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?

Maybe a bit of education in irony is useful too!

Some facts are useful, but you needed historical context, I didn't. Because some people will need some knowledge, it doesn't mean that every 6 year old needs to learn it at the expense of learning how to think, and be able to think themselves out of a situation. I know someone with 6 degrees but can't remember his times tables, hasn't hampered his job prospects. I think facts are important, but not if it requires us to return to just learning things by rote at the expense of thinking.

I think that there is a small body of factual knowledge that either provide essential building blocks for all forms of learning (the knowledge of phonic sounds, knowing what the signs + - x = stand for) or which are so useful in a wide variety of contexts that, while children should initially be taught how to do them (count objects using 1 to 1 correspondence, multiply two small numbers together) they are worth learning by rote as e.g. times tables.

There is then a much wider body of 'curriculum content' - those things that a child could learn about, such as how plants grow, or the Tudors. A child can be taught directly about these, using the single skill of reading / listening to adult talk and memorising. Or they can arrive at the same or similar body of knowledge through a variety of routes, including direct (or similated e.g. re-enactment) experience, practical experiment, or reading and evaluating primary and secondary sources. Each of those routes requires a set of skills which the child has to be explicitly taught to do them well and arrive at a sensible outcome. That takes longer BUT there should still be a really clear view of the body of knowledge that a child should be arriving at AS WELL AS the range of skills they acquire.

A workable curriculum, IMO, has to define a workable 'body of content' that a child would be expected to encounter, even if there are choices within it (e.g. a child should learn about the ancient Greeks or the Romans or the Celts or the Vikings....but should at some point encounter an ancient civilisation of this type) as well as the skills and at what level a child should employ to access that content. 'Traditional' learning employed the skills of 'listening, taking notes and memorising' to the exclusion of all else...but it is still important that the child learns these skills. Some current teaching employs the skill of 'conducting an internet search and copying and pasting what you find there' to an excessive degree.....

I'm not a teacher so I can only say it from a parent's point of view.

When I look at what I knew at their age I'm genuinely shocked by their ignorance.

Ignorance should not, however you dress it up, be the product of education.

Whereas my children are regularly shocked by my ignorance as to the digital and IT revolution. They have huge knowledge and skills, they just don't know as much as I do about the Kings and Queens of England, or their dates.

Much of the type of "general knowledge" you are talking about mitz I learnt in the home not in school my own children acquired facts about history, geography etc from me and their grandfather and while knowing facts like the kings and queens of England with dates are useful for pub quizzes or Eggheads they aren't as important as knowing why things happened.

Don't dismiss it as 'general knowledge'. It's not about pub quiz stuff - Knowledge broadens horizons and raises expectations. Ignorance condemns.

Was it Dickens who put 'want and ignorance' together?

and was it Einstein who said ?Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.?

Giving children flexible, robust skills mean that they are equipped for the future (it is more important, for example, to know how to read than it is to have read any particular book). Providing them only with a fixed body of factual knowledge that has been rote-learned keeps them looking backwards, and does not equip them to take on the future. The only absolutely critical knowledge is that which provides a necessary foundation for building new knowledge and skills with - so for example knowledge of the phonic code, and a secure knowledge of the number system. The rest is 'content on which to practise skills' as those cannot be learned in a vacuum (a child cannot e.g. carry out a science investigation on nothing, they have to do it to find something out)

Mitz, I would say that a child who lacks skills is likely to end up in want, because skills are what we use every day in our lives (the skills of cooking, of budgeting, of child rearing, of reading, not to mention our job-specific skills). A child who lacks specific knowledge of the type you mean - kings and queens, capitals of the world, the names of planets - but has excellent skills (including the skills of finding out those things when needed) is likely to thrive.

brdgirl,

I don't see how your example requires 'knowledge by heart of facts'. An interesting question for a teacher to ask, if studying a certain text in class would be 'When was it written? What else was happening at the same time?' Children could then use their research, note-taking and presentation skills to find out about, and 'teach' the rest of the class about, each of the things that you mention. The class teacher could then teach the skills of synthesis, deduction and evaluation of evidence in the text to identify the influence that these events may have had on the author when writing the book.

A teacher teaching in a 'knowledge based' way would simply say 'Right class, we have been reading Lucky im. The things happening in the world at the time were x,y and z, now take notes as to how that influenced the author'.

The shared knowledge of the text, as well as the considerable skills acquired by students going through this process, is IMO more worthwhile than 'knowing facts by heart'.

You may feel that a certain knowledge of facts is required as a starting point. An alternative is to see that a certian awareness of the questions that can be asked, and how to answer them, is an equally good starting point. Through teaching those skills explicitly in the context of one book, the students are equipped to ask those same questions and perform the same evaluation, on ANY book they read in the future.

teacherwith2kids and dustinthewind

Like I say, I'm not a teacher. But it seems to me in Victorian times kids had lots of skills and lots of knowledge of all the latest technology (probably from seeing the underside of a spinning jenny). They could earn a living alright but they weren't educated.

Universal education was about freeing children from the certainties of skills based training. Universal education was about opening up possibilities, opening doors and widening horizons.

The opposite of ignorance is not facts, it's knowledge. Arguing against knowledge is arguing in favour of ignorace.

mrz

And wasn't it Newton who said about 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.

Without knowledge of what's been done before there's no progress.

and without the skills to use that knowledge it means absolutely nothing.

?Information is not knowledge.? another of Albert's gems

or perhaps a bit of Chekhov

?Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.?

or perhaps some Fischer

?Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.?

Mitz,

I think that like the OP you are making the (understandable) mistake of viewing 'skills' as 'things like pottery and woodwork'.

I don't mean skills in that sense. I mean skills like independent research, evaluating evidence, synthesising information from different sources, interpreting data, creating new hypotheses, detecting bias, extracting key points of information from sources of different types, applying something learned in one area to a problem encountered in another, experimenting in a structured way to learn something new (e.g applying what you know about using one digital device or programme to enable one to use another digital device with a diferent purpose), presenting information orally targeted to a particular audience. All those are skills.

I do not see how 'knowing lists of facts' open possibilities or doors or widen horizons. the skills I have described do.

mrz

Exactly my point. Facts are not knowledge, information is not knowledge. The teachers on here who reduce knowledge to dates and 'general knowledge' in order to dismiss its importance are setting up a straw man argument.

Perhaps, mitz, you could therefore give some examples of what you DO mean by 'knowledge'? Perhaps what you mean by the word 'knowledge' is what I mean by the word 'skills' and we are having a meaningless semantic argument?

Trying to clarify...

I think from my point of view, the difference between a 'skills based' curriculum and a 'knowledge / content driven' curriculum is about the way a child acquires knowledge, rather than there necessarily being a big gulf between the 'information' they are ultimately exposed to.

In a content-driven curriculum, prescribed by 'what a child has to know about', then the way a child will acquire knowledge about e.g. how a plant grows, what happened in 1066 will predominantly be by transmission of that information from an adult to a child - chalk and talk, at its most basic, death by Powerpoint in its modern version. To demonstrate that the child has 'achieved', they will be required to repeat that information in some form e.g. in a written exercise, by answering questions etc.

In a skills-driven curriculkum, the knowledge a child is to acquire may well be the same BUT there will be careful planning about what skills the child is to use to acquire that information. Are they the skills of listening? Reading? Evaluating evidence? Exploring sources? Carrying out a scientific investigation? Exploring a subject through drama? experiencing a real historical location? Reading accounts from different points of view and investigating evidence which might point to one or the other? The child will, in the end, acquire the same body of information BUT along the way they will also have had to demonstrate that they have particular skills as well as 'knowing' the information.

The tension, in a real-life classroom scenario is that the latter takes longer so the 'coverage' of areas of information will be reduced - although as the skills should be transferable, the child could apply the same skills to find out about other areas. E.g. a child may cover the Tudors but not the Victorians...but the same skills of exploring historical evidence, empathising with the views of historical figures, ordering events by date, noting cause and effect of particular actions etc can be applied to a different period.

My argument is with the guy who says 'why teach them about the battle of hastings when they've got google"

Since this guy is the head teacher of the top performing state primary school in the country it's probably safe to say that he's not alone?

When I say teach about... the battle of hastings. I mean teach why, when, where. About Stamford Bridge and the long march, about the broken promises and defeat. about the Bayeux Tapestry and the Doomesday book, and why we call it mutton not sheep.

I mean pass on this knowledge, teach this knowledge. This is all great stuff, why can't children be taught it?

Children are taught it

Children are taught it. However, it may not be 'passed on' through a didactic lesson - they may be given historical sources, pictures of the Bayeaux Tapestry, facsimiles of the Doomsday book, may go out and see the local places identified in the Doomsday book, and will be guided towards this knowledge, acquiring lots of skills along the way...

'How to use Google effectively' is a skill...like extracting information from 'chalk and talk'...both are very narrow views of education but both may form part of a whole suite of skills used to address a topic like the Battle of Hastings...

Agree teacherto2kids, definately a different approach to acquiring knowledge now. DD2 recently did a half term unit on The Great Fire and it was introduced to them in a "What do you want to learn" sort of way. They then moved through Peyps diary extracts, paintings and then moved on to drwaing parallels with the London fire service today. It really captured her imagination (she's in Y2) and we went down and did the whole museum of London, Monument stuff so she could see it all brought to life. I like a balance between children feeling ownership of their own learning with a skilful teacher weaving in facts, dates, arguements etc... There is a balance to be had here I feel.

I don't agree. Many children struggle cognitively with making some of these links through the type of source work described. It seems to work well enough with middle-class children of the well-educated who access knowledge outside of school that informs their "skills" use in school, but in the schools I work in where the majority of students don't access books in their homes and are still developing basic English skills well into secondary, education largely becomes about learning "key words" like "plot" and "character" or "onomatopaeia" instead of actually engaging with texts in a way that produces thought and feeling.

I've just observed a set of lessons on the features of charity leaflets, emphasising e.g. use of colour, "tone" and text type etc and analysing how these matched "purpose". All well and good, but more than 40% of the students didn't know what a charity was by the end of the topic. So how much did they really get from analysing the features of a leaflet designed to promote it, when they really didn't understand the purpose at all? They could reel off a load of disparate "features" and "techniques" without any trouble whatsoever, but the actual point of it all was wasted because the basic knowledge required to understand these features was absent.

The skills based curriculum seems to assume a lot of knowledge. I can imagine that where this basic knowledge in place it may have merits. However, for the most disadvantaged of students, including those with different life experiences to the mainstream middleclasses who write the curriculum and those with many types of SEN, it is quite exclusionary. The opportunity to be provided with the type of information that leads to analysis is absent.