Competency Based Curriculum

5.2. COMPETENCY – BASED CURRICULUM

By: Santiago Mendoza and Samantha Luna

Curriculum refers to everything a school does to support student learning. It includes policies and practices about content and programs offered and ways in which content and programs can be learned and taught. It takes into account student diversity, organisational arrangements, assessment processes and reporting practices.

Curriculum planning takes lace across three levels; named macro, meso and micro planning. The role players who are involved in these levels include: Common European framework, Ministry of Education, schools, authorities and English teachers.

“Programming by competencies means to have identified then group of organized knowledge, which the learner needs to execute a task or a group of tasks in a satisfactory way, taking into account social and personal requirements.

In an ample sense, a competency is a group of capacities, a macro – ability that integrates three kinds of knowledge:

• Cognitive knowledge: it refers to the ability for the management of concepts, data, information and facts.

• Procedural knowledge: it relates to the ability to execute an action or sequence of actions following methods, techniques and/or adequate strategies for the resolution of a concrete task-

• Attitudinal knowledge: it concerns with the ability to entail the knowledge with the values, principles or norms that configure our attitudes, looking for success and personal progress as well as social well being.

Therefore, the main difference between the traditional approach and the approach based on competences. Traditionally, the teaching planning process parts from the identification of a topic, which is associated to a teaching objective, followed by specific contents that are going to be transmitted by the teacher. As a result, students acquire knowledge and learn to execute some processes related to just one kind of content: conceptual knowledge, which is the vertebral axis of this kind of proposal.

The new approach, on the other hand, does not part from the identification of topics, but from competencies, because it just doesn’t want to increase people’s knowledge, but improving their fulfilment, their action capacity over the environment (natural, physical, or social). From which the learning of concepts, continuous being very important and necessary, but not sufficient enough .consequently being competent implies being capable of resolving real problems. Generate agreements between people creating products or services so as to satisfy their necessities. At this level there’s a special relevance of the learning procedures and the formation of favourable attitudes for common wealth.

5.2.1. COMPETENCY, THE CONCEPT.

When we think of competencies, what it usually comes to mind is knowledge, skills and abilities.

Although the concept of competency is used quite broadly, confusion can arise because of different interpretation between countries, originating from various national educational policies and from the interconnection between education and the labor market. Pedagogically speaking, other kinds of differences can be revealed. Behaviorists, cognitivists and constructivists differ in their way of looking at competencies. Even though competencies are by most people defined as individual characteristics, some stress the trainability others argue that competencies partly are given and can not be learned.

Some organizations (e.g. public services) see competencies as aspects of the whole person, comprising

- Aptitude (verbal, numerical, spatial)

- Skills and abilities (thinking, leadership)

- Knowledge (general, profession specific, job specific, level specific, organizational specific)

- Physical competencies (stamina, energy)

- Styles (leader, manager, employee)

- Personality (social orientation)

- Principles, values, beliefs, attitudes and spirituality (fairness, equity)

- Interests (dealing with people, dealing with facts)

In this paper we define competency as the ability of a student/worker enabling him to accomplish tasks adequately, to find solutions and to realize them in work situations.

This definition fits in with the need for describing competencies and assessing them. Competencies consist of components that are trainable (knowledge, skills) and components that are more difficult to alter (attitudes, believes). In addition competencies refer to a profession in organizational context.”

5.2.2. CURRICULAR BASE STRUCTURE BY LEARNING MODULES

“Within the curricular design, the curricular base structure includes the general competencies and specific capacities identified with the students and the participation of experts. In this structure, the capacities constitute the goals, each time more punctual and precise, through which, progressively, competencies can be achieved.

We called Curricular “base” structure, because from it, we can plan units and learning sessions according to the requirements of each case (persons, context, spaces, time, contents). Another characteristic of this structure is its modular character, in which, each identified competency unit in the professional profile, is divided in an independent module.

In each module, the specific capacities are associated, from the beginning, with the evaluation criteria, the thematic axes, processes, resources and the time in which the logic of the teaching process, imply its learning.

5.2.3. PROCESSES

From that perspective, the curricular approach by competences follows the following processes: Analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation.

5.2.3.1. PROCESSES OF THE CURRICULAR APPROACH BY COMPETENCIES

Next, we precise some details about the stages of analysis, design and development.

• Analysis stage: as it is indicated in the figure above, in this stage the needs are analyzed, and a diagnostic of the situation of the learners is done, too.

The result of both processes is the professional profile, from which we can design the curricular base structure for the training program.

• Design stage: the curricular base structure is elaborated in this stage, which is an organized planning instrument in modules.

Next, we are going to show the matrix

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