This book offers an ecological perspective to understand the opportunities and complexities of spreading and sustaining educational innovations. It explores the imperatives underpinning educational reforms and identifies the role of schools in developing, disseminating, and sustaining changes in Singapore's educational context. It also includes international case studies that examine the dialectical relationships between structure, people and culture and demonstrate that cultivating ecologies involves leveraging affordances and resources across the education system to create new contexts, synergies and capacities. Further, it argues that educational innovations and reforms also need to consider tacit knowledge and conditions of transfer, which may be ambiguous and challenging. Few books address the nuances and interactions of innovation and change across levels of the education ecology - from the micro (classroom), meso (organisation / school), exo (partners), macro (policy) and chrono (time scales) levels. The ecological perspective adopted in this book explores the dynamic tensions in order to understand the interplays of policy and school-level influences that contextualize school innovations. By presenting multiple voices and views, it allows impediments and affordances of innovation diffusion to be discussed holistically, which is an integral caveat for nurturing a sustainable ecology that enables innovations.

This book provides an overview of the various 'Science of Learning' (SoL) research projects led by researchers at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and international research collaborators. It presents the goals and rationale behind the Science of Learning in Education (SoLE) initiative and examines a spectrum of topics relevant to bolstering our understanding of the science underlying learning. The Science of Learning (SoL) is an advancing field, with proponents extolling its potential impact on educational practice. This book investigates the possible correlations or causal relationships between brain functioning and development, physiology, environment factors, and their impact on learning. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding biological to behavioural mechanisms of learning that are oriented toward optimizing and maximizing every learner’s potential.