New school, new objectives

Last month I was banging on and on about the need for teachers and families to wrap our heads around the notion of competence, to forget once and for all the apparently inevitable conception of course contents that, in the field of ELT, seems to be rooted in grammar-based programming - in the way we experienced school ourselves. Competences encompass knowledge of language use and connect it to discourse genres, hence covering all the elements that make up a communicative situation. This seems reasonable enough, living as we do in the age of information, in which knowledge is constantly created and shared and language is an essential part of this process. And still, how on earth does one get students to learn competences? How can teachers plan individual sessions, sequences and yearly programmes based on competences? What impact will this have on students' learning? How will it change what happens in the classroom?

Let me share with you an insider's thoughts about these questions. Anna is an enthusiastic teacher who collaborates with the master's as a mentor for student teachers of English, and has a lot of experience both as a teacher and teacher-educator. She works at a public school in Barcelona's Eixample, and participates in a fantastic collaboration programme with MACBA, putting arts at the core of learning for their secondary school students (you can read more about it in their blog: http://institutbroggi.org/category/magnet/). This is what Anna shared with us at one of the APAC's roundtables regarding the principles that govern her own approach to teaching English to her ESO and Batxillerat students:

“We need to get our students to do things, we don't need to do everything. When you start working with project-based learning and collaborative learning, you become aware that you have to get your students to be active, that assessing them merely with exams does not mean anything to them, it doesn't help them see how or what they're progressing.”

These are indeed some of the key changes that competence-based programming brings about: A revolution in student and teacher expectations of classroom roles, of the teaching methodology, and ultimately of the very conception of learning and development. For teachers, competences require a more hands-on approach to teaching, one which reconnects the very idea underpinning school education, i.e. that learning occurs in and through social interaction.

This means that teachers are no longer the sole source of knowledge, but rather the guides helping students navigate through contents. Teachers in project-based planning aim to create learning opportunities for their students, to push them out of their comfort zone into new territory through awareness and analysis. In the new classroom, students are in charge of their learning, and active participants in the setting of goals, the creation of class materials and the assessment of their own progress. Project-based learning is rooted in the notion of meaningfulness, in getting kids to study what is close and familiar so that they are able to reach out towards the unknown. That is why many projects start with a question connected to the student's context, which then is developed into areas of interest, and leads into the final task or project, bringing together contents and skills from different subjects that were traditionally taught separately. The methodologies Anna mentions, which she has contributed to implement in her school, reflect the deep changes that the new curriculum was expected to bring about. Project-based learning refers to learning that crosses subject boundaries to help students progress towards more holistic goals, based on helping students progress and apply what they learn in definite projects. The final task, the product, embodies the competences that were set as goals, and which are in turn connected to the goals set for their specific educational cycle. These overarching goals are drawn from real life, they reflect real contexts of interaction - professional, professional, artistic - and the ways of doing, the genres people use to succeed in these situations: a technical report, a presentation, a cover letter, any of the constantly changing genres that are bound to modern life, that we all shape and use to achieve our collective and individual goals. Knowledge, in this view, is not something we say or reproduce, but something we create collaboratively when we act through discourse, when we make choices.