Competency based education

The word competence is not univocal and has been used over time with different values and semantic variations. In recent decades interest in skills has developed in different sectors, from economics to business management, from psychology to education.

The concept of "competence" has experienced an interesting evolution over time and the definition currently most shared is the following: "Competence is an integration of knowledge (know), abilities (know-how), metacognitive and methodological skills (knowing how to do, transfer, generalize, acquire and organize information, solve problems), personal and social abilities (collaborate, interact with others, take initiatives, face and manage new and complex situations, assume personal and social responsibilities)" [Franca Da Re “La didattica per competenze” Pearson 2013]

In this perspective, there is no competence without the co-presence of all these factors. The competence, therefore, is meant as the mobilization of knowledge, abilities and personal resources to solve problems, assume and carry out tasks in professional, social, study, work, personal development contexts; finally, it is a "know-how acted". Following the Lisbon conference, the European Parliament in 2006 sets out the 8 key citizenship competences, partially revised in May 2018. Below there is a comparison framework.

The didactics by skills make use of different strategies both for teaching and for organizing the class group:

• • frontal lessons, individualized exercises;

  • the contextualization of concepts and disciplinary contents in reality and in experience;

  • problem solving approach and the use of various and flexible mediators and teaching techniques to enhance students' different cognitive and learning styles;

  • the continuous metacognitive reflection, before, during and after the action, to promote learning;

  • cooperative learning to underline the contribution of each student promoting inclusion.

Teaching by skills, or getting closer to knowledge through experience, it does not mean to give up the contents. However, they must be carefully screened and selected, since everything is not equally relevant: the fundamental contents must be proposed and the didactics must do everything possible to transform them into knowledge.

How to carry out teaching skills?

Through the development of skills and the performance of reality tasks, learning to learn that is the basis of lifelong learning and one of the founding goals of the educational institution according to the Council of Europe, is fully realized.

The ‘transmission’ or lecture model is rather ineffective for teaching of today skills, actually a lot of teachers still use it. The most important authors of the constructivist approach have been argued that formal education must be transformed to enable new forms of learning that are needed to manage complex global challenges.

The established pedagogical principles are: participation, personalization, creativity, productivity, because a constructivist environment is intentionally designed and built in order to encourage to produce hypotheses, to raise questions and administer various stimuli for reasoning by the social processes of learning.

This framework allows learning through authentic real-world context. In agreement to Saavedra and Opfer nine principles are required for teaching skills:

• make learning relevant to the ‘big picture’;

• teach through the disciplines;

• develop lower and higher order thinking skills to encourage understanding in different contexts;

• encourage transfer of learning;

• teach how to ‘learn to learn’ or metacognition;

• address misunderstandings directly;

• promote team-work;

• exploit technology to support learning;

• foster students’ creativity.

[“Learning 21st-Century Skills Requires 21st-Century Teaching” A.R. Saavedra, V. Darleen Opfer in Phi Delta Kappan 94 (2) : 8-13 · October 2012]

It­`s therefore evident that the lesson planning is a very important aspect of effective teaching: teachers have to organise didactic activities to keep students constantly involved and encouraged to ask questions or to express their thoughts.

Having a lesson plan template or a model is a fundamental step to start with but it is also necessary to remember that lesson plans are meant to be as flexible guidelines in the didactic activity. There are a lot of different ways of planning a lesson so, for this reason, a lot of templates and models are available.

Briefly, the plan should have in its first phase a warm-up with a review and activation of prior learning and knowledge. In the second phase it should also give the students an opportunity to explore and acquire new contents and information and an opportunity to apply them. In addition to this, it should also be the way by which the teacher can be sure that students’ learning is happening. The last phase is a wrap-up or final review.

In detail, an effective teacher has to gain students’ attention, inform them of the learning objective(s), review and activate students’ prior learning and knowledge related to the objective(s), share and describe the new contents and information making them relevant, give students the opportunity to practice this information, use a variety of teaching methods and strategies to help students learn best, check to make sure they are understanding, align the assessments to the learning objectives, assess students’ learning both formatively and summatively, reflect on the outcomes to determine successful completion.

In this handbook it is (Italian team) proposed a template based on the EAS (Episodi di Apprendimento SItuato) methodology of Pier Cesare Rivoltella. [“Fare didattica con gli EAS. Episodi di apprendimento situate”. La Scuola Editrice, 2013.] We support this mode of learning, because it develops the self-adjust of the student’s mental activity by multidimensional learning, which highlights the cognitive styles.