Essential Skills and Dispositions: Developmental Frameworks for Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Self-Direction
From the website: “This set of developmental frameworks was created to facilitate discussion within communities of practice and to enhance a shared understanding of the dynamic nature of four essential skills collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction in learning. The frameworks define components inherent to each skill and describe performance across a beginner to emerging expert progression, informed by research on the development of expertise. Unlike discipline-specific learning progressions and rubrics, the developmental progressions reflect components essential to the skill itself and describe growth dependent on many years of active exploration, experimentation, setbacks, and reflection. Understanding the nature of expertise and how it develops raises implications for the features of supportive learning environments and the role of educators. The frameworks can be used to consider:
What each skill looks like within different disciplines;
Ways to enhance learning opportunities for students; and
Systems-level avenues to support skill development.”
This resource provides an extremely valuable set of learning pathways through the essential skills of collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction. Included are descriptions of various attributes of each skill at different learning levels, including examples that support educators’ identification of each level. It can be appropriately used for students of any age and across all content areas. There is no discussion of this resource’s potential efficacy, but the content is written and presented in an accessible way that could be relevant to educators.