Page 195 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

The competencies are a set of foundational capacities that act as a precursor to effective learning. Increasingly, the development of curriculum within many countries includes the competencies and the resulting dispositions in the foundation statements that underpin curriculum design but rarely are they actively implemented.
The Global Curriculum Project has identified and trialled six critical competencies.
The competencies include
• Identity
• Thinking and Questioning
• Collaboration
• Managing Self
• Connecting and Reflecting
• Building a Language of
Learning
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Resource 74: The Competency Pyramid
The development and the practice of these competencies results in them eventually becoming an automated set of dispositions that are foundational to learners developing agency over their learning. Under the guidance of an educator, the competencies underpin the ability of a student to become an independent lifelong learner-educator and develop self-efficacy over their learning. This ability to gain autonomy over our own learning from an early age and become an independent learner is now possible, desirable, and, one would argue, essential.
Over time, the competencies become a set of dispositions that learners apply, as required, during the Learning Process and life in general. It takes time to develop an innate sense of which combination of the competencies are required at any given activity. However, once the competencies become dispositions, their application and activation become automated into a non-conscious response (habits) to their learning demands.
For each of the competencies there are:
1. underlying concepts that learners need to understand and apply
2. techniques that learners use to develop deeper levels of competency
3. dispositions that enable learners to apply the competencies to a range of contexts
Competencies are not discrete entities and each competency contributes to all the others in complex combinations. Educators will require considerable professional learning to develop an effective understanding of each of the competencies, as well as effective pedagogical approaches (including the micro-lesson), to ensure that learners can express each competency appropriately.
Successful learners are continuously applying and extending their competencies as they become increasingly able to apply them intuitively.
The order in which learners develop competence capability is important. Beginning with Identity, educators move through the order as in the diagram, with each successive competency taking less time to develop as foundational elements have been established in the prior competencies.