The
Essential Compentency Pie
"Teaching is
a complicated process and it is imperative that we stop trying to make
it appear simple. Many teachers readily acknowledge that for a variety
of reasons they engaged in little meaning making with their students.
Many acknowledge that they engage in little learning for meaning when
they were students. Consequently, few teachers have actually had the
experience as students of discerning patterns among ideas, generating
unifying principles, or identifying similarities and differences among
events. Few teachers are able to imagine how such classrooms could operate.
"This is really great," they say, "and I'd love to teach
this way, but we have to cover the curriculum."
Jacqueline Grennon
Brooks
in a recent article entitled "To
See Beyond the Lesson"
Historically the
focus of most curriculum documents has been the content they contain.
In teaching parlance it is not "location, location, location!"
but rather it is the "content, content, content" that really
matters and the primary reason for this is that this was how teachers
were taught themselves. In social service programs a lot of effort goes
on to "breaking the cycle of violence". The understanding
here is that the very people who are the victims of violence have a
tendency to become people who victimise others violently. The same applies
to teaching. We tend to teach in the manner in which we were taught,
even though we know that our learning experiences were possibly very
poor ones. This is a hard cycle to break.
This change in teacher
culture is something we urgently need to get our heads around, otherwise
any new curriculum that is instigated and which does not contain very
clear ambitions (in order to meet the needs of the 21st Century learner
by definition the curriculum will not focus on delivering content),
will have the previous curriculum content simply assumed and inserted
where teachers think appropriate.
Supporting this
is the realisation that it is simply not possible or desirable to deliver
the historical syllabus that so many parents/caregivers expect of their
local school. This is not possible or desirable for three fundamental
reasons:
1. Given that our
end point has now migrated from knowledge to understanding and that
teachers will need to set clever, higher order, open, rich, fertile
questions along with the questioning strategies that assist in the development
of fundamental knowledge, the idea of doing "space" in three
weeks as a science unit simply evaporates. If the 21st century teacher
sets thematic topics for students such as space, dinosaurs, weather,
travel, heroes, volcanoes, mathematicians from history, village life,
earthquakes, the undersea world . . . There is a greater than ever chance
that the student will simply pay $2.99 and download the necessary project
from School Sux [www.schoolsux.com] or some similar easily accessed
database of online school projects.
2. In order to teach
a unit of work with the opening question
"compare and contrast the development of life on earth with that
on Mars by identifying three similarities and three differences between
the features of the planets. Using one of these differences use it to
develop a hypothesis as to why you think life on earth has developed
so prolifically while life on Mars seems nonexistent".
The teacher needs to provide rich resources in order that the student
can carry out significant investigation and research and cannot simply
download or copy and paste the answer or project from a single web based
source. The upshot of this is that the amount of work perceived to have
been "covered" will be significantly less than that apparently
learnt through doing a study on "the solar system ". Asking
clever, rich, fertile or open questions means a much more focused approach
to content and there will be a perception that schools are delivering
less. Rather than surface knowledge being taught there will be a greater
emphasis on more depth and a focus on understanding rather than teaching
knowledge for knowledge sake.
3. There are increasing
demands on schools to deliver a wide range of new skill sets (such as
information and communication technology skills, a wider range of literacy
capability, project/time management, "keeping ourselves safe",
. . .), an increasing amount of time carrying out what can be best described
as "social service" work (working more closely with the parent/caregiver,
ensuring appropriate care at home, sporting/cultural commitments), additional
time teaching "critical thinking skills", more thorough assessment
of students. . . . . . If this is all to be taught and encouraged then
there is simply not the time left in the day to deliver the historical
curriculum content.
Essential
Competencies
Given the purpose
of education outlined earlier what sort of curriculum would meet this
purpose and the needs of 21st century learners? The 1998 DeSeCo report
released by the OECD (and unfortunately no longer available online)
investigated 12 countries and their education systems in an attempt
to identify and possibly define essential or core competencies that
were generic for all citizens. This report initiated a series of follow-on
reports by various agencies, in particular:
A proposed framework
of essential competencies being investigated for the New Zealand compulsory
education (year 0-13/k-12) sector by the Ministry of Education [http://www.tki.org/r/nzcurriculum/docs/CompetenciesDiscussionPaper.doc]
includes the following five essential competencies groups coupled with
three attitudinal competencies.
- Thinking: critically,
creatively and logically
- Relating to others
- Belonging, participating
and contributing
- Managing self
- Making Meaning:
Multi-literacies and using language, movement, symbols and technologies
Attitudinal competencies:
- Motivation: including
willingness and "can-do" attitude
- Confidence: including
a view of the self as a competent learner
- Curiosity or
inquiry: including open-mindedness
There will undoubtedly
be a multitude of permutations drawn from a wide range of competencies
presented and debated by governments over the next 10 years. What we
can be assured of is that literacy and numeracy will still feature within
any set of competencies, however our concept of literacy will have to
expand considerably to include a wide number of literacies [http://www.i-learnt.com/Information_New_Literacies.html]
in order to be a lifelong learner. Our concept of numeracy capability
will also need considerable revision and reflection.
