To learn to do

                This week we have been working with didactic units, with a program that makes easier to make it, called PDC. But the program wasn’t what caught more my attention, in my opinion on Tuesday we were talking about the basic competences that the EU asked to include in the curriculum, it is very interesting how the didactic units change when you are focusing in competences instead of objectives.What's best in this new education is that it recognizes that every students have strenghts and challenges and learn best at their own pace, sometimes with supports.

                When you focus on objectives, you have to focus on the evaluation which means that you have to get your students to get those objectives, and nothing else matters. This is to say, you work with the kids to finally evaluate them, make sure that they have got the objectives and then keep going to the next objectives. On the other hand, if we focus on the competences, we are focusing in the methodology. This means that the teacher is going to make them understand the information, not only to know it, furthermore the teacher is going to help them to develop the different skills.

                Ok, we all know that focusing in the methodology is more important that focusing in the evaluation, because this means that we don’t want our students to learn with the purpose of passing the test, we want them to go deeper in the knowledge and get them to learn it. But the real purpose of focusing in the competences is hidden in the nowadays society, our information society this is to say, everyone can just pick the phone and look for information. Today is not important to know everything because we actually have every information at our fingertips, nowadays is more important to understand this information and to be critical with it. The competences are about being able to use the knowledge in our daily life.

 Here you have the list of competences that the EU has asked the countries to include it in the curriculum. As you are going to see, the competences are not only about being critical and understand the information, the competences go further. 

• Communication in the mother tongue.
• Communication in foreign languages.
• Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology.
• Digital competence: involves the confident and critical use of information society technology and the basic skills in information and communication technology.
• Learning to learn: is related to learning, the ability to pursue and organize one's own learning.
• Social and civic competences.
• Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship: is the ability to turn ideas into action.
• Cultural awareness and expression, which involves appreciation of the importance of the creative expression of ideas, experiences and emotions in a range of media.

          The most important is that you don’t stop leaarning these competences when you finish school; you keep learning it throughout your life.  In conclusion, our society nowadays doesn’t ask for people who knows a lot of stuff, our society asks for people who has those competences. Today is more important to have the ability to know how to learn that know everything you have studied, also know how to deal with people is quite important, know how to express yourself… We have to adapt the education to our society changes, because otherwise we are only going to get an obsolete education.