William Spady
Guest Author
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/ 17 August 2005

Shift in focus, not in content

Last month, I briefly traced the evolution of the outcomes-based education (OBE) movement over the past 35 years: from its focus on "expanding the conditions of success" in schools and classrooms during the 1970s and 1980s, to the strongly learner-centred, future-focused, personally empowering emphasis of "the five Cs" in today’s "transformational" models.

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/ 8 June 2005

Learning, living and leading: The basics

In my two previous columns, I looked at the basics of education. What is basic about education, and what is basic to accomplishing it? The answers, I said, revolve around the tight connection among three familiar terms: learning, change and leadership. Education is most fundamentally about learning.

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/ 14 April 2005

Inside OBE – It’s about life-roles

Roy Killen of Australia and William Spady have created a tool – the Curriculum Design Matrix – that directly helps educators organise their curriculum thinking around any set of complex role-performance outcomes. They explain how they have applied the OBE concept of “Outcomes of Significance” to South Africa’s 12 Critical Outcomes (COs).