Bill Lucas - Developing Tenacity. Teaching Lerners How to Persevere

Ensuring that all people have a solid foundation of knowledge and skills must therefore be the central aim of the post-2015 education agenda. This is not primarily about providing more people with more years of schooling; in fact, thats only the first step. It is most critically about making sure that individuals acquire a solid foundation of knowledge in key disciplines, that they develop creative, critical thinking and collaborative skills, and that they build character attributes, such as mindfulness, curiosity, courage and resilience.

Andreas Schleicher and Qian Tang, Education Post-2015: Knowledge and Skills Transform Lives and Societies (2015, p. 9)

Across the world there is a great shift taking place. Where once it was enough to know and do things, our uncertain world calls for some additional learning. We call them capabilities. Others call them dispositions, habits of mind, attributes or competencies, words we find very helpful. Some refer to them as non-cognitive skills, soft skills or traits, none of which we like given, respectively, their negative connotations, tendency to belittle what is involved and association with genetic inheritance.

Our choice of capabilities is pragmatic. A country in the northern hemisphere like Scotland is actively using the term, as is Australia at the opposite end of the earth. If we had to choose a phrase to sum up our philosophy it would be dispositional teaching that is to say, the attempt specifically to cultivate in learners certain dispositions which evidence suggests are going to be valuable to them both at school and in later life.

We know that the shift is underway for four reasons:

1. One of the guardians of global comparative standards, PISA, is moving this way. In 2012, as well as tests for 15-year-olds in English, maths and science, they introduced an innovative domain called creative problem-solving. This became collaborative problem-solving in 2015, global competence in 2018 and will become creative thinking in 2021.
2. Researchers the world over are beginning to agree on the kinds of capabilities which do, and will, serve children well at school and in the real world. Well explore this increasingly consensual list later on, but for now we want to share just some of the key thinkers to reassure you that you are in good company: Ron Berger, Guy Claxton, Art Costa, Anna Craft, Angela Duckworth, Carol Dweck, K. Anders Ericsson, Charles Fadel, Michael Fullan, Howard Gardner, Leslie Gutman, Andy Hargreaves, John Hattie, James Heckman, Lois Hetland, Bena Kallick, Tim Kautz, Geoff Masters, David Perkins, Lauren Resnick, Ron Ritchhart, Sir Ken Robinson, Andreas Schleicher, Ingrid Schoon, Martin Seligman, Robert Sternberg, Louise Stoll, Matthew Taylor, Paul Tough, Bernie Trilling, Chris Watkins, Dylan Wiliam and David Yeager. Wed include our own work in this field too.
3. Organisations and well-evidenced frameworks are beginning to find common cause with the idea of capabilities. The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project, Building Learning Power, the Center for Curriculum Redesign, the Expeditionary Learning Network, the Global Cities Education Network, Habits of Mind, New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning, Partnership for 21st Century Learning and the Skills4Success Framework are just a few examples. Wed include our own Expansive Education Network here too.
4. Inspirational leaders across the world are very gradually showing us that you can powerfully embed capabilities into the formal, informal and hidden curriculum of schools, if you have a mind to do so. Here are six examples: Collegi Montserrat in Spain, Hellerup School in Denmark, High Tech High in the United States, School 21 and Thomas Tallis School in England and Rooty Hill High School in Australia. Youll doubtless have your own favourites to add in. We love these schools and their courageous teachers. Throughout the series, we hope that their stories and our grounded practical advice will serve to ensure that hundreds of thousands of schools across the world see the value of systematically cultivating capabilities