Why choose a competency-based approach?

Establishing a programme based on logic that is centred on competencies fits in a set of instructions commissioned by the Ministry of Education. These instructions are based on worldwide research that highlights the importance of the links between learning and context of use, thus helping the learners in making learning meaningful.

For several decades, competencies have been used in the educational field. Since emphasis is put on the learner’s social and personal development, the aim is to make him reinvest his knowledge while performing tasks at school level as well as at social and professional levels. The programme has been conceived with the purpose of ensuring sustainable and viable learning.

Although the competency-based programme is a novelty, its objectives are not new. Actually, educationists have always been interested in developing general “know- how” processes and in fixing knowledge acquired in class. This programme will allow the Algerian learner to develop his capacity to think and act according to a vision of a world that he will construct day by day. This logic has a series of pedagogical implications such as:

Making the school acquisitions viable and sustainable:

The school will help the learner give sense to knowledge acquired in class and teach him how to make beneficial and relevant use of it. His learning must be reinvested not only in school contexts, (that is to say from one situation to another or from one disciplinary context to another) but also in contexts outside the school.

Developing the thinking process of the learner:

To achieve this aim, it is vital to reinforce the cognitive function of school by establishing tight relationships between acquiring knowledge and developing thinking processes. The emphasis put on the development of competencies makes it impossible to focus exclusively on acquiring disciplinary knowledge, but enhances the development of thinking processes necessary for assimilating them and using them in real life.

Presenting learning contexts in relation to the needs of the learner:

The learner must grasp the usefulness of the resources he develops in relation to the problems he meets in everyday life. The competency-based approach makes it possible to link the development of personal resources and the meaningful situations, which call for such resources.

With this approach, the learner will acquire abilities to use the language for communication thanks to the interwoven processes of learning reading, listening, speaking and writing.

Since language is central to all forms of communication, its mastery is necessary and basic to all school learning as well as interpersonal relationships.

Thus, the learner becomes able to get in touch with schoolmates and the adults around him, to express his own vision of the world, to make his the others’ culture and transmit his own culture.

Putting an end to disciplinary barriers:

The programme recommends focusing on basic learning that the pupils will have to master during their course. This programme will take part in the setting of transversal competencies in various fields: intellectual, methodological, personal, social and communicational. It aims at developing competencies in various real life situations, appealing to various sources that are related to disciplinary fields, the decompartimentalization encourages and favours the development of transversal competencies. Going beyond the disciplinary field, these transversal competencies will be implemented in a gradually widening field as they get used and developed in various contexts.

Choosing a personalized pedagogy:

To facilitate the development of the learner’s competencies, it will be necessary to rely on the resources that have to be explicited, developed and enriched. To achieve this aim, various pedagogical approaches will be preferred, keeping individual differences in mind.