Last updated Aug 23 1995 3:00pm

BACKGROUND ON COMPETENCIES

They are the skills, the abilities, the capacities people have for performing in desired ways in a society.

Competencies were learned by experimenting, and by observation, by emulating the performance of those who were successful at the desired competence.

As society became more organized, competency building became more important. Apprentices in crafts like stone masonry learned to perform under masters, and learned much of the lore and knowledge of the craft incidentally while working alongside the master. At rest and meal breaks the master took opportunites to explain, to teach, and the apprentices took opportunities to ask about what puzzled them.

Philosophers and intellectuals learned in the same way, although their competencies were almost entirely intellectual; thinking, reasoning, debating, lecturing, sermonizing. Would-be philosophers learned at the feet of a master, who talked to them as a small group, then required them to perform by talking to the group.

As more and more people wanted to become philosophers and intellectuals, it became inconvenient to teach them one-on-one. so schools were organized (universities) where learners read about philosophies that had already been written down, and in large groups were taught philosophy and other intellectual pursuits in prepared lectures. To practice their new competencies, and to prove their competence, the learners were required to think out and write down philosophies (tests and exams), and to stand in front of recognized established philosophers and describe philosophies (orals).

This became the model in schools and other programs for learning competencies. Of course philosphy and intellectual pursuits were ideal competencies to learn in this way, because the learning so resembled the competencies.

Eventually traditional crafts faced the same problems, they needed more trained people, there was less time for lore and knowledge, and many of their masters were not able to provide the lore and knowledge quickly enough. Using the model of the universities, they would gather all the apprentices and teach them all the lore and knowledge in a school. They would continue to learn all their competencies on the job.

So all the apprentices in stone masonry were removed from the building sites for a few weeks a year, and placed in a school for stone masons, to be taught by a respected stone mason.

While the trade schools provided information and theory, the emphasis remained on the competencies needed on the job. This was mainly because of the industrial arts and vocational education movement, which had rigorous methods of job and skill analysis that kept the focus there. The learning program was kept in its proper supporting position.

For society in general, It was deemed that there were certain competencies that were common to all people in the society, to all jobs. These were competencies that were not easy to help someone else learn to perform, arithmetic and reading and writing. So we created public schools where these were taught to all, by trained teachers.

The public schools used not a competency building model, but the knowledge or philosopher model, with increasing emphasis placed on the teaching and knowledge and less on the competencies.

As public schooling became more and more academic, and became uiversal, it became increasing difficult to motivate more and more of the learners. They couldn't understand what all the learning was for. They couldn't see how it could be used.

As time went on, the stone masonry training program began to change. Because it was in a learning institution, there were growing pressures to make the learning more academic. Courses in physics and chemistry were added to help the apprentices appreciate structural design and the mortar bonding process. A course in geology was added to make the young masons better able to select the best stone for their projects.

The learning institution was faced with accreditation to prove its programs were academically sound, and which demanded that all courses have rigorous written exams.

The school produced bright young masons, but many drifted off into other pursuits like selling stone mason tools, or working for the quarry that supplied the stone. With growing shortages of practical masons, the companies soon had to begin training a lot of their own people again, right on the job.

In the 1960s Robert Mager caused a great stir with 3 small books that introduced the concept of behavioural objectives for learning programs. Mager showed an easy method of looking at the content of learning, then devising outcome behaviours that would bo th be an impetus to the learner to better understand the subject matter, and also serve as proof that the subject matter had indeed been learned.

Many started using it with a vengeance. Long frustrated by the difficulty of determining society's objectives, teachers now had a way to create performance objectives for what they wanted to teach. Learners seemed better motivated, and now could at least apply what they had been taught in some outcome behaviour. There were significant improvements in some aspects of academic learning.

Unfortunately, those involved with occupational and professional training did the same. The stone masonry school and its instructors began ignoring the real competencies of stone masonry work, and began devising performance objectives out of the content they had already deemed important, the chemistry and physics and geology. The learners were still being directed toward goals that were not the real competencies of stone masonry.

Where does it end? It ends by building a real competency model of the occupation, concentrating on showing only the real skills needed in work, and showing all these real skills in a practical way. They should be the focus of all evaluation, and goal setting, and program planning and delivery. The DACUM chart was one kind of practical competency model. The specific version that is the topic of these pages is called AMOD, pronounced Ay-Mod. A version designed for email and the Internet is called IMOD, pronounced Eye-Mod.