Our Story - Lam Learning Hub

Our Story

The Early Days

Lam Learning Hub was set up in 2009 by founder Mr Lam Kwong Khiam, a former banker, to provide quality and convenient Student Care, Tuition and Enrichment services for residents in Hougang under the brands of Little Professors @ Hougang and Global Art Hougang respectively.
 
In the initial years, he noted that the centre has a larger than proportionate share of weaker students. Many parents treated education centres as musical chairs, moving their children from centre to centre hoping to find a centre that could turn their children around.
 
It was painful looking at the despair and resignation showing on the faces of these children and their parents. Having personally guided them, he soon realised that tuition alone would not be the long-term solutions for these children. The issues were more deep-rooted. That would involve changing mindset, habits and behaviours besides picking up study skills.

The Research

He decided that he wanted to help them and that set off a continuous search for solutions. Over the next few years, his time was filled with reading, attending workshops, seminars and conferences all over the world learning more about education in general and in special needs.
 
As part of the research results, in 2016, he set up Arte Sensorial to provide brain development courses for both children and adult as an authorised training centre of Neuro Code Research. He also expanded the Global Art business by acquiring the franchises of Global Art Bedok and Global Art Yishun. The company was also accredited as a training operator of People’s Association providing enrichment classes across community clubs in Singapore.
 
He further gathers that majority of these students have some common problems. Most of them have difficulty paying attention in class and in doing homework. Partly because of this and partly because they have not been taught the effective learning skills, they have difficulty remembering what they learn and hence have poor memory.
 
Consequently, they do poorly in school and that lead to stress. Their consistently poor school results further erode their confidence and lead them to have low self-esteem. They begin to think that they are not good in study and no matter how hard they work, they will not in improve. They started to have a fixed mind-set. They become uninterested in studying and will not pay attention to school work. This becomes a vicious circle.

Expanding Into Mindfulness

Mr Lam was excited by Carol Dweck’s fixed mindset and growth mindset theory and Barbara Oakley and her partners’ learning How to Learn series and found these to be great resources that will be helpful to his work. However, he was particularly intrigued by Eline Snel’s Sitting Still Like A Frog and Christopher Willard’s Alphabreaths. They make teaching mindfulness practices and techniques to children so easy and so effective. He started seeing changes in children’s behaviour, habits and even mindset after a few weeks of lessons. The benefits go beyond children who are academically weak. In fact, we see improvements in general among all our children.
 
In 2019, he developed a new program for children, the Arte ingenuity Plus. The aim of the program is to shape changes in attitudes, habits and behaviours of children through training in mindfulness, growth mindset and memory and brain training. These elements have since been incorporated into the Student Care service as a value add to parents.
 
As Mr Lam dealt deeper into the research on mindfulness, the more he was convinced that anyone be it adults or children who adopt some forms of mindfulness practices even with small doses will see improvements in many aspects of their lives. These include mental and general health, work performance and inter-personal relationship.
 
Mindfulness has its root 2,000 years ago from ancient Buddhism. About 40 years ago, Jon Kabat Jinn, then a university professor working in the University of Massachusetts Medical School, stripped the religious component of it and brought mindfulness to the western medical world.
Jon Kabat Jinn Initially developed a mindfulness program to treat patients with chronic pains. With that success, he went on to develop a program call Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Program. (MBSR). This is the most successful mindfulness program in the world today.
Since then, a lot of research has gone into this field. More than 20,000 research publications on mindfulness have been published on PubMed in the last 20 years with more than 2,800 published last year alone.