October 16th, 2019 – The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) is pleased to announce that Microsoft Education Research will be using its CCR Framework Rev 1.0 to help different international education systems establish a shared competencies standard equivalency.
This CCR 4D framework is the first of its kind to describe a deeply researched, explicit, and consistent structure for an education of Skills, Character, and Meta-Learning (aka “21st century skills” or social-emotional learning (SEL)). The framework expresses these dimensions through 12 parameters, their 60 sub-competencies, and a lexicon of 200+ associated and related constructs.
The intent of the 4D framework is to provide jurisdictions, organizations, municipalities and schools with a blueprint for a curriculum that transforms 21st century competencies into daily practice, helping teachers and students in developing relevant skills, character, and meta-learning qualities, all to be expressed through Knowledge disciplines. These competencies are much needed to update K-12 curricula around the world to make 21st century education a lot more relevant. The framework is propagating rapidly to a growing number of organizations globally, notably among them the Mastery Transcript Consortium™ and Atlas as previously announced.
Charles Fadel, founder of the CCR, and co-author of 21st Century Skills, Four-Dimensional Education, and Artificial Intelligence in Education, adds, “It is very validating to CCR that a corporation of the stature of Microsoft selected its framework over numerous other possibilities. The Framework was created at a cumulative investment of approximately $6M over the past six years. We are releasing the tip of the iceberg at this stage, and will soon announce several other high-profile partners. The framework was painstakingly developed as an elaborate synthesis of 75+ other frameworks worldwide, with clear design goals of actionability: comprehensiveness, compacity, orthogonality, abstraction, and global relevance. This will allow learners to thrive in an innovation-driven yet problem-challenged world, one that is shifting to learning-based societies where fulfilled citizens will not only generate knowledge but also know how to apply it, how to behave and engage in the world, and how to reflect, adapt, and “learn how to learn.”
Dr. Maria Langworthy, Worldwide Director, Education Research at Microsoft, stated, “CCR’s framework stood out to us because it maps the curriculum frameworks from many different countries and jurisdictions to a common framework that includes advanced competencies in a consistent way. This is important for developing internationally valid work standards that could enable ‘interoperable’ learner profile data. When those learner profiles are expanded to include a broader range of advanced competencies, it will be necessary for them to be represented consistently in education systems’ data platforms.”
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CCR is a non-profit global organization dedicated to improving education and openly propagating its recommendations and frameworks on a worldwide basis, via answering this question: “What should students learn for the 21st century?” CCR’s focus on relevance in education brings together international organizations, jurisdictions, academic institutions, corporations, and non-profit organizations including foundations. For more information, please Contact Us.
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