What Competency-based learning is...

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Created By N. Zimmermann

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Successful and relevant application of learning happens when individuals activate and apply knowledge, attitudes and skills in a specific situation. This ability can be described as competence. From a lifelong learning perspective it is a short time people spend in educational institutions. Outside of formal learning settings they continue self-development, gain new insights and shape their personalities.

10 Reasons for Competency Based Learning

We might conclude, that education and qualification needs to respond to that observation and cover the broad range of experience, attitudes, book-knowledge and skills that one has and needs for his or her active and autonomously shaped life.

10 Reasons for Competency Based Learning

  • Competency based facilitation gives learners ownership over their learning and is a cooperative social process – real and authentic empowerment.
  • It takes takes strengths, needs, and abilities of learners for serious. Be more often surprised by the abilities and strengths of your learners.
  • It appreciates the diversity of perspectives and learning styles in a group as a potential (instead of trying to even these qualities).
  • Competency based facilitation encourages creativity, because it shapes new connections between topics, people, concepts.
  • It stimulates a sense of initiative and leads to self-efficacy when learners experience a gain of competencies by successful applying their knowledge.
  • It's relevant, because it allows learners to apply their abilities in a lot of different social roles and situations.
  • It's more flexible, because it understands learning as a process instead of subordinating it under the regime of a too linear curriculum.
  • It allows you to focus more on social processes and communication skills, because competency learning is a social process.
  • You are more free from unrealistic learning goals or unreal assumptions regarding the needs and abilities of your learners, because mainly the learners abilities are in the focus of competency based learning.
  • Thanks to competency based learning you know better, how cooperation with different fields of education, social engagement or non-formal education increases the quality of education. Because such cooperation allows your learners to apply the learned better under real life conditions.



...and 5 Wrong Practices

Beyond all missionary words we need to acknowledge, that competency based learning is not always easy to implement. It is often a disruptive element in the learning culture of a school, of an academy or an organization. Changes are never easy and dilemmas appear between old proven and new risky ways of educating and unclarity how they might go together. For instance:

What Competency-centered Learning Should Not Be

  • A New Layer of Bureaucracy: It's intended to give learners and teachers more freedom instead more rules or procedures. It requires flexible teachers/facilitators and more freedom for learners.
  • Tailoristic: It's a humanist and holistic approach aiming to support autonomy, not usability. However, some promoters of competencies misunderstand competency-learning as emphasizing on skill training.
  • Autonomy terror: Competency is not a self-optimization tool for assessing the fittest or making people competitive. Nor is competency-centered education the rationalization of Western ideology. Competencies are neutral. However, every learning environment has its ideological imprinting and expresses this by certain competency frameworks.
  • Stupidity: Competence-centered learning involves knowledge, attitude and skills. But some understand that it is a practice-only approach. Such learning does not strengthen the ability of a learner to assess and reflect for what aim he or she wants to learn.



Articles

Competencies

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The focus on applicability of learning, the lifelong perspective and the positive attitude toward learners as the ones being able to co-create their learning biography, these are achievements of competency based learning concepts. A shift has taken place from traditional knowledge dissemination toward modern competency development.

Experiential Learning

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What we do is the result of observation, action, and reflection. In contrast to a linear understanding of learning, this dynamic could be described as circular development. It involves referring to previous experiences as well as anticipating outcomes, and is fluid.


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DEFINITION:

A competency is more than just knowledge and skills. It involves the ability to meet complex demands.

"A com­pe­tency is more than just know­ledge and skills. It involves the ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on and mobili­zing psycho­social resources (including skills and attitudes) in a particular context."

OECD


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