Speaking to Ms Ng Lee Siah, one gets the sense that she has an adventurous and inquisitive streak. But it’s not something that is immediately apparent when Schoolbag first met her at the Project Work Marketplace of Ideas Pitch. The Eunoia Junior College (EJC) teacher, who teaches Project Work (PW), was there to accompany her students for their group presentation.
Named Sustainabite, her PW group had proposed to create a recipe kit with insect-based protein product to combat food insecurity in Singapore. Their comprehensive and practical proposal – and charming presentation – won them first place in the pitching event, and they readily credited Ms Ng for her guidance in helping them shape their work.
Sustainabite’s win aside, their quirky personalities compelled us to find out more. There are five of them: one wants to go into public policy; one is a self-proclaimed insect lover who is determined to work for NParks; one wants to go into foreign policy and law; one wants to study biology; and one is interested in music cognition and neuroscience. So, how did Ms Ng get all of them on the same page? Turns out, she herself has as diverse a set of interests as the winning team she oversees.
Ms Ng and Mr Andrew Tan, and the team members of Sustainabite.
A fortuitous posting
Ms Ng first entered the teaching profession fresh out of school. “I graduated with an Engineering degree from Nanyang Technological University, and I applied to all the jobs I didn’t mind trying out,” she recalls. “I went for interviews with a few companies, and MOE got back to me, offered me a teaching position.”
That led her to her first teaching stint, where she was trained to teach Mathematics and posted to Pioneer Junior College (PJC). “I went to the school website to find out more about the school, and I saw that the PW oral presentations were ongoing. My interest was piqued and I remember wondering if I could call the school to ask to sit in for the presentations,” Ns Ng says.
She did not contact the school eventually, but fate would have it that PJC set up the PW department that year. The Head of Department (HOD) asked Ms Ng if she was interested to join. She said yes immediately, which surprised him. “The idea of working on a project and solving a problem sounded interesting to me because there was no PW when I was in JC,” she elaborates.
A thirst for new experiences
In her fourth year of teaching, however, Ms Ng had an urge to seek out different experiences. “Entrepreneurship was something that I always wanted to try out, and I felt that I shouldn’t wait too long to try it out because I wasn’t getting any younger,” she says. That’s when she decided to take a leap of faith and explore a different path in her career.
She took on some gigs as a translator and then a full-time role as a trainer, where she was conducting programmes such as Math Olympiad training in schools. Then one day during lunch, an advertisement caught her attention.
Ms Ng (left) and her business partner, Ms Celine Wong, back in 2011.
“It was an ad looking for a franchisee for menswear. My colleague got really excited about it, and we decided to pop into the shop next day to find out more,” Ms Ng says. One thing led to another, and she ended up resigning from her training job to start the business with two of her colleagues.
From manning the shop to stock-taking, and also coming up with promotions and tracking which ones worked, Ms Ng put her knack for problem-solving to use. “I learnt the importance of experimenting and taking small, incremental steps and improvements. It debunked my belief that ideas and solutions always have to be ground-breaking.”
Back from her detour
Ms Ng stepped away from the business two years later and re-evaluated her next steps in life. “It was a bit idealistic, come to think of it,” she admits, “but I felt like I had something valuable to share, with the skills I acquired. I also wondered how much the teaching environment had changed.”
She reached out to her teacher friends and through them, met with the new HOD for PW at PJC. Ms Ng was certain that she “only wanted to teach PW”; it was an important consideration for her.
In 2014, she rejoined the fraternity after successfully reapplying to be a teacher and undergoing the entire application process once more. She emphasises that she was fortunate and appreciated that MOE took her preference into account and posted her back to PJC. PJC was subsequently merged with Jurong Junior College in 2019 and the new school was renamed as Jurong Pioneer Junior College.
During the pandemic, she applied to EJC and continues to teach PW there.
Ms Ng leads one of her PW group’s discussion.
When asked what has changed, she candidly says that it’s the increased focus on students’ social-emotional development. “In a subject like PW, where students must work together, you have to be able to manage everyone’s social-emotional well-being. How do we engage a group mate who has different or additional needs and get them to contribute? If one of the students has special needs, how do we go about supporting everyone in the group without breaching the privacy of the student with special needs?”
What has remained unchanged, though, is the satisfaction she gets when she sees students grow and enjoy the fruits of their labour. With the refreshed curriculum for PW and its shift to being a pass/fail subject since 2024, she has witnessed students get more enthusiastic about the work that they do.
She elaborates, “Students are increasingly open to choosing a topic that they are interested in, rather than one that they can do well in, and they get much more joy and satisfaction from developing their project ideas. They also learn deeper of their own accord.”
Photos courtesy of: Ms Ng Lee Siah
Work opportunities like what Ms Ng wanted to experience can now be more easily accessed through the MOE Teacher Work Attachment Plus (TWA+) Programme. Introduced in 2022, it lets teachers broaden their perspectives through a range of learning journeys and work attachments in the public, private and people sectors. These professional learning experiences are specially curated to span different industry clusters and sectors, and designed to provide an insight into the trends, challenges, and opportunities of each industry. Teachers then return to school and share their learning with their fellow colleagues and students.
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