Group items tagged

Deep learning

The extent of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral engagement influences the effectiveness of learning, and thus, the development of competence.

These modes of learning blur boundaries between teachers and learners, as learners progressively take responsibility for their own learning.

Success also rests on profound teacher understanding of curricula that should accrue during curriculum design and development stages. Such understanding is crucial for the teachers’ buy-in, conviction, ownership, and commitment to effective curricula implementation.

Within the curriculum continuum, assessment has significant potential to support and reinforce curriculum reform. However, it equally has enormous potential to distort the official/intended curriculum.

When appropriate strategies are used in assessment, they can support the implementation of the official curriculum, enhance learning, and lead to an enrichment effect. However, gaining these benefits of appropriate assessment demands a specialized knowledge of assessment by all concerned.

Another critical policy message is that competence-based assessment and examinations systems require significant investment in the professionalization of teachers as assessors of learning. Competence-based assessments also require trust in teachers’ ability to make reliable judgements and to utilize assessment as an inherent and important part of teaching and learning.

A key policy message is that education and learning systems cannot succeed at adopting competence-based approaches to curriculum without similarly transforming teaching, learning, as well as assessment and examination systems. All the three elements must be aligned. Transforming curricula to competence-based approaches and leaving teaching, learning, assessment, tests, and examinations subject-based is tantamount to not transforming curricula.

In competence-based approaches, teachers are not just co-designers and co-developers of curricula. They are also pivotal co-assessors, co-testers, and co-examiners.

Most importantly, competence-based curricula must lead quality assessment rather than be led by poor practice assessments, tests, and examinations.

What "developmental progression" means, in general terms, and an understanding that progressing is neither linear nor necessarily agerelated. Rather, it is iterative, interactive, and dependent on making connections to prior learning and to context;

it is best to base judgements on a number of different criterion referenced assessments.

Effective teacher professional development must include all 4 componen ts: • Knowledge – worthwhile research-informed theory, content, and expertise; • Integrated pedagogical and assessment skills and strategies; • Modelling, demonstrating, and engaging with approaches, ideally in settings that approximate to the workplace; • Practicing the approaches frequently over a substantial period of time between professional inputs; (2–6 months a minimum) with ongoing and follow up evaluation of impact and refinement; • Concurrent dialogue/coaching/peer collaboration in activities such as lesson planning, preparing related resources, peer observation, discussion, and reflection on impact

Table 4. Success of different methods of professional development Training Components Outcomes % of participants who demonstrate Kno wledge % of participants who demonstrate new Skills % of participants who transfer into Classroom Practice Theoretical Knowledge and Discussion 10%5%0% Demonstration in Training 30%20%0% Practice and Feedback in Training 60%60%5% Coaching in Classroom Settings 95%95%95%

Teaching still lacks core characteristics that define a profession, vis: (i) a profession-specific, systematized, scientific body of knowledge that informs the daily activities of practitioners; (ii) a lengthy period of higher education training and induction; (iii) engagement in continuous professional development; and (iv) autonomy to exercise professional judgement and decision-making in practice and in governance over the profession

Institutional outcomes

Program outcomes

Student learning outcomes

For example, a team project that requires analyzing the business impacts of population shifts demonstrates realistic problem solving, and the assessment could even be embedded in a work context. This type of assessment requires more thorough demonstration of competencies than an objective assessment, which is typically delivered as a test with pre-determined right and wrong answers. Authentic assessment also provides learner-centric benefits such as collaboration with peers and genuinely valuable evidence of learning that can be used in a professional profile.

For example, an assessment could be aligned to competencies, occupational skills, program outcomes, and accreditation standards. The same assessment can award a badge for mastery achievement, show students the occupational skills they’ve demonstrated, and also roll up into evidence collection for accreditation and program improvement purposes

can optionally be shown to students

Consistent use of rubrics enables learner choice, since learners could be working on different assessments to master the same competencies

And when competency based education programs differentiate instructional roles, such that faculty subject matter experts might not be evaluating assessments, specialized assessors can all apply the same definitions of competencies by using the same rubrics.

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.

With practice, the students can frame the questions themselves.

Once completed, the project becomes less of a daily race to fulfill lesson plans and more of a quest to document your students' growing capabilities.

model it yourself first

Do you know teachers who claim to be doing PBL but are really doing the same teacher-centered instruction they always have, only with a project (think trifold) thrown in at the end of the year?

we fail to notice the ways of thinking and norms that structure the world in which we operate. As a result, we then cannot see the cultural and structural shift needed for these innovative ideas to reach their true potential.

the data presented showing that less than 1% of U.S. schools were actually operating in the learner-centered paradigm left me even more convinced that inertia is still winning and the only way to make any realistic change is by being much, much smarter in our approach to positive disruption.

earner agency; socially embedded; personalized, relevant, and contextualized; open-walled; and competency-based.

three change levers 1) increasing public will, 2) refining public policy, and 3) building proofs of concept—can be a powerful tool to help grow the 1% of learner-centered environments to a potential tipping point, where learner-centered environments are the prevailing approach to education in this country.

When more education stakeholders are able to see how learner-centered environments are having positive impacts on children, they are better able to build on this success in their own local context.

Pilla worked as a mechanical engineer at Lockheed Martin before switching to teaching. “I didn’t have enough experience working on and planning out a really big project,”

That’s what he tries to give his students in high school.

I felt like I didn’t know how to make enough stuff,”

Tiarra Bell, a senior at SLA Center City. Design drew her into engineering. She experimented with architecture and industrial design, but has really become passionate about furniture design. She now makes and sells her own furniture.

Kamal and Pilla meet with an advisory group of engineering industry professionals periodically to make sure their program is truly equipping students with the skills they’ll need to go into these fields later

The experts say students need to be able to write, to find problems, to communicate, to Google, to understand constraints. They need to be creative, take thoughtful risks and have a “fearlessness to leap.

robotics, senior engineering, astronomy and space sciences, MakerSpace, electronics and programming)

To me it’s not about becoming an engineer in college or after. It’s about the critical thinking and the challenges and the creativity that comes with it,”

We think and learn about things that matter to us, that are emotionally relevant because we perceive them as important to our physical or social survival and well-being.

Motivation, engagement, perseverance, creativity, optimism, resilience—pretty much all the so-called “soft skills”—are rooted in emotion.

If students’ programs of study include significant, meaningful opportunities for them to follow their expanding and changing interests during their many years in school,  motivation and perseverance will spontaneously combust because, as some students told me, “my interest and involvement in my studies became personal. I felt like my school had meaning, like there was purpose.”

regression is essential to learning because each time the learner rebuilds the network, the more stable and automatic it becomes. Regression is not failure, although it is often treated as such.

natural process of learning—building, regression, rebuilding

So what matters to students? What are they learning in school that forces them to focus on what matters to adults?

Because emotional goals motivate and direct people’s thoughts and behavior, as Immordino-Yang suggests, understanding students’ goals can provide insight into what they are likely to learn and help educators understand how they might change their practices

Engagement in school does not always reflect engagement in the sort of deep, meaningful learning—developing intellectual skills and conceptual understanding—that educators value.

how to rethink school designs and create a new conceptual model for schools—a model that combines and finds an effective balance among the goals that adults have for students and the needs that students have for themselves, a balance between what matters to students and what matters to adults.

more effective model will offer real opportunities for students to pursue personally meaningful interests and questions

we don’t need to try to make all students masters of all disciplines.

Instead of insisting that all students collect identical promotion and graduation credits by meeting minimal standards to “pass” anywhere from five to seven courses each year in discrete, unrelated subjects, educators might be more successful ensuring that all students work each year on a body of specific essential skills—perhaps communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving, which are getting so much attention today—that can be learned while working in any subject area.

Some of the changes that make this new model possible involve significantly reducing the number of traditionally required courses, creating individualized rather than rigidly standardized courseloads, giving students more control of the subjects they study, and establishing graduation requirements based on skill development.