A Tale of Two Schools: Learning Competencies for the Future

In the latest issue of NEXUS (Vol. 2, No. 7, 2018), Dr. Phillip SA Cummins and Brad Adams, of Circle Education, discuss the learning framework that will be necessary for 21st Century Schools to achieve greatness. Here is a sample article from this issue, by Phillip Cummins, which looks at how two Circle client schools are currently building these competencies:

In our consulting practice with international schools, the CIRCLE team has built strong relationships with a broad range of schools over many years, especially in the design and implementation of frameworks for education that seek to capture the aspirations of the community for their students to emerge from school equipped with the 21C competencies. These schools, regardless of system or provenance, can be characterized by their future-focused orientation, their commitment to searching for excellence in what they do, and a genuine curiosity about how learning might work best in their schools. They are all driven by a desire to achieve results for their students and their communities; this understanding includes a clear focus on attaining specific academic outcomes and holistic character development as fit for purpose 21C citizens. In this article we will examine two case studies in how schools have prepared their communities for this journey towards competencies for their futures.

School A:

School A is situated in North America. With some 700 students located on a single campus with elementary, middle, and high school divisions, this school with a secular foundation has embraced the notion of character education as its significant mission over the past decade. From the inception of this strategy, it has embraced an understanding of its educational rationale as being something broader than public success in competitive academic results and sporting fixtures (while not discounting in any way the merits of either of these lynchpins of schooling in its area). It has, for the longer period of this decade or so of work, focused on gaining community acceptance of this mandate to produce citizens with the character to succeed. It identified a series of co-curricular activities, in particular, as a way forward in demonstrating how learning might have a broader rather than narrower set of outcomes by which the school might measure itself and its sense of attainment. It has begun to attend to the way in which this might be embedded into the fabric of the school’s curriculum and guide the language of everyday life. In addition, it has sought to think more deeply about the place of its students in the world beyond their city and the role that they might play in this broader global context. Its approach to change has been cautious and steady; its leaders and governors have been earnest in their desire not to leave any member of their community alienated by a process that asks people to deviate from the past and look ahead to the future.

School B:

School B is located in Australia and has identified a global mindset and a set of corresponding international ambitions from the outset of its recent decade of strategic educational development. With nearly 2,000 enrolments of students, from early learning through to matriculation, it is spread over multiple campuses. It has set itself a goal of being distinctive in all respects and has relied strongly on its capacity to paint a picture of an exciting and dynamic future. The building of consensus around an adventurous and challenging ethos that seeks excellence in describing and attaining a set of sophisticated competencies for its students has characterized its approach. All areas of the school’s life have been challenged equally in this respect concurrently. Again, specific programs have acted as hotspots of exemplary activity while the school has pursued a process of progressively building staff capability to deliver on the vision across all learning experiences. The families of the school have embraced the vision from the outset and have been willing to join the school faculty on the journey towards this vision, which relies on strong symbols and a willingness to embrace a holistic perspective of mind, body and heart. At the same time, the engine room for progress has relied significantly on the emerging research and development capacity of the school, which has been channeled into a specific center for supporting this educational reform and ensuring that it is closely aligned to the school’s ethos and faith foundation.

There are, of course, many differences in the choices made with respect to design and implementation of these decade-long campaigns to win over their school communities to a sense of an education that is compelled by a vision for developing students who are equipped with profound and practical knowledge, skills, dispositions, and reflective capacity. Specific programs have been chosen to be the spearhead for the process and there have been differing expectations about when and how the whole staff might buy in to what has been proposed for them along the way. Commitment has been garnered differently and divergent thinking has been managed sympathetically but according to the specific needs of the people concerned. Context has determined a variance in process, scope, and pace of change.

Yet, there are several clear similarities between the approaches of both schools. Both schools have begun work in developing a guiding framework of competencies for their futures armed with a deeply held conviction that the purpose of their schools was something much more than straightforward educational functionalities - of moving students through a prescribed curriculum - and attending to their personal development. This is being done as best as possible along the way given whatever constraints are placed on them by time, resources, and the requirements of the prevailing regulatory authority.

These schools have seen their work in terms of addressing the future of their schools and the students who will graduate as being more compelling than simply meeting the administrative requirements of the present. At the same time, they have both been very keen to ensure that things run smoothly in their schools even while great changes are afoot. The language to describe their educational vision is persuasive and framed in respect of the global citizenship of their cohorts of students, as well as in their own place within the broader international educational community. Both schools understand that learning is paramount and that teachers are critical to the success of their venture. And for both, the ongoing civic, performance, and moral character of a graduate is the measure that they most wish to adopt in terms of how they evaluate their own success longitudinally.

The success of both schools is tangible. Without having yet completed all of the process of embedding their framework of competencies, already they are different to how they were before they began this work. They have retained and grown the loyalty of their stakeholders, even though both have been strongly challenged at times by those who have sought to arrest the movement for change and divert it elsewhere. They have led with vision and asserted a mandate to effect improvement in their educational processes that has been tested and found to be valid. At the heart of their achievements to date has been a commitment to the long-standing ethos originating in the locality of their schools and a desire to see this expanded into a 21C extraterritoriality of competencies that equip students to flourish in a world that demands more of schools than it did in days past. It is this deep conviction in the importance of what they are doing that has and hopefully will continue to sustain them as they continue to set the example for other schools who wish to be stake a claim as schools who are themselves for purpose in our world.

Questions to Discuss within Your School Community:

1. How does your school address student competencies for the future?
2. What does your school do in common with School A and/or B to prepare students for competencies for the future? Differently?
3. How will your school community define success when embedding a framework of competencies?

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