NUS Honours Two Educators Who Put Judgement and Character Ahead of AI

Teaching that starts with a failure to learn

Associate Professor Stephen Tay of the NUS College of Design and Engineering, who teaches in the Department of the Built Environment, was one of two faculty members honoured at the event. He recalled a lesson his father brought home from night class: "If you fail to learn, then I have failed to teach."

That idea shaped the Contextualised Learning via Enquiring, Answering, and Reflecting (CLEAR) pedagogical framework, which he presented in his lecture to more than 100 participants. According to NUS, the framework encourages curiosity and critical thinking and has been adopted across Singapore and five other countries.

How CLEAR works in the classroom

Assoc Prof Tay developed CLEAR after early student feedback that theoretical equations were hard to follow. "I began to question my efficacy as a teacher," he said. He then studied pedagogy at the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology.

In the method, students do not receive tutorial questions. "Instead of giving students the tutorial questions, I guide them to generate the tutorial questions," he explained. Students then develop answers using real-world examples and teach their peers with the questions and answers they created.

In one class, a group turned urban sustainability challenges into a game, with classmates cast as adventurers solving real-world problems. NUS says the exercise helped students link theory to practice.

The approach has also reached younger learners. Mr Ng Ee Noch, Head of Department of Information Communication and Technology at Boon Lay Garden Primary School, credited Assoc Prof Tay with guiding him in introducing CLEAR to primary school students, including feedback on an application Mr Ng developed to support it.

Shaping character, not only knowledge

Associate Professor Robin Loon of the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences holds that education should shape character as well as impart knowledge. Skills can be forgotten, he argues, while dispositions, the habits of mind that guide behaviour, take longer to develop but last. With AI making information readily available, critical evaluation matters more, though it requires an open mind. "You cannot make a wise critical judgement if your mindset is closed off," he said.

His philosophy underpins GEN2001 Theatre and Community Engagement, a course he co-designed. Students use role play, process drama and community observation to examine their assumptions and responses to everyday situations. In one workshop on a moral dilemma, a student reflected on not offering her seat to a pregnant woman on a crowded train, and wrote that she had convinced herself that no action was needed if nobody asked. The exercise led her to question that response and consider acting differently next time.

What the university says AI changes

Professor Peter Ho, Vice Provost (Undergraduate Studies & Technology-Enhanced Learning), said in his opening address that educators must put greater emphasis on nurturing critical thinking and character as AI increasingly handles tasks from drafting syllabi to synthesising literature and generating content.

"What an algorithm cannot offer our students is judgement, resilience and character," he said. "An algorithm does not care. It has syntax, but no stakes. Humans can care and we must care."

For students and teachers, the message from NUS is that the value of teaching is shifting toward the skills AI does not supply, and the two honoured methods show how that can be done in practice, through student-generated questions and guided reflection.