Teaching and Assessing Core Skills (FutureLearn)

This course will guide you through how to capture student achievement and plan progression in core skills. You’ll work through examples of how this can be carried out in the classroom with opportunities to practice these new techniques in your own context.

Understand how to break down teaching core skills

On this course, you’ll learn the Skills Builder approach which breaks down core skills into manageable steps. This approach will allow you to target and understand students’ progress over time.

You’ll also learn the six principles of building skills to give you a simple conceptual framework for building students’ key skills that you can put into practice in your school environment.

Develop an action plan for embedding progression in core skills

Once you’ve mastered the principles, you’ll build an effective project to support the progression of core skills in your own school. You’ll then share, review, and refine this project with other learners on the course and with support from the course educators.

Reflecting on common challenges and solutions is vital, so you’ll share what has worked well before creating an action plan for how you’ll continue to build the core skills of your students.

Learn from the experts at the British Council

The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. They have created this course to give you the tools to help students build their core skills. Being able to develop cognitive skills such as leadership, critical thinking, and collaboration, will help them succeed in the future.

What topics will you cover?

- Introducing the core skills and why they matter

- Exploring the Skills Builder framework

- The principles of teaching and assessing core skills

- Developing an action plan to build the core skills of your students

Learning on this course

You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Demonstrate an understanding of the core skills and why they matter

- Develop a theoretical understanding of how core skills can be broken down to support progression

- Explore the principles that underpin effective core skills teaching and how they can be applied in your school environment

- Assess your students’ existing skills and plan next steps

- Reflect on your students and school context to put together an action plan to support progression in core skills

Who is the course for?

This course is aimed at teachers and school leaders looking to build their students’ core skills. The course does not require any previous knowledge of core skills.