Integrating An Institutional Language of Skills into Teaching and Assessment
Many institutions are developing a skills language or framework: once they are built, how can they be used?
The conversation about transferable skills in higher education is not new, but it can be seen through several different lenses. Among these is the ‘graduate identity’ lens, where an institution defines its graduates through 8-12 transferable skills and attributes (behaviours, qualities, values) that reflect the institution’s vision of itself and its aspirations for its graduates.
There is also the lens of the ‘future of work’, where institutions see both specialist and transferable skills as key to preparing their students for the diverse, ever-evolving and uncertain workplaces of the near and longer term future, such as through transdisciplinarity or digital literacy.
Then, there is the lens of ‘work-readiness’, where experiential learning is used to construct curricular and extra-curricular opportunities for students to engage actively and reflectively with their skill development.
And lastly there is the lens of ‘academic nuance’, where we recognise and articulate the transferable skills and attributes innately developed in each discipline: what does it mean to be a physicist or a historian in those terms?
From one extreme to another?
We can see two of these lenses as opposites of each other: the graduate identity lens and the academic nuance lens.
Graduate identity (or graduate attribute) frameworks are often very attractive to institutions streamlining a complex conversation into a manageable form for students, academic partners and employers, not to mention to underpin institutional strategy.
However, the selection of those 8-12 elements of a framework can be a complex undertaking that risks over-simplification and reductiveness. For example, ‘communication’ is a popular choice but one which encompasses over 60 different skills across interpersonal, teamwork and leadership. More contentiously, perhaps, attributes and transferable skills often become conflated with each other and, in particular, academic colleagues can find it difficult to transition framework elements from the generic to subject-relevant.
At the other extreme, as I explored in my own approach to building a taxonomy of transferable skills and attributes from academic curriculum, it is possible to surface a rich and complex language that is strongly recognizable to academics across all subjects, but which in its complexity can be utterly overwhelming, and very context-specific. The first taxonomy I built had over 200 transferable skills and over 80 attributes, all surfaced from QAA subject benchmark statements. It was very empowering for academics to be able to see their subjects in this way, but also at times paralysing to deploy.
Finding a sweet spot
So, one of the opportunities and challenges for an institution is to find the sweet spot of sufficient complexity and sufficient usability between any sources of language of transferable skills and attributes they create or draw on.
In a consultancy project I did in 2022 for a UK university, we were seeking a meaningful language that accommodated academic relevance, non-academic and extra-curricular experiences of, and recognition of the workplace and needs of graduate employers. In another consultancy project I did with a non-UK university, there was an aspiration to embed the research-led culture of education into the language of skills, with less emphasis on the workplace. In another project where I was a critical friend to the development of a language of skills for an applied sciences discipline, there was a strong aspiration to show interdisciplinarity and context-specific application of skills.
Whether building from the ‘bottom up’ in terms of making complexity navigable, or from the ‘top down’ to flesh out a simple framework to greater relevance, a sweet spot in the language of transferable skills and attributes means all the communities (students, academics, professional services teams, employers) who have a stake in this language can see their priorities embodied in the language. In my experience, managing that juggling act rarely results in simplification, but rather in recognising and embracing complexity and in enabling contextualisation.
See it, Say it…
As an example, our hypothetical graduate framework might include the element of Making Decisions. That could mean a lot of different things in the academic curriculum of different subjects, so rather than leaving the interpretation wide open – and risking unequal experience for students across the institution – we might start adding layers of detail to keep everyone on the same page about what skills actually constitute.
Making Decisions could include sub-categories such as Evaluation, Reasoning, and Reflection. And at the next level of detail the Evaluation sub-category might include sub-sub-categories of Evaluating evidence, Evaluating arguments, Evaluating significance. Different subjects might then see more of their discipline in one sub-sub-category than another, but there is a level of coherence in the way these transferable skills are understood at that level which enables the equality of student experience, and is meaningful to academic partners and to employers.
Anyone with a disposition towards simplification and a graduate framework could be quite uncomfortable with this level of detail. But without it we make it much harder for students to recognise that skills exist and are used with this level of complexity and transferability across different contexts in education, work and beyond.
It is not enough for us to have an elegantly structured taxonomy of transferable skills. We also need to be incredibly rigorous about the ways in which we make the acquisition, development and application of those skills visible to students and create constant, structurally unavoidable ways for them to engage with that acquisition, development and application. In my former life as an academic, I innately knew being a musicologist included synthesising and reconstructing evidence and material, identifying and responding to ambiguity, and expressing ideas in a variety of ways. But unless we constantly and consistently articulate that to students, how can we be sure they know that too?
…Sorted?
This brings us to the problem most institutions have in implementing a language of skills and attributes: actually making it attractive and possible for everyone in the institution to do so.
At a holistic level, quality assurance processes are often deployed to ‘enable’ academic colleagues to identify where in curriculum they will develop specific skills identified in a framework. Some institutions have created menus for learning outcomes and teaching approaches for academics to choose from, which have successfully inspired programme review and design.
But quality assurance is, by definition, a prescriptive process, and what of existing curriculum? How do we reflect on our teaching, student learning, and assessment to enable students to engage regularly and with self-awareness on the development of such skills and attributes, recognising that such a lens might feel very disruptive to how we understand and live our subjects?
The acquisition of knowledge still dominates in narratives about academic curriculum, and it often dominates in the language of learning outcomes too. In a programme or module, we might ask students to demonstrate a number of different areas of knowledge gain, but by using a very limited number of skills such as ‘critically analyse’ or ‘synthesise perspectives on’. But if we instead asked students to demonstrate that knowledge gain using more diverse skills such as ‘analyse forensically’ or ‘curate diverse sources’ or ‘argue for and against the case for’, we celebrate our subjects authentically as well as focusing students more precisely on their skill development. We also make it easier for students to recognise those skills in other contexts, both academically and non-academically.
When we are teaching, therefore, we can think of our subjects as spaces in which to celebrate the huge richness of skills students deploy all the time to engage with the subject in depth. Educators have a role in pointing that out, but we also want to create opportunities for students to identify and reflect on those different skills themselves in all their learning, and not just in assessment contexts. It is always challenging to cover the syllabus, but in the shift from teaching to learning we can achieve a lot by flagging up all the skills students use when they engage with the subject holistically, and not just with the topics in this week’s schedule.
Conversations about skills and assessment are often consolidated with discussions about ‘authentic assessment’ and ‘the real world’, and resistance to any discussions about transferable skills in curriculum often starts here, particularly in subjects that are not professionally-aligned. But if we think instead of ‘authentic’ as ‘authentic to subject’ and not only to the world outside the subject, we can see any approach that uses skills to develop more complex capability and deeper engagement with the subject as both academically rigorous and having longer term value to the student.
A question of value
Which brings us to the thorniest question of all: the value of a degree to the student after they leave our universities.
It is difficult to argue with the idea that we want our students to love their degree and recognise how it can be used in the longer term. While the knowledge they gain may not be applicable in other contexts, the transferable skills which innately shape their engagement with the subject are. And by celebrating our subjects through an effective language of transferable skills, we are enabling students to recognise that for themselves.
