Learning Through Competencies
For this my first blog post of the 2016-2017 school year I am going to talk about a couple of important and interrelated ideas: learning through competencies & 21st Century learning.
Competencies
Alberta Learning defines a competency as an "interrelated set of attitudes, skills and knowledge that are drawn upon and applied to a particular context for successful learning and living.
Learning through competencies is a new way to look at curriculum that identifies competencies students need for life as being".
A simplified way to look at a competency is that it is a set of skills that a person needs to be able to accomplish a real-life task.
Our curriculum is increasingly becoming competency based so that, instead of focusing on individual, isolated skills in classroom, students must work through multiple skills at the same time. The tasks that we ask children to do should be rooted in the disciplines they are learning and be real-life situations or problems as much as possible.
In the past teachers and students learned skills in isolation from each other. For example, they might have focused on sheets of math facts to "practice" the one skill that is needed to complete an addition question. The work might have looked like this:
Competencies
Alberta Learning defines a competency as an "interrelated set of attitudes, skills and knowledge that are drawn upon and applied to a particular context for successful learning and living.
Learning through competencies is a new way to look at curriculum that identifies competencies students need for life as being".
A simplified way to look at a competency is that it is a set of skills that a person needs to be able to accomplish a real-life task.
Our curriculum is increasingly becoming competency based so that, instead of focusing on individual, isolated skills in classroom, students must work through multiple skills at the same time. The tasks that we ask children to do should be rooted in the disciplines they are learning and be real-life situations or problems as much as possible.
In the past teachers and students learned skills in isolation from each other. For example, they might have focused on sheets of math facts to "practice" the one skill that is needed to complete an addition question. The work might have looked like this:
This type of practice has shown to not be effective, as it is memory learning that is separate form anything else the student is learning. We say that learning must be in context in order for it to be retained and stored on our memories.
The competency approach solves this problem because students must still focus on the skill of addition, but it is within a broader Inquiry context such as a larger math problem that is connected to the students' lives and the more meaningful world around them. They must use multiple skills to build their competency with the discipline and the larger, more real problems.
An example: Terry fox day is coming up at the end of September and we will be doing the Terry fox run as a school. We might be looking at the legacy of terry fox as a peacemaker and hero, as well as what cancer is, how it touches all our lives and what we can do to improve the lives of those with cancer. We might give the following, connected problem instead:
Students would have much longer, perhaps a whole period or 2 to work on this much more complex task as it requires them to develop, learn and focus on multiple skills at the same time. The key is that it is connected to the other learning!
For more information, here is a link to Alberta Education's competencies page:
And a short video:
