“…increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. . . We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.”
Thomas L. Friedman, The Professors’ Big Stage, The New York Times
Here at BMIS we are committed to developing our students into successful, self-regulated, lifelong learners. We believe in success that extends past our students’ exams into further education, their careers and how they interact with, and affect, the world around them. To that end, one of our key foci is on extending our students’ capacity to learn.
“(Learning the content) is very much the 20th century idea around education. But in the 21st century, it’s learning the tools and the skills of remaking that content and becoming the creator and the producer.”Our students’ skills for learning have been termed by IB as their approach to learning (ATL). We use the term “skill” to encompass cognitive, metacognitive and affective skills. Cognitive skills include all the information-processing and thinking skills. Affective skills are the skills of behaviour and emotional management underpinning attitudinal factors such as resilience, perseverance and self-motivation. Metacognitive skills are the skills that students can use to monitor the effectiveness of their learning skills and processes. Throughout the IB continuum these cognitive, metacognitive and affective skills are grouped into the same five ATL categories.
Diana Roten, Director of the Digital Media and Learning Project
From PYP through MYP to DP we facilitate the development and mastery of our students’ ATL skills. In PYP our younger students will begin their journey as teachers introduce and foster core learning skills in the classroom. In MYP you will find, ingrained in every subject, unit and task sheet, the explicit teaching of individual ATL skills. DP students are supported to amalgamate or synthesising their ATL skills. At the highest level: mastery, students gain autonomy over their own learning and become self-regulated learners. They have learned how to set learning goals, ask good questions, self-interrogate as they learn, generate motivation and perseverance, try out different learning processes, self-monitor the effectiveness of their learning, reflect on achievement, and make changes to their learning processes where necessary (Zimmerman and Schunk 1989, de Bruin et al. 2011, Wolters 2011).
Below are videos of BMIS Students talking about ATL:
The development of areas such as thinking skills and communication skills are frequently identified as crucial elements in preparing students effectively for life beyond school. A 2007 survey of 400 hiring executives of major US corporations identified their top four requirements of new recruits as being oral and written communication skills, critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, professionalism and work ethic, and teamwork and collaboration skills (Trilling and Fadel 2009).
“…producing more of the same knowledge and skills will not suffice to address the challenges of the future. A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would last their students a lifetime. Today, because of rapid economic and social change, schools have to prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, technologies that have not yet been invented and problems that we don’t yet know will arise”
Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education Directorate
During their time at BMIS, students do more than just develop as students: they develop as people. There are important links between ATL skills and the crucial area of student emotional health and well-being, which historically has tended to be “mostly separated from other aspects of school life” (Konu and Rimpelā 2002). The development of the affective skills can enable students to gain some control over their mood, their motivation and their ability to deal effectively with setbacks and difficulties. For many students, the internet means connection with others both communication and social interaction, whether by email, Facebook, Twitter, chat, blogs, gaming, and so on. The capacity to navigate online platforms and communities, we believe, is a key skill for our students’ future wellbeing. As part of the ATLs, students develop social skills which support self-awareness and developing meaningful relationships.
Based on information from The International Baccalaureate Organisation