Organize your training courses: guides and pedagogical scenarios

How to build an educational progression or sequence around a general objective ? How to organize activities so that they allow mastery of knowledge associated with a skill ?

Here are some tools to get started, accompanied by the pedagogical assumptions on which they are based.

The principles

In order to help teachers in vocational training, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) has developed a series of guides for implementing  a competency-based approach. There is little theory or nuance in the definitions, but pragmatic and immediately usable advice.

The Educational Project

The guide also emphasizes consideration of the educational project of the institution or team. It gives some examples of axes among which we can mention the development of autonomy, the sense of finishing, respect for others and the environment, etc.

Competency Based Approach (CBA)

The authors of the guide take a competency-based approach. To this end, they use the 2005 definition of the Quebec Ministry of Education, Recreation and Sport:

"the power to act, succeed and progress that allows one to adequately carry out tasks, professional or personal life activities, and that is based on an organized set of knowledge: knowledge and skills from various fields, strategies, perceptions, attitudes,etc."

This is a definition in a few words that might not satisfy pedagogy specialists, but it can be useful for a trainer concerned with organizing and planning the learning phases of his groups.

The CPA begins with an analysis of the craft in context. The diagram below captures the main features of this analysis.

Socioconstructivism

The guide is based on the assumptions of the socioconstructivist approach:

1. Knowledge is constructed by the learner, it is not just transmitted. Therefore, the learner must be put in a position to question, act, and interact with an environment, other learners, and teachers.
2. The learner is at the center. Therefore, learning situations must be adapted to be meaningful to them, and care must be taken to provide them with relevant activities that are related to their skills.
3. Skills are linked to a context. Learning situations must therefore take into account the particularities of the work situation (tools, human environment, time frame, level of requirement...)

Steps to accompany skill building

The guide finally gives us a generic method to support skill building.

The Tools

The chronograph

The guide then suggests listing the skills, and breaking them down into a timeline based on the week they will be specifically worked on. The tool is presented as a large chart.

The activity sheets

For each skill, the guide suggests creating worksheets. These cards are very structured, and we invite you to discover the examples presented.

The associated knowledge is accompanied by "tags," which clarify the expected level of achievement.

Scripting an activity

The Mooc from the University of Montreal, "Tools to help script an activity" extends this work. It proposes to help script an educational activity. The pedagogical model chosen by the Mooc team, and in particular Bruno Poellhuber, is learning through active and "sociocentric" methods.

The Mooc is a tool for the development of a pedagogical activity.

In simple and operational terms, the teacher develops an approach in which learners are most often active and in small groups. Before defining the activity, he invites us to specify the objectives using the method of Krathwohl, Bloom, and Anderson and to answer some questions. Bruno Poellhuber emphasizes dissemination.

Bruno Poellhuber's work has resulted in the creation of a scripting tool. For a general purpose, it has several phases:

1. Preparation: learners discover the problem, explore avenues and solutions, and begin to produce elements that will be useful to them.
2. The priming, activation: in this phase, what has been found is retrieved, reframed, and the teacher may provide some rules and principles.
3. Procedure: this is the production phase. The learners are still active. They design and develop one or more solutions, and share them.
4. Presentation of the production: learners share their achievements, difficulties, solutions chosen, etc.
5. return on its functioning as a team
6. Metacognitive feedback: capitalization phase, reflection on what has been learned.
    

The approaches presented above aim to give a structure to build training they are based on pedagogical assumptions that have demonstrated their interest, whether it is learning by doing or sociocentric. Starting from hypotheses from other pedagogical currents, such as neuroscience or connectionism, we would obtain other grids, also very relevant!

Illustrations: Frédéric Duriez

Resources

Organisation internationale de la francophonie - Design and production of an educational guide accessed on November 4, 2017
https://www.umc.edu.dz/images/guide-approche-par-comptence.pdf

Bruno Poellhuber: Scripting Tool accessed November 4, 2017
http://oas.ccdmd.qc.ca/app/scenario.php?demande=accueil