Fieldnotes: Making a goal often comes with a strategic assist

• reDesign’s competency framework is a tool for meaningfully engaging learners in unpacking the strategies and skills needed to be future-ready

• Developing foundational skills like goal-setting is instrumental to building a set of academic and social-emotional competencies that support lifelong learning

• Learners recognize the role of family, educators, and peers in guiding them towards more independent application of those types of skill sets

• When the language of skill development is made visible to young people, they can be part of collaborative conversations about how to progress to the next level

Picture it: while enduring a hungry wait for our food to arrive, my daughter was distracting herself with a series of ruthless games of tic-tac-toe. Wanting nothing more than total defeat of my husband, she gleefully claimed a number of victories, after which she asked, “So…what’s your strategy?”

“My strategy”, he replied, “is to get three in a row”. She looked up at him in slight disdain. “That’s not your strategy,  that’s your end goal! That’s what we’re all aiming for. Your strategy is how you get to that goal.” 

Whoa! I wondered where she got the language to name the bigger concept behind the decisions that you make during game-play…like counting on your Dad not to notice that you’re trying to fill all the corners of the tic-tac-toe grid before he can. 

She explained that earlier this year, her first grade teacher was having conversations with each child about the kinds of goals they’d like to aim for and digging into what that meant. Her main one was to really, truly learn to read. “That sounds like a great goal!” we said. “How do you think you can get there?”

Realizing that she had hit a limit in her understanding, she proclaimed – “I don’t know THAT! I’m only six! You and the teacher are supposed to talk and decide what’s best for me!” We laughed gently and agreed that we would talk together and figure out how to support her quest to go from navigating easy readers to unpacking more complex sentences.

But, actually, that kind of goal-setting process supported by strategic guidance is something that learners of all ages crave on the road to greater independence and skill development – and it’s at the heart of getting to meaningful growth that has long-lasting, real-world resonance. 

fBuilding From What Young People Need

At the Aurora Institute Symposium, we offered a sneak peek of reDesign’s new competency framework, which takes a whole child approach to building and measuring the learning that matters, both to students and the world at large. With the official launch around the corner, we highlighted the value that the framework places on student agency within academic and social-emotional development, and explained how we incorporated youth voices into our design research and review process. 

As part of the design research that was shared at Aurora, we featured insights from high schoolers on our Youth Advisory Council about the kind of support they would need to “become good” at the type of holistic, transferable skills that the reDesign competency framework encompasses. They identified that help from family, teachers, and peers was a necessary part of becoming more independently capable. As a result, they valued opportunities for competency development that integrated intentional feedback, collaborative idea generation, knowledge and experience sharing, and the type of guided practice that would build their confidence.  

At the same time, they saw that the reDesign competency framework was designed to be a tool for shaping the nature and focus of that guidance, alongside self-assessment. They envisioned using the framework to deepen their understanding of the steps needed to further growth in a particular competency, describing how it could create a clearer, more transparent avenue for providing and digesting feedback about their current abilities and the results of their applied practice. 

Making Transferable Skills Visible

Within our Aurora presentation, we explained that by pairing reDesign’s new competency framework with subject-specific content and inquiry, the learning experience becomes a vehicle for gaining specific knowledge along with enduring skills that carry across contexts.

Our Youth Advisors had also identified that goal-setting, monitoring their progress, and making adjustments were exactly the type of practical, transferable skills that enable other types of development across subjects. While they wanted to make reDesign’s competency framework come alive by connecting it to projects and inquiry that reflected their personal interests and passions, they affirmed that, “because this framework is applicable in countless scenarios, it serves as a scaffolding for human life”. And ultimately, isn’t that the type of foundational support that we want our learners to be able to carry with them, as they grow from the guidance given within a learning community and take greater ownership of their unique trajectories?

At reDesign, our team often gets so immersed in the concept of developing future-ready competencies that we start to see their relevance all around us – in discussions with our kids before dinner, and in the aspirations of our savvy Youth Advisors, who know what they want next in life, but appreciate a road map for determining the best route to get there. If you’d like to be first on our list to notify when reDesign’s new competencies are fully launched, sign up here!