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Stage 1: The Learning Process119 The Competencies
Building a learning culture within a community requires learners to see value and enjoyment in learning. The purpose of school is to prepare learners for the society or community that they will contribute to and draw from. As a result, the learning must be meaningful and be relevant to the learners’ needs, as they transition into fully-fledged community members. To fulfil their purpose in this century, learners are required to build increasing agency over their learning so they can independently and successfully apply the Learning Process to a vast range of learning contexts.
Having agency over their learning implies that the learner can take increasing responsibility for that learning, along with the assessment of their progress. The competencies are a set of understandings, techniques and dispositions that learners will require to take increasing agency over their learning.
The capabilities and concepts that the competencies120 create in learners allows them to adapt to their changing world, whether that aspect is new technologies, social and cultural practices, learning demands, or the play, social and work places we inhabit. The competencies are based on broad expertise and reflect the principles and character of the individual. Competencies emanate and develop from the intersection of our ability to reflect on our thinking (metacognition), as well as applying our ability to think cognitively to develop our understanding across numerous learning domains.
The terms ‘skills’ and ‘competencies’ are not used as synonyms. ‘Skills’ is used to designate an ability to perform complex motor and/or cognitive acts with ease, precision, ... while the term ‘competence’ designates a complex action system encompassing cognitive skills, attitudes and other non-cognitive components.121 OECD
The competencies have taken on significant status in the last 10 years, due to the changing nature of the societies and workplaces we live and work in. The complexity of life across all our contexts has changed dramatically and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It is our responsibility, as educators, to ensure that our young people have the necessary capabilities to succeed in our increasingly complex world.
It is not possible to be fully competent in each of the competencies before we must move on to the next one in the series. Once the learner has some enabling competency of Identity, learners can move on to Thinking and Questioning, and this then tiers down the inverted pyramid.
Unless learners can reflect on their learning, actions, attitudes, values, motivations and thinking, they cannot develop into independent lifelong learners who can have agency over their learning journey. Metacognitive and cognitive thinking provides the stimulus for understanding self and others, and drives the capacity to moderate and improve our thinking and subsequently, our learning. To develop learner awareness of their ability to be metacognitive it is necessary that learners develop an age-appropriate ‘language set’ around their self-talk. It is for this reason that one of the competencies is ‘building a language of learning’.
119 The chapter 13 summary video can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRM0k-6kDUE if you are reading the book, otherwise click on the video icon at the top of the page
120 New Zealand Ministry of Education. (2006). Key competencies in the New Zealand curriculum (draft statement) April 2006. TKI. Retrieved from http://www.nzcer.org.nz/system/files/CM2005_1_211.pdf
121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2002). Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo). Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/41529556.pdf
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