How Can We Make Core Competencies More Central To Our Teaching?

The core competencies are meant to define a set of skills that students are to use across all subjects – communicating, creative and critical thinking, personal awareness and social responsibility. These skills are meant to better prepare students for the 21st century. They are meant to be cross-curricular and built in to each subject we are to teach our students. But are these competencies doing just that?

One way of looking at the competencies is as an extra layer of skills built up on the old curriculum. For example, take a look at chemistry 11:

Content-wise there is very little that changed. The mole is the mole. Stoichiometry is still a vital part of being able to predict quantities with respect to chemical reactions.  Most components of the new curriculum (and not just in the sciences) either retains the same content as before or includes content that has been shuffled in from other grade levels. Placing astronomy from science 9 to science 10 is one example of this.

The extra layer in the new curriculum is the inclusion of the big ideas along with the curricular competencies. I have heard on numerous occasions however that teachers are already doing a lot of the curricular competencies. The approach therefore is to not alter our lessons but modify our assessment to get students thinking more explicitly about these competencies.

This approach bothers me. In many ways it feels contrived and at worst creates a set of hoops for students to jump through for the sake of jumping through them. The question is how can we incorporate these competencies in a way that makes sense?

Finland came from the same initial intent as us when they decided to go with phenomenon-based learning. Essentially instead of reorganizing their entire curriculum, they created an additional course requirement where students have to study a multi-disciplinary problem. This additional subject is meant to provide a reason for students to focus on and develop core competencies.

If we are to get students to genuinely apply and practise these core competencies, we need to provide them with a compelling reason to do them. I believe this inevitably means restructuring or rethinking our pedagogy. If we provide them with interesting projects that force them to collaborate, think creatively and critically students would be glad to do them because it makes sense to do so.

A good example (used often in the district) is Alyssa Becker’s Rube Goldberg Machine project:

Other examples of projects that do this would be the chemical switch PBL.

It is telling though that the only high school level example regarding the competencies I found (on the district examples) was the Rube Goldberg Project. Developing compelling projects or ideas can be quite tough and time consuming.

My initial question was about how we could make the core competencies more central to our teaching. My response would be to rethink our pedagogy in order to make them a necessity instead of an accessory. This may involve providing teachers with time to develop ideas or even rethinking the curriculum so it’s not just a shuffling of content with the competencies layered on top.

Why Education is Slow to Change

I believe there are a number of reasons why it is difficult to make large changes in education and/or why the pace of change is slow. The following points are from the perspective of a senior high school science teacher:

The way in which we learn has not changed.

This one is not a problem per se, but it is an important reminder that with all the “hype” about project based learning, inquiry and personalized learning we cannot forget about how humans actually learn.  There is a misconception that whenever we do inquiry, we throw out all about the “traditional” (sage on the stage, lecturing) forms of learning.  This ignores the dynamics of how we learn. We learn by building up on previous base knowledge (through discovery, instruction, etc.) and practicing repeatedly to build fluency.  It bothers me when I see subjects like math being solely taught conceptually (what does 2 x 2 mean? Can you draw a picture?) whilst the importance of practice (worksheets!) is ignored.

Another compelling argument for this is the existence of machine learning/artificial intelligence. I’ve made a previous post on this but AI learns essentially via repeated practice and eventually figuring out the best way. It is important to remember that machine learning is our attempt to model how humans learn. This method works and can lead to surprisingly creative solutions as alpha go has shown. Repeated practice does not make automatons; rather it can lead to creativity.

Since learning still involves memorizing/understanding facts and practising base skills, it’s doubtful we will ever see direct instruction go away. I believe any new forms of learning such as PBL or inquiry must still have these elements for it to produce deep, lasting learning.

Education has become an increasingly top-down system, which produces too much rigidity.

Education in BC is governed by the ministry which determines the curriculum.  It dictates what students learn and at what pace. The existence of a curriculum isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it can trap us into the box of categorizing learning into distinct subjects. The purpose of having specific subjects listed has a couple of practical reasons.

1. It makes it easier to keep track of what students have done. This would be important for graduation and for admittance to various post secondary programs.
2. It is an efficient way to run the system.

The issue with this occurs when we try to integrate inquiry based learning pedagogy.  By its very nature, inquiry takes a longer period of time to complete; furthermore, it can be difficult to fit some inquiry neatly within a prescribed curriculum.  It also gets people mentally categorizing everything into subjects when real life problems are multidisciplinary.  It also makes teachers more hesitant to try new things since if it does not go well, it equates to instruction time lost and pressure increases to finish the curriculum. Building rockets for example involves knowledge of chemistry, physics and mathematics. If I am doing this in chemistry class it is hard for me to justify teaching students the physics because it’ll take time away from the chemistry I am supposed to teach.

A bachelor’s degree is seen as an essential ingredient for success.

Bachelor’s degree is seen as a must in order to have success.  If you don’t agree with this statement, just consider the following graphic:

Even companies that specifically removed the requirement for a bachelor’s degree for employment have a highly educated workforce with degrees.  Employers still see a degree as an easy filter since it shows they have a reasonable amount of mental ability to perform.

This almost singularly forces the academic students to focus purely on grades, getting credits and having the necessary prerequisites. It reinforces the top-down system and makes things less flexible.  I’d imagine this issue becomes less pronounced the lower you go in grade level.

Universities have not changed in their ways due to issues with scalability.

Large lecture halls, with hundreds of students listening to a professor speak for an hour is an expectation.  Students might have smaller tutorial sessions with a graduate student but the system consists of attending lectures, writing midterms and final exams to obtain the required credits.  This pedagogy is an extreme version of what goes on in high school and it’s no wonder senior students are OK with this. Preparing students for university is a mentality that is shared by both parents and teachers alike.

Of course, the reason for this structure is due to scalability. It is simply impractical to have smaller class sizes, personalized education and do inquiry in a university setting. Various universities have tried using various technologies to solve this (such as MOOCs).  Their results are decidedly mixed or even negative. Thoughts of doing “real life problems” are not even an afterthought until students maybe approach 3^rd or 4^th year of their bachelor’s degree.

Given all this, the question at the high school level then becomes all about preparing students for university – shouldn’t students get used to lectures, memorizing information and writing high stakes tests?

A lack of grassroots empowerment reduces innovation

The scalability issue is much less severe in K-12. We have more manageable class sizes but due to the reasons outlined above it becomes difficult to innovate. If educators were given greater license (time and resources) to develop and try new models we may see greater changes but this isn’t the case.