Abstract:
Educational policymakers around the world are recognizing that students need a broad
range of skills such as communication, collaboration, and problem solving in order to
thrive in the future. However, what this means in practice is not clear. Revising
curricula to include these skills does not address lack of understanding of the nature of
the skills or how to teach the skills.
A first step is to understand how these transferable skills develop. The concept of
learning progressions addresses this step. Learning progressions describe how the skills
might be demonstrated, both in their early forms and in increasingly advanced forms.
It is critical for teachers to be able to identify the behaviours that relate to these skills if
they are to intervene at the appropriate levels of challenge. This means that teachers
need to have access to descriptions of how skills progress over time so that they can
design classroom tasks that are within the zone of proximal development for their
students. In this way, teachers can scaffold the learning of their students.
