What is a skills based curriculum?

[skewiff]

Our primary school says one of its aims is to make the curriculum more skills based?

What does this mean?

Learning how to think and learn rather than learning 'stuff'.

What is multiplication, what is it useful for, how can you work out a multiplication if you don't know it off by heart rather than 'repeat after me.. 1x2 is...'

How can I find out what happened in 1066? Do I trust this source? etc rather than 'In 1066, children,...

That sort of thing.

Yes santac is right. I don't know how the government think they can know what today's primary school children will need to know by the time they hit the workforce, never mind by retirement. Surely there is nothing more important than learning how to learn.

The National Curriculum review sickens me slightly.

Good round up from a teacher here

teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/skills-or-knowledge/

The curriculum review is suggesting strategies like a system of rote learning times tables and not allowing and entire class to move on until every member has consolidated the knowledge.

Basically ramming in facts and doing away with diferentiation.

You are for that are you mitz?

Oh right, this is what it means - I thought it meant teaching skills such as woodwork and pottery and electronics etc

I was a bit worried because DS has v limited use of his left hand and I thought that that curriculum would make it v difficult for him.

Mrz - re you link - surely there cannot be any learning skills taught without some subject matter being taught as well??

Sorry I meant mitz - not Mrz

The thing is that if you teach in a questioning style that makes the kids have to think and consider and make connections for themselves it takes longer.

In my opinion the 'having to think' bit promotes cognitive development which makes them more cognisant and efficient learners. In the future they become more resiliant, auto-didactic problem solvers which is what is required in today's world.

However, in the time it takes to develop those thinking skills you could force in a lot more facts- which the government could then test reliably and feel smug about improving educational standards.

santac - I don't work in schools - so don't know the ins and outs ...

But DS's school really gave me confidence in that the deputy head there has said to me a couple of times that even if the new government does change things our school is confident and experienced enough to carry on doing what it know is best ...

I don't know how on earth they think they'll manage this. They have been really pressurised into becoming an academy - but are completely against it.

Do teachers think it is possible for a good/confident head and school to keep going doing what they know is best regardless of the crap being pushed on them by the government?

EBD

Scenes from a battleground guy does a good analysis of 'thinking skills' too.

Do you agree with that head teacher who said recently "why teach them about the battle of Hastings when they've got Google"?

I would want to teach them how to find sources about the battle of Hastings and think critically to select out good, reliable ones. To consider the motivations of the authours of the sources. To look at accounts from both sides to really understand. To consider it from a human scale and bigger picture point of view. To consider the antecedants and consequences to really appreciate it's role as a historical event.

Not just to learn a list of dates and names and then move quickly on to the next historical event.

Do you agree with a child knowing that there are 100cm in a metre but not being able to use a tape measure?

EBD

Good so you'd be happy to teach them all those bits of knowledge about the battle of Hastings. That sounds very traditional to me, exactly how you would have been taught at a grammar.

How to use Google. The end.

EBD - I am a History teacher. Unless children actually have a fair bit of knowledge about a subject such as the Battle of Hastings, they cannot think critically about good, reliable sources etc. They actually need quite a lot of knowledge in order to use their analytical skills in any depth.

I totally agree beatricequimby. My DS is unfortunate enough to be subject to the disastrous Curriculum for Excellence experiment in Scotland. Our children are in huge danger of having all kinds of "skills" with absolutely nothing to apply them to. Skills do not exist in a vaccum whatever trendy educationalists think. Children need knowledge and context. Otherwise they could be fed any old crap and not know how to make sense of it. Now the cynic in me...

I think it's obvious that students need both!

I am constantly surprised by the level of 'teaching to the test' that goes on at the kids' school - supposedly a top-ranked school. The main thing I notice is that while the depth of knowledge on a single topic is impressive, the range of knowledge is not at all adequate. They spend a lot of time learning how to answer questions or write an essay on, for example, one novel, but don't necessarily learn how to apply the skills of analysis and comprehension to other works. They learn a great bit about one area of, say geography - but are not given even the fundamentals of basic facts like world capitals (which, yes, can be found on Google, but honestly - an adult person needs to be able to converse intelligently without recourse to the internet, and without some 'just plain facts', one cannot).

I'm just stymied by the idea that these are either/or approaches. There ought to be time enough in school to both learn multiplication tables and learn the thinking behind the process. At risk of sounding like Grandpa Simpson, there was in my day.

(I had my primary and secondary education in the States, so I am still learning a lot about the way education is viewed and practised here. I went to uni here and now teach at the university level here, and have two kids in a grammar school here. My experience in the States was, by sheer fortune, in a very good school system. So I am not attempting to say that my experience is universal or make any national comparisons, just saying where I'm coming from!)

I have to say that the thought of children not learning multiplication tables by rote just beggars belief. Why do we set out to deliberately disadvantage our children in this way? And yes I agree about depth versus breadth. My DS's class has spent nearly two terms doing a project on one single topic. It is totally crazy.

Are you Michael Gove?

The skill is in being able to do those things for yourself and then apply the same sort of thinking to other contexts. The tradition you speak of is to present information and tell the kids what to think about it.

Many kids need to actually be given time, support and structured teaching to begin to think for themselves.

I was at a very traditional, academically selective school 15 years ago. We were not taught how to learn or think. I flew into Oxford (defered a year- not easy to do). I, and many of my peers, had a massive culture shock when we very quickly had to learn how to actually learn and how to form an opinion idependently. Many didn't make it. If I hadn't had to do it at Oxford I still wouldn't know.

MY DH is on the SMT of one of the top selective schools in the country. One of big issues they are grappling with is that the kids are poor at independent learning, which they know will hold them back at university and in the modern world. I don't think learning how to think independently should be a preserve of the elite either. Should be part of every kid's basic entitlement.

What is every kid's basic entitlement is for knowledge to be imparted to them that has been built up through the centuries. Not to expect them to "discover" a thousand year's of knowledge for themselves. Give them the knowledge first. Then help them understand where that knowledge came from. THEN give them the skills to further and question that knowledge. In that order. Otherwise what you are teaching them - and what I believe kids are learning - is that any version of the truth is OK, because it's all just someone's opinion. I will not have my DS taught in that way.

Problem is gaelicsheep if you up the 'content' of the curriculum there just is not time to do all three parts of your model.

What Gove wants is just more of part one and he thinks parts two and three will just happen as a byproduct- that is pretty explicitly stated in the curriculum review. I do not believe that is the case.

If you asked me whether I'd like to you teach my DS all the capital cities of the world or how to use an atlas, I'd want the latter. Teach him all his times tables or how to multiply, again the latter please. If there was time for all of it, brilliant. But there just isn't.

But again, as beatricequimby said so well up-thread - without a base level of factual information, one cannot make considered judgements about what is a good source or a bad, or comprehend how a new piece of information fits into a bigger picture.
There has to be time made to teach both - if your claim that there isn't enough time is right, then that is the problem that needs to be addressed.

Learning to look things up in an atlas is a good skill, but requires one to know enough to realise it is time to look something up in an atlas, to recognise that one's grasp of a subject is lacking and requires supplementation through that atlas, and furthermore, to know when the atlas is reliable. It also requires having an atlas to hand every time such knowledge is required...on the tube, at work, watching the news, reading a novel...sorry, but we need to carry facts in our brains as well as on our laptops.

Maybe the government don't want the masses to be questioning and learning for themselves. Much easier to govern if people don't think for themselves but spend their time agonising over whether the capital of Australia is Canberra or Sydney.

Don't get me wrong, I want my children to know facts, but unless you plan to work in a situation where you need that information, it serves more as a way of judging a person's background than something vital to everyday working life. Certainly in my PhD the ability to think was more important than the ability to remember the dates of kings and queens of England - I view that now as the function of horrible histories anyway.

Yes maybe in an ideal world both would be covered, and certainly memorising times tables is useful, but making the whole class wait until little Johnny can receit them is a bit mad when Johnny will have a till to scan the items in poundland (if he is lucky enough to get a job) and a calculator to check his bank statement is only going breed resentment. Some other facts these days can be left to the internet, unless a child wants to learn them. Give a man a fish...

Indeed...why should the underclasses learn any more than is required for a job at poundland....?

In my own PhD, the knowledge of historical facts was vital to allow me to see connections and to ask the questions required for analytical thinking.

I don't want to use an example from my own field, as I do not wish to out myself - but let's make one up. One reads 'Lucky Jim' and enjoys it. One notices that it was published in 1954. One then recalls, spontaneously, certain national or world events occuring at or just prior to the time of its publication - the ramp-up to Vietnam, the end of rationing in Britain, the McCarthy hearings, Queen Elizabeth's coronation. One might then ask oneself if these events have informed the novel in some way, think it through, and develop a greater understanding of this piece of literature.

Does that matter? Obviously, I think it does. That the enjoyment and understanding of literature (for example) is a major goal of education. No matter what (or if) one needs it to make a living at poundland. Without education for the sake of education, we are lost. And that requires facts sufficient to make us ask the right questions in the first place.

Obviously, if we wish children not to grow up to do anything besides thank christ they've got a job, then no, we don't need any time-consuming facts to slow down their relentless march into the workplace.