Integrate Lifelong Learning Skills with WIDS

Life skills or “core abilities” in the WIDS model, are essential to an individual’s intellectual, physical, and emotional success—they apply beyond a specific knowledge area, occupation, or life role.  Despite their application and inclusion in many community and technical colleges mission statements, integrating core abilities at the course level can be challenging—but WIDS can help.

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Integration poses several challenges

Teacher and educational psychologist Jane Healy describes core abilities in four broad categories:

• Critical thinking
• Effective communication
• Collaboration
• Community contribution

Yet, core abilities are often “invisible curriculum,” teacher and educational psychologist Jane Healy argues in “Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--For Better And Worse.”  Colleges may experience several challenges including them:

• Core abilities can sometimes seem ambiguous, abstract, and even controversial.
• There is no exact formula for incorporating core abilities into the curriculum.
• Traditional curriculum formats have no vehicle for explicitly stating and assessing these skills.

As a result, core abilities are often not stated at the course level and, therefore, have been overshadowed by content-specific competencies.

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Define and integrate core abilities with WIDS

By designing, incorporating, and assessing life skills at the course level, teachers can bring broad college-wide goals to the frontlines of the classroom where learners can apply them in a variety of contexts.

In fact, educational research strongly supports integrating core abilities with more advanced course and program outcomes.  

Core abilities should be explicitly named and posted Healy argues.  

Moreover, "decades of research reveal that there is, in fact, no reason to separate the acquisition of learning core content and basic skills from more advanced analytical and thinking skills,” Elena Silva, Senior Director of PreK-12 Education at New America, writes in “"Measuring Skills for the 21st Century."

 WIDS software helps educators specify and integrate these skills into the curriculum in a systematic way – both in courses and in programs.

• Educators can develop core abilities specific to their organization.
• Educators can define organization-wide core abilities using preloaded examples and indicators in the WIDS Core Ability Library.
• Educators can incorporate core abilities into performance assessment by adding the indicators to a rubric or checklist.

For example, consider how students involved in group work might address the skill "employ appropriate social skills.”

• Students practice collaborating to achieve a goal, and they might be evaluated on their ability to work as team members in addition to their academic or technical skill.
• Students can see and interpret information rather than relying on information the teacher provides.
• Students could also self-assess, using a rubric designed in WIDS, as to how well they have demonstrated these skills throughout the course.
• Students could provide feedback about the skills to one another and reflect.

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A framework for bringing lifelong learning forward

Although including core abilities has caused challenges and sometimes controversy, few colleges consider lifelong learning skills as unimportant, even in relationship to academics.  WIDS software gives colleges a tool to integrate lifelong skills throughout the curriculum.  Once that happens, students are better prepared for life -- both in and out of the classroom. 

WIDS (Worldwide Instructional Design System) is a nonprofit organization that provides curriculum design software, consulting, and training services.  Download the free Core Abilities Performance Assessment Task.

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