Faculty meeting on Learning Outcomes

At today's faculty meeting, the topic of conversation was our ongoing process to define learning outcomes for the school. After a brief reframing of why, how, and what we are doing, the faculty considered the following definitions of "competency", in continuation of our discussion of proposed core competencies that all students would develop while at TBS:

1) possession of required skill, knowledge, qualification or capacity

2) the condition of being capable or able

Some faculty liked the first one more, while others liked the second. Both "possession" and "required" were thoughtfully challenged (I added "for success in a future that is un/known" in response to the thread of discussion about "required"). Differentiating the competencies from personal character traits was brought up, along with many other ideas.

Faculty were then asked to engage in the Circle of Viewpoints thinking routine by taking the perspective of a faculty member at a different level from their own, which lead to another round of discussion, including the question of whether these are all present at all times in all children and therefor we need to talk about the relative development of each one - similar to how we talk about both the diverse intellectual profile of each child, and the idea of each child's gifts and challenges.

It was a complex, nuanced conversation about important educational philosophy, to say the least!