LEARNING TO LEARN
a skills-centred curriculum or competency-based education curriculum call knowledge acquistion ‘ Gradgrindian ’ and outmoded , and describe policies which promote it thus : “ The knowledge-based approach that has typified England has not been fit for purpose .” ( Wyse and Manyukhina , 2019 )
A more nuanced approach is needed , which takes account not only of the interdependence of learning knowledge and skills , but also a clear understanding of what a skill is . Amanda Spielman , Ofsted Chief Inspector , discusses the matter in these terms : “ Knowledge and skills are intrinsically linked : skill is a performance built on what a person knows . That performance might be physical or cognitive , but skills matter and they cannot be separated from knowledge . They are , if you like , the ‘ know-how ’ in applying the ‘ known ’” ( Spielman , 2018 ). In other words , “ we have to move on from ‘ knowledge versus skills ’ … to oppose the two is quite wrong .” ( Oates , 2018 )
Skills in the curriculum
Most schools will advertise that their teaching will engender all sorts of skills in their students : critical thinking , creativity , global engagement , self-awareness , collaboration , and resilience are some of the more common skills cited . These are all highly valued by employers and transferrable to “ the new ”. Moreover , the medium through which these skills are delivered is often irrelevant . A student who can look at a series of different historical sources describing the battle of Austerlitz from all perspectives and arrive at a reasoned historical
truth , or a student who can devise the most robust experiment to test the ammonia content of pondwater , or a student who can hold all the different grammatical variables in a Latin or Mandarin sentence and arrive at the only possible meaningful translation which fits them all – all these students will , in their own way , be able to face a range of different challenges and tasks within a career , even ( or perhaps especially ) if they don ’ t know at secondary school what their future job will be .
Courses and programmes like the IB and schools like Sevenoaks have long been tailoring and adjusting their curricula to do precisely this . It is no coincidence that the language used in the IB learner profile , in the CAS ( Creativity , Action and Service ) outcomes , and in the Theory of Knowledge specifications heavily overlap the skills listed above .
The area between skills and knowledge – Techniques
Just as whether the ability to use a photocopier is a skill or a piece of knowledge is not obvious , there is another area which needs careful definition . A range of actions which students undertake in school , which are often described as ‘ skills ’, sit somewhere between pure knowledge and the transferrable skills described above . These are techniques that a student might be required to use in a variety of subjects and which will help them to learn effectively , but which , partly because of the fact that they are not exclusively “ owned ” by one subject , are sometimes not taught systematically – actions such as : making notes , constructing an essay , research , delivering
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