by Lucy Betts

As part of the three-year TKCOM Erasmus+ capacity building project that ends in October 2020, nearly two years ago, three members of Psychology staff travelled to Beijing Normal University, Northwest Normal University, and Southwest University in China to deliver training on competency-based approaches to education.  Competency-based approaches to education involve students’ mastery of learning and assessment that is underpinned by specific competencies that students must demonstrate.  Through this approach, learners take responsibility for their own learning to achieve competencies that are aligned to learning outcomes.

The NTU team delivered a 25-hour training programme to over 90 teachers and university tutors, across the 3 partner universities.  The overall goal of the programme was for participants to develop a teaching plan (a scheme of work for a specific module) that included competency-based approaches and that they planned to implement during the next academic year.  We delivered a range of structured activities, group discussions, and tutor-led presentations focusing on competency-based approaches to education, constructive alignment, and assessment principles to participants who had previously completed a complementary online course.  Throughout the face-to-face training, there was a particular emphasis on reflection as we designed the training with experiential learning principles in mind.  Due to flight cancelations, we also ended up modifying the training programme during our trip so that it could be delivered remotely using the videocall and chat functions in WeChat.

Since we delivered the training, colleagues at the partner universities in China have developed competency-based courses for both university students and in-service primary school teachers. Beijing Normal University have developed an elective course for undergraduate teacher education students “Development for Teachers’ Key Competencies”, Northwest Normal University have offered a training course for in-service primacy school teachers on competency-approaches, and Southwest University have developed four competency based postgraduate courses for pre-service teachers: “Curriculum and pedagogy”, “Classroom management”, “Classroom observation and teaching reflection”, and “Education technology”.  The team are also putting together a MOOC (‘Massive online open course’) that draws on the material from the online training and the face-to-face course.

You can find more information about the competency-based training programme that we developed in our article “Developing a competency-based education training programme for university tutors” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cbe2.1200 and you can find out more about the TKCOM project at http://tkcom.eu/ . The NTU team on the project were Lucy Betts, Lai-Sang Iao, Gayle Dillon, Thom Baguley, Phil Banyard & Bethany Huntingdon, and we would also like to thank all our colleagues at our partner universities for the warm welcomes that we received when we visited.

This blog was created within the Project Building Up Chinese Teacher Competences through a Global Competence-based Framework with the reference 586415-EPP-1-2017-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP and co-funded by the European Commission. Six universities are involved in this project (University of Barcelona, University of Coimbra, Nottingham Trent University, Beijing Normal University, Northwest Normal University, and Southwest University). This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.