Inside Current Buzz: The Bi-Weekly Session That Helps Students Develop Critical Thinking Skills

Key Takeaways:

• Current Buzz is a bi-weekly feature of Learning Point's Secondary Excellence in English (EIE) programme for S1 to S4 students.

• Every session is built around relevant news articles, curated from local and global sources.

• Students read, discuss, form opinions, and learn to defend a position clearly — skills that feed directly into essay writing, oral examinations, and comprehension.

• Critical thinking is not a subject. It is a habit of building thinking skills, and Current Buzz is designed specifically to build it across topics.

• Current Buzz topics focus on popular themes that often come up in essay and oral exam questions, as well as current news that teachers consider important to know.

What Is Current Buzz?

Current Buzz is a bi-weekly component of Learning Point's Secondary EIE programme, designed for Secondary 1 to 4 students. Each session is built around a real news article drawn from local and global sources — technology, society, the environment, culture, science, and beyond. It also gives students regular exposure to current affairs , helping them connect classroom learning with real-world issues.

The rules are simple: every topic is current, every topic is relevant, and no topic is ever repeated. Students cannot memorise their way through it. They have to engage with it fresh, every single time, drawing on the thinking skills such as questioning and analysing to form their own views.

What makes Current Buzz different:

• Topics are curated specifically to spark genuine debate, not surface-level agreement.

• Articles are adapted from credible sources including The Straits Times, giving students direct exposure to the kind of writing they encounter in comprehension examinations.

• Sessions are structured to build skills progressively — students are not just reading and moving on. They are forming, testing, and defending positions.

• The topics are chosen to be things secondary students actually have opinions about. Getting a teenager to engage meaningfully starts with giving them something worth caring about.

This Week in the Classroom

The topic on the table: Gen Z is abandoning smartphones for Walkmans, wired earphones, and "dumb phones" with no internet. Is this a genuine cultural shift — or just another aesthetic trend?

Students in Learning Point's Secondary EIE classes read an article adapted from The Straits Times, tracking three young Singaporeans who have swapped modern devices for retro tech. One collects 180 CDs and 170 vinyl records. Another switched to a three-inch phone after a Reddit addiction cost her hours of her day. A third keeps film for his Polaroid camera in his refrigerator.

After reading the articles, students connect the topic discussed to questions that appear in essays and oral exams. An example of a possible argumentative essay question for this topic would be: “Is nostalgia for old technology justified? Why or why not” The discussion that occurs during lessons helps students to form pointers for argumentative essay writing when they are asked to take a clear position and justify it.

"Form opinions. Back them up. Say them out loud." That is the heartbeat of every Current Buzz session.

What Actually Happens in a Session

Each Current Buzz session follows a deliberate structure that takes students from reading to reasoning to writing.

01	02	03	04
Read	Discuss	Defend	Write
Students read a real, curated news article on a topic they actually care about — technology, culture, society, global events.	The teacher facilitates open discussion. Students are pushed to form a position, not just summarise. Agreeing with everyone else is not enough.	Students learn to back up their view with reasoning and evidence from the article. Vague opinions do not survive the room.	Students write down points raised during the discussion, building material they can use for their essays.

The Gen Z and technology session is a good example of how this plays out. The article presents three real people with three different relationships to retro tech. Students have to read carefully, identify each person's motivations, and decide whether the arguments hold up.

Is ditching a smartphone a meaningful statement about screen addiction, as Jamie Lee's story suggests? Or is it mostly about the aesthetic appeal of wired earphones and vintage Walkmans, as Cody Tong's perspective implies? Students cannot just pick a side. They have to explain why one reading of the evidence is more convincing than another.

That skill — evaluating competing perspectives and arriving at a reasoned position — is exactly what O-level English markers are looking for in argumentative essays and oral examinations.

Why This Matters for Secondary English

One challenge many secondary school students face is limited exposure to real-world examples, globally or locally. Current Buzz provides that and helps students practice their critical thinking skills. For parents looking for support to build the  critical thinking skills secondary school students need, this kind of structured discussion fosters stronger habits of reasoning, questioning, and expressing ideas.

Here is how the skills built in each session map directly onto secondary English assessments:

English skill	How Current Buzz builds it
Essay Writing	Current Buzz trains students to form a clear position and support it with reasoning and evidence — the structure O-level essays demand.
Oral examination	Students who discuss current issues regularly are far more comfortable with the spoken interaction component, where examiners expect personal views backed by real-world awareness.
Comprehension and inference	Engaging with real news articles builds the habit of reading critically, identifying the writer's intent, and distinguishing fact from opinion.
Critical thinking	Every Current Buzz session asks students to evaluate an issue from multiple angles before landing on a position. This is the thinking skill that separates strong writers from average ones, and it is one reason parents may consider secondary English tuition in Singapore when their child needs more guided practice.

Many secondary students struggle with essay writing not because they cannot write, but because they have not practised forming and defending a view under any real pressure. Current Buzz creates that pressure, in a low-stakes environment where the goal is to think well, not to get a grade. It is features like Current Buzz that sets our secondary enrichment classes apart from other enrichment classes in Singapore that parents often consider for academic development.

By the time a student has been through a full year of Current Buzz sessions, they have encountered dozens of real-world issues, practised articulating their position on each one, and built the habit of reading news critically rather than passively. That accumulates into something that shows up noticeably in their writing and strengthens the thinking skills they need across different English components.

What Parents Often Ask

My child isn't interested in current affairs. Will this work for them?

This is the most common concern, and it is worth addressing directly. Current buzz topics are chosen to provide students with something to say about them. Technology, social trends, the environment, identity, pop culture — these are not abstract issues for teenagers. They are lived experiences. A student who has never read a newspaper in their life will still have a view on whether abandoning a smartphone is a genuine act of rebellion or just a fashion statement. That is the entry point. Critical thinking develops from there.

How does this connect to what's being tested in school?

MOE's secondary English syllabus places explicit emphasis on the ability to form, express, and justify opinions in both written and spoken form. The Oral examination's Spoken Interaction component and the essay writing format both reward students who can engage with an issue thoughtfully rather than just recite facts. Topics chosen also link closely to commonly discussed themes taught in school. While parents may compare to find the best English tuition for their child in secondary school, English support often requires a very different focus on reading, reasoning, discussion, and writing.

See It for Yourself

Current Buzz is one component of Learning Point's Secondary Excellence in English (EIE) programme, which runs for Secondary 1 to 4 students across English language, and writing skills. For families considering Secondary 1 English tuition, it offers an early way to help students adjust to the demands of secondary-level discussion, writing, and comprehension.

The best way to understand what a session feels like is to be in the room for one.

Wonder what a Current Buzz session looks like? Join our tuition centre for a trial class to see how real-world discussion sharpens thinking skills, builds confidence to speak up, and strengthens writing through the Secondary EIE programme.