Dr Leong Swee Ling

Profile

Swee Ling has being actively involved in environmental education for the past 14 years to raise awareness to care and protect mother earth. Winning the Watermark award in 2009 and the EcoFriend award in 2010 was a recognition by the PUB and NEA of her many environmental efforts. To promote water concerns and issues, together with some students, Swee Ling designed games to educate primary school students on water conservation and other issues. In 2009 she shared with teachers from the North West clusters on using games as pedagogy for integrating water into the curriculum. In addition, the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources invited Swee Ling to be part of the Environmental Education Resource Package committee to help to develop lesson plans and activity on water sustainability.

Another area that Swee Ling is very passionate about is special education. She was a tutor for Teachers trained in special needs (TSN) since 2006, and have trained many secondary school teachers to differentiate for students with special needs. In 2008, she completed her master in education (special education) and her dissertation was Service learning project of gifted/twice exceptional pupils: A participatory action research study. In 2009, she was accepted by NIE to continue her doctoral study. She successfully defended her thesis on the Effects of a Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) instruction on the conceptual and procedural understanding of algebraic expressions for secondary students with mathematics difficulties in 2015. This study enables Swee Ling to bring together her concerns for students who need special accommodation and mathematics. She presented her study at the International Congress of Mathematics Education Hamburg in July 2016.

Under the Teachers Work Attachment of Teachers Network, she led a team of three young teachers from other schools to train mathematics teachers in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap from 12 November to 20 November 2010. Seeing the lesson packages translated into Cambodian gave her immense satisfaction. The experience had been most rewarding and enriching and she hope to train more teachers in developing countries in the near future.

As a core team member of the math subject chapter in 2015 to 2016, Swee Ling supported AST in professional development of math teachers at various platforms and she was conferred the Associate of AST in 2016. She led the Math Modelling NLC in 2016 and conducted demonstration lessons at Guanyang Secondary on the Potato Chip Problem to Secondary One Express and Normal Academic students.