Starting small with the key competencies

Teachers need to feel that they don’t need to know the huge big picture about the key competencies before they actually start along the journey of the key competencies. 

For instance managing self could be as simple as hanging your bag on a hook in the morning. A very simplistic view but it is a starting point. You might see that the kids need to do that, the bags are all over the ground. Great. It is a context, it is in class. So the first thing you do is you might take a picture when the bags are all hung up. 

Everyone can get hung up on that being a very simplistic view of managing self but what it does is give you a starting point. From there you can build on what ‘managing self’ looks like. You may do a self assessment on how well have we done it this week, how well as a class have we done this and it then it builds on and on.

My son has recently started school and one of the really important things for me was for him being able to manage himself while I wasn’t there picking up pieces behind him. And what I found really exciting one morning was when he was able to go and hang his own bag up and take out his book bag and go and place that in the correct tray in class. For some that may be a very simplistic view of ‘managing self’ but for my son that was a huge step in his key competencies and it showed me that my son was beginning to manage himself. 

He said to me one day, “I’m a good boy mummy, I put that in the book bag.” And I knew then he was self assessing his ‘managing self’. And that was exciting for me to see as a parent. 

That is why I think when we are going into the classroom context we can’t put a judgement on how important these little things are, these little ‘managing self’, or these little ‘relating to others’. When I see him playing with a friend in the playground and they have a disagreement and he talks about it rather than using pushing and things as they do when they are little. That is ‘relating to others’ in action. It is something small, but for a new entrant that is really huge. 

So from there we can build on. As a teacher’s pedagogy moves on, as we read more theory, as we look at different examples around the school, in our homes and in our classrooms what we can see are the building blocks to move us on in the key competencies.