, don’t just pass the child to the parents […] Make conversation, so that you can build rapport with the parents, so the parents will speak up to you more if they have any concerns, and also like be comfortable with sharing ideas with you.’ That is one thing I did with the K1 and K2 teachers. (E2)

E2’s role as a mentor was confirmed by some other English teachers. And the teachers’ expressed their general desire for coaching and mentoring:

When Mrs E2 is not around, we tend to be working on our own only but when Mrs E2 is here, she really makes it a point that we are really working together, communicating with each other. So we really like Mrs E2 to be here. (FGD)

The new teachers who needed to grow in their pedagogical skills were those who required more practical workshops and coaching. As mentioned by C1, they preferred to receive practical training so that the trainer was not just ‘showing PowerPoint’ but sharing teaching strategies.

However, this kind of practical professional learning opportunity was limited. As a result, the teachers felt that they went about their everyday work in a repetitive manner with little feeling of accomplishment and growth. When asked how they felt about working at ABC Centre, the teachers tended to agree with these views:

‘It’s just an ordinary day. I don’t feel I learn anything, just repeat what I did before.’ (C2)

‘Working here just [feels] mundane, not much training for Chinese teachers.’ (C3)

Ms B acknowledged that there was limited teacher professional sharing and peer learning as everyone was overloaded with different tasks. And although she had hoped for her team to be able to connect with and learn from other childcare centres, she was not successful in her outreach to other centres to create opportunities for her teachers to visit other centres, or for other teachers to share at ABC Centre.

Organisational culture and power relations

This theme sheds light on inter-connected aspects of culturally derived challenges that should be addressed before any teaching team can grow into a cohesive community of practice. Firstly, the nation’s teacher shortage led to ABC Centre’s significant proportion of foreign-trained migrant teachers. Time and effort was needed to understand the prior experiences of foreign-trained new-hires so that trusting, professional relationships grow. Secondly, as with most childcare chains in Singapore, the organisation’s HQ had a set of curriculum plans for its centres to implement, with minimal autonomy accorded to teachers to modify the plans, and centres were also under-resourced to enact those plans. Lastly, the HQ curriculum segregated Chinese language plans from the English language plans so that children were not experiencing integrated learning: this dichotomised approach did not motivate many of the children who were unfamiliar with the Chinese language.

Cultural barriers faced by migrant teachers

The centre had mostly migrant teachers, and only two Singaporean teachers (E1 and E2) (See Table 2). By the end of the project, the migrant teachers were yet to fully participate in centre-based quality improvement due to cultural barriers such as language and expectations. The migrant teachers had to adapt to the local childcare context that was reportedly different from the ECCE practices in their home countries (i.e., the Philippines and Peoples’ Republic of China). They were uncomfortable with the care routines such as bathing and diapering children:

The first month was really hard because [in] childcare [I help the children] to take a shower; [however] in Philippines, I don’t have that […] I only teach [for] a few hours. I will start my class at 8, and then I end at 10.20, so if they go [to the toilet], I can just let my assistant go, there is no showering time, no nap time. So when I came here, I have so many children. I am like ‘the mother’. (E4)

In addition, they found it difficult to communicate with Singaporean parents. This was especially difficult for the Chinese teachers who did not speak fluent English. The cultural differences between teachers and parents seemed to lead to a lack of partnership. The teachers and Ms B confirmed that the migrant teachers wanted to try and improve their communication and relationship with the parents despite being new to the local culture and expectations.

Hierarchical curriculum decision-making and limited resources

At ABC Centre, the team seemed to have little decision-making power, and the centre had too few resources to allow the teachers to exercise curricular flexibility. The teachers felt that the curricular restrictions dictated by the HQ caused significant organisational and teaching stress, making it more difficult to have a vision for distributed pedagogical leadership to aid quality improvement efforts.

The HQ curriculum guide was literature-based with pre-determined learning goals and objectives that did not suit all children. The curriculum document prescribed steps for the learning activities, mostly utilising teacher-directed instruction (e.g., storytelling) using stipulated story books. Teachers were isolated from the curriculum decision-making process. Moreover, the teachers did not think that the activities in the HQ curriculum were engaging enough to support children’s active learning. The children at ABC Centre had different home languages, socio-economic and cultural experiences.

The teachers reiterated this at the focus group discussions, saying that HQ was unfamiliar with children’s needs. Here is an example:

I think the curriculum is not fun. Because they require us to use these storybooks, but the same books are used for one whole month. And the books have only a few pages. For example, I used a book called ‘Thank you for staying with me’: ‘I am three years old today, thank you for growing up with me. Today I am four years old, thank you for growing up with me. Thank you for growing up with me, mum!’ This book is over [quickly, without an interesting storyline]. First of all, their learning objective is to know the words ‘thank you’. Wednesday is a reading class and Thursday is a character recognition class.…I just want the headquarters’ teachers to show us how to teach with such a picture book [for a month]. (FGD)

However, the HQ required teachers to write detailed lesson plans based on the HQ curriculum guide, with pre-determined themes and objectives. Teachers had to rely on the HQ curriculum document and had to re-create more detailed lesson plans. Moreover, the HQ curriculum was instructional, focusing on vocabulary learning, and fact-based. As mentioned by Ms B, ‘…the curriculum planned by HQ is not enquiry-based, so the children are always led by the teachers. So when it comes to writing lesson plans and things like that, they [teachers] don’t practise [enquiry-based learning].’

In the focus group discussion with Chinese teachers, this finding was also confirmed. Below is an excerpt from the Chinese focus group:

C2: There is more teacher autonomy in China’s kindergartens. Here [in Singapore], they [the organisation] arrange everything for you.

Researcher: But don’t you all write the lesson plans by yourselves?

C2: We have to follow their framework. You can’t change the learning goals which are fixed.

As a non-profit centre with limited government financial support, the centre was under-resourced. Teachers even had to buy materials for their own teaching, and the outdoor learning equipment was tired and limited. The HQ had left individual centres to their own devices to obtain the necessary resources needed to implement the HQ curriculum:

The utilisation rate of outdoor venues is not very high. More outdoor learning facilities can be set up to support children’s development. Those existing ones are not [appealing to children], and the iron (iron slides, for example) gets very hot […] after 10 a.m. […] and can’t be used by the children. (FGD)

Segregated bilingual teaching

In line with Singapore’s bilingual education practice in primary schools, ABC Centre offered children activities that were conducted in either English or Chinese language. With much time taken up by daily routine care activities, the teachers commented that they had just about one hour to conduct the HQ-recommended large group curricular activities in each language every morning. There was also a disconnect between the English and Chinese curricula that resulted in children’s fragmented learning experiences and their low motivation to learn an unfamiliar language.

The Chinese curriculum was developed to support children’s language learning and, therefore, Chinese teachers were not required to provide integrated learning across domains. This was a concern agreed by all the teachers, as they found it difficult to work as a team with such a compartmentalised curriculum. For example, as C1 said:

I don’t know if there is a connection between Chinese and English curricula. Our Chinese curriculum is now picture-book based, that is, there are two picture books each semester, and the other activities are extended based on the picture book story […] But the English curriculum seems to be theme-based. For example, the topic this semester is ‘insects’. It is not something that can easily be integrated with ours […] I don’t know if this must be separated or if there should be a link. (C1)

According to the Chinese teachers, many of the children also had uneven levels of exposure and competency in using the Chinese language, making it difficult for rapport-building. As mentioned by C1, it is difficult for the children with lower Chinese language ability to learn Chinese. C2 also confirmed this, saying that ‘Their language is not fluent, so maybe only one or two children can understand and have some interactions with you [during the activity].’ The Chinese teacher even reported that the children were more willing to listen to an English teacher, and some children who didn’t understand Chinese would reject the Chinese teachers.

Despite this, parents wanted the teachers to use didactic teaching methods and spelling tests to ensure their children learned the languages. While the teachers struggled, they were cognizant of the need to placate parents so as to maintain a healthy child enrolment within a neighbourhood that had at least three childcare centres.

Negotiating a shared pedagogical vision

Since the launch of the national frameworks and SPARK, the sector had been nudged toward thinking about providing more holistic, meaningfully integrated curricula that is play-based. Also, the sector has been encouraged to participate in continuing teacher PD so that they are better equipped with competencies as pedagogical leaders and curriculum designers. Evidence from this study suggests that this national vision may be a tall order for under-resourced centres and diverse teaching teams from different cultural backgrounds, dealing with a range of parental expectations.

Both Ms B and the teachers felt that the educational authorities expected more progressive and contemporary notions of ECCE to replace traditional pedagogical approaches. However, teachers at ABC Centre faced the challenge of getting their skills updated and mindsets changed. The teachers shared that they were learning how to rely less on large group, direct-instruction and academically focused activities to, instead, set up small-group learning centres in the classroom spaces to promote child autonomy through play-based explorations.

Ms B worked at moving teachers away from an academically driven, worksheet-based curriculum with mostly teacher-determined tasks to a more play-based curriculum which required more teacher scaffolding to promote child-led ideas and engage children’s minds. As she said, learning through play is more interesting for children, because teachers are actually planning and observing how to scaffold children’s thinking, bringing them to the next level.

However, parents had varying demands. Some parents preferred more academically driven learning experiences, while others wanted more playful learning experiences. Ms B shared her concern about catering to the spectrum of expectations:

We are open to communication, that’s why the parents are asking ‘why [is there] no 听写 [dictation]’ […and] we say ‘No, there’s been a change.’ The thing is that we have to [educate] them saying that, let’s say, phonics – we say there are benefits of rote learning phonics but not all children [can discern by listening and would need other methods]. (Ms B)

The challenge for teachers was to judiciously balance the various demands and yet lead pedagogical change so that the curriculum became more engaging for children. This is linked back to teachers’ professional learning and confidence. Teachers’ concerns about parents’ expectations were similar to Ms B’s observations – with some parents querying the lack of academic homework and their preference for reducing play time for children. The teachers felt there was a need to work together to educate parents about the value of a play-based curriculum.

Discussion

This case study explored the centre-based conditions that afforded distributed pedagogical leadership. Systemic factors have been found to affect teachers’ pedagogical leadership, learning and involvement in quality improvement. Conditions included the shortage of staff, teachers’ ongoing learning needs, curriculum decision-making rules, resources for teaching and learning, cultural constraints, and parental expectations amidst shifting curricular and pedagogical requirements in the sector.

Within months after the new principal joined the centre, there appeared to be positive changes despite the challenges created by a critical shortage of staff. At least one of the five interdependent dimensions of distributed pedagogical leadership (Heikka et al., 2019) seemed to be emerging in the team’s attempt to improve children’s learning experience – the team appeared to be developing a shared vision of a more child-centric curriculum through a process of realising what they did not know, and thinking of ways to circumnavigate a HQ-determined curriculum to cater for children’s needs and interests.

This study has shown that centres relying on migrant teachers and newly qualified staff need time and curricular guidance to develop into communities of practice. This finding confirmed some of the observations recently shared by early childhood leaders in Singapore (Lipponen et al., 2019). The sector has been growing rapidly to meet government targets of having two in three pre-schoolers in either a childcare or kindergarten by the year 2023 (Lipponen et al., 2019), leading to significant staff shortage (Chia, 2017) and, as such, it has become inevitable to rely on a migrant workforce. Such workforce diversity in the ECCE sector warrants attention in future research if Singapore is to maximise the assets and potential of migrant teachers from the region.

Against the backdrop of SPARK certification and upskilling of teachers in Singapore, this study has documented the challenges and concerns raised by the educators at ABC Centre as they attempted to engender change. In theory, the support of a quality rating system, national frameworks and available funding for PD opportunities could be useful in guiding practitioners to improve. In reality, these macro initiatives and quality rating in and of itself may not support teacher learning or sustainable improvement of ECCE programmes given the complexities that exist in teachers’ everyday realities. The quality assessment process did not naturally transform teams into communities of practice nor nurture distributed pedagogical leadership. Our findings echo that of Zellman et al. (2009) in questioning the utility of quality rating and improvement systems as panacea for uplifting childcare practices, as well as Nolan and Molla (2018) in the need to conceptualise PD as socially situated practice.

Nevertheless, teacher education and continued teacher learning is a lynchpin in the sector’s search for quality improvement, to be seen as dependent on contextual influences such as teachers’ cultural backgrounds, identity, autonomy, available supports and their full participation in pedagogical leadership. It was surprising that centres within the same childcare chain were not more collaborative and thereby conducive to learning across centres. Bautista et al. (2016) found teachers’ professional needs occurring in specific learning areas. Our study has further found that teachers have PD needs to improve their engagement with children. There is also a need to promote implicit and informal exchanges that can facilitate teaching and learning within and across settings (Evans, 2019). It is only when teachers flourish as learners within their teams that they can lead curricular change within their setting and be more confident in communicating their intended curricular goals with different kinds of parents.

Conclusion, implications and limitations

This study examined centre-based conditions that could hinder or facilitate teachers’ distributed pedagogical leadership and the development of a community of practice – both assumed to be necessary for teachers’ continued learning and improvement of centres’ practices. Results are presented to highlight three overarching themes: (a) the inevitable influences of the national context of the sector’s workforce; (b) organisational culture and power relations; and (c) pedagogical vision. The present study thus move forward the international research on early childhood leadership by situating and understanding practitioners’ distributed pedagogical leadership in the authentic ECCE settings. The results also illustrate the intricacies involved in centre-based quality improvement work, signalling the need for more investigations into the everyday realities of ECCE reforms as experienced by teachers-as-learners and leaders.

Although this case study is by no means generalisable across all childcare centres, it provides nuanced information for rethinking the nationwide quality improvement movement in Singapore. Being the first such investigation into the everyday hopes and challenges of a non-profit childcare centre, this study should speak to the issues found in a significant proportion of the privately-run non-profit childcare centres that may be under-resourced and facing shortages and inadequate PD. More research is needed to examine how quality improvement efforts within individual centres can improve. This study provides some preliminary but important implications for future research into the contributions of a migrant teaching workforce, leadership practices and teacher learning for quality improvement within bilingual settings.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the principal and teachers who took part in the study. We also thank Ms Tan Seok Ling for helping us with the interview transcription.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the SUSS Applied Research Committee under Grant RF19NSH01.

ORCID iD

Weipeng Yang

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