Nadya Shaznay Patel
Dr Nadya Patel, an Assistant Professor in the Business, Communication and Design cluster at the Singapore Institute of Technology, has had the privilege of accumulating over twenty years of experience as an educator, researcher and trainer. With a passion for critical design futures thinking for interdisciplinary learning, she co-develops design innovation and multimedia design modules that aim to develop learners' critical competence, design dexterity and futures flexibility for innovation. At the invitation of local and international institutions, she regularly facilitates professional development workshops on pedagogical approaches to improve teaching and learning practices. Committed to bridging the research-practice gap, she engages industry partners in applied research projects that leverage on her expertise in learning and development and interest in GenAI applications. Over the years, she has worked with industry partners like JurongHealth Academy, Ng Teng Fong General Hospital, AstraZeneca, UOB, Social Service Institute to offer industry-relevant workshops on design innovation, designing futures with GenAI, empathetic leadership communication, and corporate coaching and mentoring.
Dr. Nadya Patel graduated with a Doctor in Education from University College London, and in 2024 a Master degree (with Distinction) in Digital Management is a testament to her unwavering commitment to lifelong learning. Previously, she was a Research Fellow with the Centre for Pedagogy and Practice at Nanyang Technological University, where she was involved in two nationwide research studies, including the CORE study on the impact of national initiative TLLM on teaching and learning in schools, and the Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project (SKIP). Her research interests include Critical Design Futures thinking, GenAI applications, transdisciplinarity, creativity and entrepreneurial readiness.
Over the years, Dr Nadya has received teaching excellence and commendation awards from SIT, NUS, a graduate research award from NIE-NTU and an innovation commendation PS21 ExCEL (Excellence through Continuous Enterprise and Learning) award for MOE. She is a well-regarded educator, highly-rated workshop facilitator and regular presenter at international educational conferences. A teacher-researcher at heart, Dr Nadya endeavours to remain at the forefront of transformational pedagogical approaches that leverage emerging technologies and transdisciplinary learning.
Keynote Address (Live Virtual)
Better Questions, Not Faster Answers: Designing Generative AI for Intellectual Agility in Differentiated Classrooms
Generative AI systems are increasingly deployed in schools to accelerate output, smoothing away the productive struggle that genuine learning depends on. Yet the most powerful use of AI in differentiated teaching is not to reduce cognitive load, but to redesign it intentionally. Drawing on Dr Nadya Patel's research, she will share her work on designing Erwin* bot and examining how an AI tool can strengthen intellectual agility and foster future-ready dispositions through a design-driven innovation curriculum. This keynote argues that meaningful differentiation in the age of GenAI requires deliberate cognitive friction, the careful calibration of challenge, reflection, and recovery to each learner's readiness. Rather than treating differentiation as task simplification, the session reframes it as the art of stretching every student's intellectual agility, that disciplined capacity to probe assumptions, pivot under uncertainty, and remain curious in conditions of change. School leaders and educators will leave with a practical framework for deploying conversational AI not as an answer machine but as a co-thinking tool, one that widens perspective, sharpens judgment, and ensures that every learner, regardless of starting point, earns insight rather than inherits it.
*Erwin is an AI chatbot built on an LLM with a conversational framework to support Critical Design Futures thinking, which is developed as part of a three-year research study (2024-2027) funded by Singapore’s Ministry of Education Tertiary Education Research Fund (MOE-TRF). The project is embedded in a university-level interdisciplinary design innovation module at the Singapore Institute of Technology, supporting more than 3,000 students a year.