Curriculum, learning and teaching
What can we ‘do’? Sally Hirsch and Malcolm Nicolson consider the essential skills for our times – and if we give them enough importance in teaching
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planning to teach skills through units? Are schools planning to teach skills through extra-curricular experiences? Should skills be taught within subjects or in a separate class? To what extent can we assess and monitor student progress? Is the teaching of skills important? Why teach skills? It has often been said that most of the jobs that today’s children will work in as adults have not yet been invented. Most children in school today can expect to have at least five careers in their professional lives. Increasingly, university graduates experience multiple career changes within the first decade after graduating (Barrett, 2017). To be able to change, cope with and adapt to regular periods of employment and financial uncertainty, students need skills and strategies such as resilience, grit, flexibility, entrepreneurship and an openmindedness to learn. A 2007 survey of 400 hiring executives of major US corporations quoted in The Global Achievement Gap (Wagner, 2010) asked what knowledge and skills they were looking for in potential future employees. The results were, in priority order: 1. Oral and written communication skills 2. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills Autumn |
Spring
Knowing, understanding, doing; the triumvirate of learning sometimes known as KUD. These three aspects are chewed over most often by schools when they are developing and implementing a curriculum. Historically, emphasis has been on the required knowledge to be learned. Developments such as the International Baccalaureate’s Middle Years Programme: the next chapter have moved the emphasis to teaching concepts, which in some cases has seen teachers forget that the foundation of those conceptual understandings is knowledge. However, knowledge and concepts can only be accessed and used when students are able to learn, practise and demonstrate skill acquisition. In the International Middle Years Curriculum (IMYC), skills are defined as ‘things students are able to do’ (Fieldwork, 2016), while the International Baccalaureate (IB) defines a skill as ‘a set of strategies and techniques harmonised to achieve a single purpose which improves with practice’ (IB, 2014). The foundation of the Common Core in the US was to create a set of standards that explicitly identify knowledge and skills that students need in order to be career- and college-ready upon graduation (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010). As curriculum development shifts to a focus on planning and teaching skills, it is pertinent to reflect on the current state of skill development in schools. How many schools are explicitly
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