This month I want you to walk with me through the history of outcomes based education (OBE) as I have experienced it over the past three decades. This journey led to my current understandings of OBE — and to where I left off in my previous three columns in the Teacher: discovering and implementing what I described as the ‘real basics” of learning, living and leading.
The first and longest phase of my journey with OBE in the United States involved a nearly 20-year period in the 1970s and 1980s — a time in which OBE advocates focused on expanding what were called ‘the conditions of success” in schools. These conditions have a huge impact on the real opportunities students are given to become what the system calls successful learners.
Our experience worldwide was that schools had a host of severely limiting factors that made it virtually impossible for most students to experience real success in their learning and be recognised for it. My colleagues and I worked long and hard to encourage educators to seriously examine these limiting conditions and to find ways to overcome them so that more learners could experience genuine success in school.
Over time we settled on four things that could have a dramatic effect on improving these conditions for successful learning, both school-wide and in individual classrooms. These four things we called OBE’s power principles. They involved:
– Having a clear focus on the ultimate learning results educators desired for students. This must be continuously shared with the students from the beginning of any learning experience, and all activities should be in line with the desired result;
– Curriculum and learning experiences must be systematically designed back from that ultimate, desired end;
– High expectations regarding every student’s ability must be established so that no student is written off as incapable of learning successfully;
– The range of opportunities students are given to learn, and ultimately demonstrate learning successfully, must be expanded. This principle requires schools to view time as a flexible resource, not as a schedule-bound definer of the educational process — a challenge that remains as large today as it did 35 years ago.
While these operating principles clearly helped educators become much more learner- centred and improve conditions for success in classrooms, implementing these principles didn’t remove some of the systemic constraints that were legally imposed on them. Consequently, educators felt that real OBE would only be possible when the education system, in which they worked directly, supported the implementation of these four power principles.
I believe this is one of the major challenges facing South African educators — they don’t appear to have adequate system encouragement and support for implementing OBE’s basic operating principles.
My experience of the second major phase of OBE’s evolution and implementation began in the middle 1980s when several of us realised that what most people were calling outcomes were simply micro skills that often had little relevance beyond school itself. This realisation set in motion a volatile period of exploration, discovery, and creation. The most significant breakthroughs in this extremely dynamic period came when we recognised that:
– Outcomes have more to do with the long-range competence and applied abilities of learners than with content details that are easily and quickly forgotten;
– These competencies need to be focused on the life roles and challenges learners will face in their careers and lives, not just on the content demands of school subjects and examinations;
– Learning and performance need to be viewed in ‘big picture” terms — with learners seen as role performers embodying a range of desired attributes and abilities.
All of this only happens when systems (and individual schools) establish a clear vision of the kind of learners they are committed to sending out into the world after school. While South Africa’s ’12 critical outcomes” framework tries to establish this vision, the system has not found a way for schools to reach it as yet.
I have come to view, as the real basics of learning, living and leadership in today’s world, the five Cs, which I described in my last column. That is, the nature of the world in which we live and create through our individual and collective actions is shaped by our learning, living and leading consciously, creatively, collaboratively, competently, and compassionately in our daily lives.
So much for my short journey — more on OBE next month.