Embedding Competencies in Curriculum (With Examples)

Timothy Harding:

I think it’s important to recognize that our students have multiple touch points when they come to an institution of higher education, and there’s not any one person that’s going to touch every single person. So in order to this, it has to be done university wide and broadly across the curriculum and the co-curriculum as well. And it’s important I think, to help people have some frame of reference about what we’re talking about, not just identify the competencies as important as that is, and I don’t diminish that in any way, shape or form, but helping people understand what we’re trying to achieve with this. I think a lot of people, when we began to think about competency development and skills based to education and learning, it was about how did we just make them aware of these competencies?

We have to go beyond that point, and in my opinion, we need to look at, yes, raise awareness about the competencies and what you’re developing, the skills that you’re developing and transferability of those, but also to think about how do you strategically develop them, not just that it’s going to happen through osmosis of going through your classes and your college experience, but you bring intentionality to that learning in a strategic way and then thinking about how you help students to articulate those competencies. So I think you have to build a framework around it so that people can begin to think in those terms when it comes to the work that they’re doing as far as the curriculum is concerned, one of the things that I was most concerned about as we began to launch our competency development initiative at the University of Tampa was that our faculty were already overwhelmed with the work that they already had.

They weren’t looking for anything more to do. And what helps is having conversations with faculty, and I’m a liberal arts graduate, so I embraced the whole concept of traditional liberal arts education and that it’s not based on careerism and vocational preparation and so forth, but I do recognize and they recognize that even while teaching content that is liberal arts based, the skills that students are using are what’s important. And so doing simple things like creating icons that help identify the competencies that students are developing through particular assignments that they’re doing and asking faculty, could you add an additional, and this is the addition part, but it’s a very small addition. Could you add some reflection around not just what you’re doing but how you did it, the thoughts around teamwork, the thoughts around leadership, if you’re in a group, a group discussion, critical thinking abilities that you use and have the students do thinking around those.

So we have a finance faculty member, for example, who teaching financial principles very cut and dried, but she’s added in elements of competency development, reflection into her coursework through the assignments that they’re doing. They do a class presentation. She has them reflect on communication skills and critical thinking and preparation for that. They’re doing time management around, you only have so much time that you can present. So she begins to relate the skills development with the students’ assignments that they’re doing in the class. We had a biology faculty member who, he was in a lab at his students. He had put them in groups and they were supposed to be problem solving together in their groups, but they kept coming up to him and asking him clarifying questions and trying to get him to answer questions that they were having that he really wanted them to wrestle with in their group.

He stopped his lab, he put up our competencies on a screen, and he talked to the students for a moment about, look, the assignment is about the lab assignment. Yes, but you are supposed to be using these competencies and skills to help solve the problem that you’ve been given to accomplish during this lab assignment. Little things like that are tremendous. The impact on students, I hear students anecdotally, but also through a lot of the reflections that we built in around assessments that we do, saying, I get it. I understand that yes, the content is important, but I am learning the ability to analyze this in a different way that I can take that and put it in different places. And we have to be very intentional too about building it into things like if you have awards programs where you recognize people, build in reflections that students need to do if they’re nominated for an award where you’re having them reflect on the competencies that you’ve identified as core or certain ones that are related to that award so that they’re actually having to think about context, their development and how they articulate that.