The Difference Between Teaching a Skill and Building a Competency

When I think of competence, I can't help to think of the word confidence.  This image is of a confident young person.  When I look at his smile, it reminds me of learners who know what they know and know what they don't know.  Even still, they are fine with it.  

​A skill is something a learner can perform when the conditions are right. This happens when a teacher sets up a task, provides the scaffolding, and tells the learners when it's time to use a strategy or tool.  They are growing in their understanding of how to use the skill with accuracy every time. 

A competency is something a learner reaches for independently when conditions are wrong, ambiguous, or completely new. Competencies are a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes about the task or idea.  This is completely different, because the learning has gone through the process of meaning making. Building a competency requires something much harder: designing conditions where the learner has to decide whether, when, and how to apply what they know, without being told.

A learner who can write a beautiful literary essay in a structured writing lesson, but cannot construct a coherent paragraph in a science discussion is not competency. The skill was taught, but the competency was never built. We call this learning transfer.

To help our learners transfer their learning, it means we have to intentionally  design for it and not just teaching the skill hoping it carries over.  To be honest, this happens all the time.  I've been guilty of it, especially when time is crunched and I have little understanding of what is the purpose of the skill.

At these moments, we have to ask ourselves and our learners these questions:

• where else does this thinking appear?
  
• What does this look like in a completely different subject, situation, or problem?

If your assessments only measure whether learners can perform a skill in the context you taught it, you have never actually measured competency. You have measured recall under familiar conditions. This is a useful thing to measure, but It is just not the same thing.

In the PYP, educators regularly assess the difference between teaching approaches to learning skills as isolated items on a checklist versus genuinely developing them as transferable, self-directed capabilities. The checklist produces skill performances. The genuine development produces competent learners.

Take one skill you teach explicitly in your classroom. When did you last design a situation where learners had to decide for themselves whether to use it?