Group items tagged

Maker Empowerment (v2): A sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, along with the inclination and capacity to shape one’s world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking.

one of the main purposes of the Agency by Design project, which is to understand how maker activities can develop students’ sense of agency or self-efficacy.

maker empowerment is a dispositional concept. That is, rather than simply naming a set of technical skills, it aims to describe a mindset, along with a habitual way of engaging with the world.

the research I’ve just described wasn’t conducted with the disposition toward maker empowerment in mind. So we don’t know if the findings about sensitivity transfer.

Through a series of rather elaborate experiments, we were able to show that the contribution of these three elements—ability, inclination, sensitivity—could indeed be individually distinguished in patterns of thinking and that a shortfall in any of the three elements would block cognitive performance.

It turns out that the biggest bottleneck in behavior—in other words, the shortfall that most frequently prevents inclination, ability, and sensitivity from coalescing into sustained cognitive activity—is a shortfall of sensitivity. In other words, at least in terms of critical and creative thinking, young people don’t follow through with these habits of mind not because they can’t (ability), and not because they don’t want to (inclination), but mainly because they don’t notice opportunities to do so.

This doesn’t mean that young people’s inner detection mechanisms are woefully flawed. Rather, sensitivity has everything to do with the saliency of cues in the environment. If an environment doesn’t have strong cues toward certain patterns of behavior—or actually contains counter-cues—it can be pretty hard for those patterns of behavior to be cued up.

the maker movement can empower people to shift from being passive consumers of their world to being active producers or collaborators.

As the maker movement continues to infiltrate mainstream education, a dispositional analysis of maker empowerment might serve as a similarly useful tool.

education that is student-initiated, interdisciplinary and co-planned by students and teachers together

“It’s about doing work that matters,” Richardson said. “It’s about connections. It’s about play. It’s about cultures where kids and teachers are learners.” When schools have a set of beliefs about learning and enact those beliefs through practice, but don’t anchor what they are doing in today’s context, they may be doing something progressive, but also a little irrelevant. Beliefs and contexts without practice leads to ineffective teaching. The sweet spot for a very different type of education system lies in the Venn diagram of all three: beliefs, context and practice.

It can be difficult to interrogate longstanding policies and choices, but if districts, schools and individual educators can’t reflect on what’s working and what isn’t, articulate a change, and begin doing it, the education system as a whole will become irrelevant.

What works better than traditional homework at the elementary level is simply reading at home.

How do people feel about knowledge – is it power to be hoarded, or a gift to be shared?

The two key advantages of informal learning are that it happens at the point of need and what is learned is usually applied right away.

In the cooperative model, the learning and development group can shift from being the producer of content to being the guide, initiator, facilitator, and coach.

Based on alignment with agreed upon organizational and learning goals, the learner takes responsibility for his or her own learning – with the support and guidance of the organization.

People who are not used to working in a learning organization culture, where cooperative learning within communities of practice is the norm, need the knowhow and a new mindset regarding learning to cooperatively in the workplace.

The positive is that this incidental learning doesn’t take people away from the work. The disadvantage is that when they are so caught up in doing, people often miss an important ingredient for learning: reflection.

The combination of structured and incidental learning can give us intentional learning.

The key to solidifying this learning is reflection.

David Kolb, wrote about a model of experiential learning consisting of the following cycle: action, observation, reflection, concept formation, and back to action.

Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck asked managers to stop once a week and answer just two simple questions, “What did you do last week?” and “What did you learn from it?” They found that this simple process of reflection enabled the managers learn from their experiences and to change the way they managed.

integration of formal and informal learning can create a virtuous cycle that leads not only to increased productivity but to the real innovation that is necessary for long term success in a dynamic marketplace.

Many contributors agree that a competence is a complex construct, comprising knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, etc. But in the actual listing of the competences, they mix competences with their constituent elements.

Lack of evident interaction across elements of competences:

Lack of a common starting point:

Varied taxonomies:

Lack of a common language and common concepts

Unclear standards and developmental progression:

Lack of consensus on the structure of curricula:

While there is consensus on the need to transition to competence-based curricula, views on the structure of curricula remain divergent between the maintenance of traditional subjects and learning areas interwoven with competences, and the more radical view that curricula should be restructured around competences.

Feasibility of implementation:

Managing the transition:

Weak or unshared tracking of impact:

However, the world still lacks a global normative instrument that can be used as a global reference point for curricula transformation.

Competence is herein defined as the developmental capacity to interactively mobilize and ethically use information, data, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and technology to engage effectively and act across diverse 21 st century contexts to attain individual, collective, and global good.

Distinguishing Attributes of a Competence-based Curriculum

A competence-based curriculum is grounded in the understanding of the demands of the learners’ context.

In contrast to competence-based curricula, subject-based curricula are mostly grounded in an understanding of the subject matter content or the disciplines. They generally prepare learners to know the subject matters and to gain a deep understanding of advancements in the field. They don’t necessarily emphasize immediate use of acquired knowledge. The application is often deferred to real life situations that learners may confront later in life, forcing them to apply what they had learned. Because of insensitivity to context, it is often easy to have the same curriculum across different contexts, mostly borrowed from what are considered to be advanced contexts. The risk of irrelevance of the curriculum is also higher.

A key consideration is how best to facilitate curriculum specialists to gain an in-depth understanding of the learners’ current and future contexts, and how to identify competences, which should be reflected in curricula.

Learner centeredness:

Competence-based curricula emphasize the ability to use what is learned. Acquisition is important but not sufficient.

Emphasis on outcomes or impact:

A key consideration is how to support educators to reach for the deeper impact of learning, and how to assess it.

Emphasis on trans-disciplinarity:

Especially at the post-primary level, a key consideration is how to enable educators to master their specific disciplines, and at the same time, to have adequate knowledge of other disciplines enough to make transdisciplinary linkages. Another challenge is how to design curricula in a way that makes linkages across subjects and learning areas.

Competence-based curricula are structured around competences and not around subjects, and progression relates to the competence rather than subject matter difficulty.

As the last word, competence-based curricula are not against subject matter content. Effective application of content across disciplines actually requires a high level of mastery of the content.

seven macro competences that are considered relevant across contexts. These are: (i) Lifelong learning; (ii) Self-agency; (iii) Interactively using diverse tools and resources; (iv) Interacting with others; (v) Interacting with the world; (vi) Multi-literateness; and (vii) Trans-disciplinarity. Because of their universality, macro competences are quite stable. They allow for curricula stability across transformations and reforms. They are the bigger picture and the overarching "why" of a curriculum.

Knowing how to learn is the most critical future competence.

The 21 st century requires people to be self-actualized agents.

Responsible use of tools and resources is also at the heart of responsible consumption and sustainable lifestyles, which contribute to sustainable development.

It demands collaboration to resolve complex problems and create integrated solutions across contexts.

This competence enables people to be local and global.

Different contexts will demand different types and levels of literacies.

Increasing complexity requires ever more sophisticated solutions that integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines and from domains of knowledge.

This framework therefore balances the need for dynamic change in curricula with the equal need for stability.