Profile of Highly Educated - Focus on Competency Based Education

This past week a great research article came out by Tom Vander in support of competency based learning.  Take a moment to read how his research found the key characteristics of high educated and successful people.  He began the article with this quote:  “Students who are deeply engaged in their own learning and fully prepared for all that the future has to offer,” they say, have the following characteristics:
• Masters of all fundamental literacies:
- Building the academic core necessary to prepare for college, career, and life;
- Critical readers;
- Compelling writers;
- Mathematical and numeric thinkers;
- Data and visual thinkers.
• Holders of foundational knowledge:
- Curious people who are knowledgeable about the world, its history and culture, its sciences and underlying mathematics, its biology and cultural currency;
- Engaged participants who are key to creating a more just and functional democracy – who participate fully in all America has to offer.
• Original thinkers for an uncertain world:
- Sense-makers – dealing with conflicting knowledge;
- Generative thinkers – creating many ideas in ambiguous and new situations;
- Creative thinkers – reframing, imagining, and seeing problems from different perspectives.
• Generous collaborators for tough problems:
- Self-aware team members who bring their strengths;
- Talent-seekers who find the expertise of others;
- Essential co-creators – because of what they bring, and how they show up;
- Inquisitive world citizens who seek out – and respect – diversity and diverse points of view.
• Learners for life:
- Self-driven, self-directed; curious learners – about themselves and the world;
- Inventors of their own learning paths, careers, and lives.

“Show What You Know: A Landscape Analysis of Competency-Based Education” by Tom Vander Ark, Mary Ryerse, et al. from Getting Smart and XQ Institute, October 23, 2018
https://xqsuperschool.org/competency-based-education-cbe/part1