Raffles Programme

The Raffles Programme is a seamless 6-year curriculum culminating in the Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate in Education (GCE) Advanced Level Examination. Students are expected to complete the full duration of the programme. Transfers to other schools, especially other IP institutions, are strongly discouraged and will only be considered under exceptional circumstances.

Building on the rich heritage and culture of excellence of Raffles Girls’ School and Raffles Institution, the programme provides a rigorous and enriched curriculum for highly-able students in Singapore. The Raffles Programme offers a broad-based curriculum, pathways for the development of special interests and strengths, and an emphasis on character and leadership development.

Our Mission

Nurturing the high ability girl to be a leader who will realise her talents in service of nation and community.

Goals

To develop fine character and well-being, nurture the intellect and fire the imagination of the RGS girl as a

Person who is purposeful and aspires towards the greater good with integrity, empathy and resilience.
Leader who values diversity, cohesiveness, and inclusiveness in exerting positive influence and impact on the community.
Thinker who demonstrates a disposition for reflective and flexible thinking, and is willing to take intellectual risks, especially in the face of complex and ambiguous situations.
Pioneer who seeks opportunities and embraces challenges with courage to innovate for the common good.

School Values

People-centred, Principled, Passionate, Professional

Our Curriculum Framework

The Raffles Programme is based on the principles of the Integrated Curriculum Model for gifted learners (Van Tassel-Baska, 1986). The curriculum challenges highly able students through the use of advanced content knowledge, high-order process and product work, and cross-disciplinary concept development.

Raffles Approaches to Foster Learning

The Raffles classroom fosters a passion for lifelong learning through the following approaches:

Authentic: Draws on real-world knowledge of local and global contexts
Learner-centred: Encourages active participation, exploration, discovery and collaboration among learners
Process-focused: Emphasises ways of thinking and the development of disciplinary skills in the various fields
Integrative: Builds on the inter-connectedness of ideas across disciplines

Assessment

Assessment modes are varied and emphasise content mastery and process skills. Continual assessment is a central feature of the assessment framework. Both assessment of learning and assessment for learning are emphasised. Assessment tools include:

Standardised pen and paper tests
Performance tasks and journals
Portfolios
Oral presentations
Individual and group projects

Curriculum and Instructional Design Tools

The Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM) is an integrative approach of organising and differentiating the curriculum for gifted learners through three different dimensions:

Advanced content
Interdisciplinary concepts/themes/issues
High level process-product development

It is designed to respond to the precocity, intensity and complexity that characterise highly able learners.

Understanding by Design (UBD) Framework by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

Assessments are based on the desired learner outcomes (what we want students to know, understand and be able to do); they drive our instructional practices. This is consistent with the backward design process of the UBD framework that the school uses for the development of its lesson units in each discipline area. The framework helps focus curriculum and teaching on the development and deepening of student understanding using a three-stage design process: identifying desired results, determining evidence, planning learning experiences and instruction.

Curriculum Differentiation

Teachers harness multiple instructional strategies to facilitate higher order thinking and research skills. These include Richard Paul’s Elements of Reasoning in the Humanities, Problem Posing in Mathematics and Team-Based learning in Science. Teachers also use Learning Centres, Concept Development approaches and Collaborative Learning to enrich the learning experience. At all times, the teacher facilitates, steers and deepens learning through questioning, explanation, and clear feedback. Responding to the needs of all learners, we differentiate the way we learn and teach so that students learn based on their readiness, interest and learning profile.
[Carol Ann Tomlinson]