"What did you learn today?"

The question parents ask their children when they return from school has been the same for generations: “What did you learn today?”

This question echoes another question, this time asked by educators around the world: “What should we teach children?”

For a long time, the answer to both those questions was centered around content: students were expected to learn facts, memorise them and regurgitate them. Thankfully, education has moved on since then and content is only one part of what forms our curriculum.

Curriculum can be broken into “four Cs”: content, conceptual understanding, competencies and character. Beyond teaching children facts that they could access easily on the Internet (content), we must give them the means to make sense of these facts (conceptual understanding), apply their knowledge to new and challenging situations (competencies) and develop the attitudes and traits that will make them successful, collaborative adults (character). This complete education is central to both our mission and the IB’s mission.

In the past three weeks, we have been assessing the content knowledge that students already have in order to determine what they need to be taught and how we can best tailor our teaching to their individual level. However, our focus has also been on creating a culture where students can truly understand the content they are presented with, as well as acquire the skills and character traits that we wish to develop is all SISQ students.

As a mother, I know that too many learning conversations are still centred around a narrow vision of school that focuses entirely on content. When we ask our children what they learned at school, let us make sure we adopt a broader perspective and enquire about the understanding, skills and character traits they are learning too.