Opinion pieces from CORE’s principal investigators — the conversation you’d get sitting down with them, not the version that goes in a journal. Deliberately unpolished, occasionally contrarian, and always the writer’s own view rather than the programme’s. We pick one question a quarter and let people disagree about it.
[Contributor name] · Panel Principal Investigator
We keep saying we want engaged learners, then measure whether they were quiet and on task. Those are not the same thing, and in a Mother Tongue classroom the gap between them is wider than most of us admit.
“A student who is silent because they cannot find the words is not disengaged. They are stuck. Our instruments are not good at telling those two apart yet.”
[Contributor name] · Senior Education Research Scientist
Some of the most effective teaching we have recorded looks completely unremarkable on video. No group work, no technology, no visible excitement. Just careful sequencing and a teacher who noticed when to slow down.
“If we only celebrate the lessons that look good on video, we will end up rewarding performance rather than teaching.”
[Contributor name] · Research Fellow, CRPP
A short piece on the distance between the Mandarin, Malay and Tamil that students hear at home and the register they are assessed on — and what that distance does to a fourteen-year-old’s willingness to speak up.
“Engagement is partly a question of risk. Ask yourself how willing you would be to answer in a language you only half own.”
Every past question stays up. Nothing gets quietly deleted because someone changed their mind — changing your mind is rather the point.
