Assoc Professor Stephen Tay
Department of the Built Environment, College of Design and Engineering
Acting Deputy Director (Continuing Education), Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology
National University of Singapore
About
Associate Professor Stephen Tay’s teaching philosophy builds upon constructivism and active learning, viewing the class as a shared platform for learning by students and educators. To empower student agency, he developed Contextualised Learning via Enquiring, Answering, and Reflecting (CLEAR), which has been funded for implementation through collaborations in Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden, and Thailand. For sustained contributions to teaching excellence, he was awarded the NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award for three consecutive years (AY19/20 to AY21/22), the University Honour Roll (2024 - 2028), and the Outstanding Educator Award in 2026. Beyond the university, he actively collaborates with MOE schools to explore the implementation of CLEAR, which includes working with the Gifted Education Branch in MOE. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College London under the National Research Foundation (Clean Energy) Overseas Scholarship and is a faculty member in the Department of the Built Environment. An alumnus of the NUS Teaching Academy, he currently serves as Acting Deputy Director in the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology.
Strand: Learning Through Inquiry
From Questions to Learner Agency with CLEAR: Contextualised Enquiry Beyond the Classroom
Motivated to move beyond textbooks and traditional lectures, Associate Professor Stephen Tay developed CLEAR (Contextualised Learning via Enquiring, Answering, and Reflecting) to increase student agency. With CLEAR, students develop their own questions and answers that are anchored in observations from daily life or industry cases. In this presentation, he shares his journey in developing and implementing CLEAR across STEM and non-STEM courses and multiple institutions. Evidence from triangulated measurements — assessment scores, student feedback, samples of student work, and feedback from lecturers — is presented to highlight learning gains and challenges. Specifically for the Forward Learning Conference, examples of CLEAR implementation in primary schools will be presented, along with an interactive workshop for participants to develop lesson plans for potential implementation in their teaching context. This presentation aims to provide participants with practical insights on designing authentic assessments and cultivating student autonomy through CLEAR. With the move from the Gifted Education Programme to High Ability Learners (HALs), CLEAR could provide cognitive engagement for HALs. By sharing these experiences, educators are invited to draw lessons that can inform and enrich their professional development journeys.