| Skills for Success |
What is the History of Skills for Success?
After recommendations from the Governor's Commission on School Performance in 1989 and a statewide task force in 1993, the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) initiated a high school improvement program with higher goals for both student achievement and school accountability in English, mathematics, science, and social studies. The MSDE also entered into a partnership with the Maryland Business Roundtable for Education (a consortium of the state's largest employers committed to strengthening public education) to develop Skills for Success: a set of learning tools to prepare high school graduates for the 21st century. In all, the team responsible for creating Skills for Success involved more than 40 members representing Maryland business, labor, local school systems, higher education, parents, and government.
After conducting an extensive national review of existing sets of skills developed by states, school systems, and research center, the team wrote a draft set of skills reflecting the unique perspective of Maryland. This involved continuous cycles of detailed review and revision. It also entailed going out into the communities to actively seek feedback from the full range of Marylanders concerned about education, including high school students themselves. Once these community-influenced revisions brought the team to a solid working consensus, the group sent its draft skills to more than 40 experts around the nation–including prominent researchers, organizations representing teachers and administrators, and employers known for successful management for comment and review. The response was overwhelming: not only did the experts believe that Maryland was on the right track, but some called Maryland's home-grown set of skills the best thinking on the subject in America.
What are the Skills for Success?
The Skills for Success cover five categories: 1) Learning Skills, 2) Thinking Skills, 3) Communication Skills, 4) Technology Skills, and 5) Interpersonal Skills.
For each of the five skill categories, there is one Core Learning Goal that summarizes the general skill to be mastered in that category. Goal 1, for example, which covers Learning Skills, is: "The student will plan, monitor, and evaluate his or her own learning."
Each Goal is broken down into three to five Expectations: expected accomplishments that demonstrate the student's mastery of the skill. The first Expectation under Goal 1, for instance, is: "The student will establish and pursue clear and challenging goals and plans for learning."
Each Expectation, in turn, has its own set of Indicators: actions that indicate a student's fulfillment of an expectation. For the above expectation about pursuing goals, for example, one of the indicators is a student's "developing short- and long-range goals for learning."
Finally, for each Indicator, Skills for Success identifies a number of Elaborations: very specific examples of the kinds of behaviors targeted by an indicator. One elaboration of the above-mentioned indicator regarding short- and long-range goals, for instance, is that a student will "establish priorities among goals"; another is that he or she will "seek advice on goal-setting." Elaborations are meant to be seen only as examples of the types of student responses to look for, not as a limited set of "correct behaviors.
To summarize, each of the five Goals generates Expectations, which are then judged by Indicators of accomplishment, which consist, in turn, of specific behaviors for which Elaborations serve as examples. The result is a way of learning that can uniquely empower any student in any area of knowledge. The Expectations can reflect any subject. The Indicators can involve any academic or interpersonal skill. The Elaborations can pertain to any realm of response. It is here that the true power of Skills for Success can be found.
How Can We Prepare Students to Master the Skills for Success?
There is a growing recognition of the complexity and diversity of human learning. Several recurrent principles are shaping our perceptions of the learning process and how educators can promote student mastery of the competencies associated with Skills for Success:
The behaviorist model of learning is incomplete: we cannot teach everybody in the same way.
Teaching must address individual learners, their learning style preferences, and cultural backgrounds.
The brain is a pattern-seeking organ constantly searching for order in chaos.
Learning is non-linear and requires students to connect new learning with what they already know and have experienced.
In optimal learning, teaching and assessment are integrated rather than separate processes.
