Competency-Informed Curriculum
Curriculum Mapping: A Meaning-Making Process
The Community of Practice engaged in a series of activities to make sense of the curricular components of the learning and teaching experiences. In this exercises, we explored and addressed the following queries, amongst others, at a course level:
Mapping the Competencies in the Curriculum
Based on the current competency framework in PSB, which of the competencies are:
- Taught
- Practiced
- Assessed
in the context of your 1000 or 2000 level course in the BBA program?
- What competencies are most prominent?
- Are there any that are missing?
- Are there any that you might suggest be added to your course? And if so, why
- In what ways, if any, do your courses align and/or connect with the attributes associated with each of the competencies?
- What do you see as the core competencies that are most relevant to your course? What are the ancillary competencies? How and where do these appear in your course?
Please provide three rich examples of competency development. Tell us about a time/moment in your course when you were teaching, practicing, and assessing competencies.
- What competency/competencies were addressed in this scenario?
- Paint us a picture of what the process looked like/sounded like/felt like for both you and the learners?
- What impact did this teaching and learning moment have on you? And your students?
A Competency-Informed Audit
The following template (see below) was used as part of a competency audit and indicates the various competency areas that are connected to the learning experience. Faculty used a constructive alignment approach to connect learning outcomes to competencies, and then considered the assessments and activities in their courses to map to the categories of taught, practiced, and assessed in the matrix. Further, they made determinations of competency levels based on the learning verbs in the learning outcome, and named them as introduced, strengthened, or integrated.
[Download the Competency Development Worksheets]
Here is another resource that was used to explore these competency-informed curricular considerations related to levelling of competence in and across courses in the BBA program:
Connecting Competencies to a Graduate Profile
With competency-informed curriculum models and theories in mind, we posited both individually and collectively: What mindsets and/or dispositions are critical for the 21st-century business education student? Why do you deem this as critically important? As a professor, how might you/do you cultivate the mindsets that you’ve identified? What are the ideal attributes that a PSB graduate should possess upon graduation?
To address and grapple with some of these questions and curiosities, faculty created reference letters that intentionally connected to the competencies that they deemed as critical for the 21st-century business student to possess.
Mapping Competencies in a Concept Map Activity
Another creative activity that faculty participated in involved creating concept maps focused on the context, content, and process of their courses. They were then prompted to highlight and draw out where the competencies come to life—where are they already discovered and developed? How do we know? (the evidence) and then what other possibilities are there for integrating competency-based approaches in each of these courses to support the teaching, learning, practice, and assessment of competencies?
