Page 22 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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We will briefly unpack the competencies here, as we refer to these throughout this resource. The competencies are unpacked in more detail in section three of this resource. Universally, the competencies are a set of foundational capacities that act as a precursor to effective learning and our ability to navigate our relational and working world. Increasingly, the development of curriculum within many countries sees the inclusion of the competencies and the resulting dispositions in the foundation statements that underpin curriculum design.
The Global Curriculum Project has identified six key global competencies. The competencies include:
• Identity
• Thinking and Questioning
• Managing self
• Collaboration
• Connecting and
Reflecting
• Having a Comprehensive
Language of Learning
Once learners have a degree of competency in these domains, they can take increasing agency over their learning journey, accompanied by appropriate mind-sets. Coupled with the competencies, the Learning Process enables learners to take increasing agency over their learning and become independent lifelong learners. As learners create increasing understanding and the ability to apply that understanding, they can be innovative and ingenious and solve increasingly challenging problems. These capabilities become the new expectations by which schools will be judged.
The final reason for these transitions is the mental well-being of educators. The teacher that is operating with one leg in this century’s paradigm and the other leg in last centuries at the same time, is going to find it very difficult to maintain a healthy work/life balance along with their mental well-being.
This notion of juggling all this new thinking while hanging onto the old thinking, coupled with the bizarre expectations of standards, that are increasing losing relevance, are the leading cause of the frantic nature of the teacher’s workload. That choice of spanning the chasm between multiple education paradigms has led to schools becoming overly complicated and bogged down with trivial testing and redundant processes. Couple this with a lot of irrelevant content, contexts and exams, and educators have barely the time to sleep, let alone have a social life or interests outside the all-consuming life of a teacher. It is important that you as educators invest in your own lives as much as you invest in the lives of the learners that you work alongside. Your sanity is critical to their success.
What we are calling for here is a transition in our thinking about our expectations of ourselves as educator-learners and the role of the learner-educators in our classrooms. We need to reconfigure how learners can take greater agency over their world so that they can be prepared for the world they will enter, and so that educators can have a life outside of school!
Before we can do this, we need to define our learning language, develop a model for how our brain learns and an understanding of the Learning Process itself.
Resource 4: The Competencies