The Skills Builder approach

By now you have an idea of the development needs of your students. This should give you an idea of where you want to focus your efforts. Before you start focusing on the step and skill you want to improve, we’ll look at an example.

As mentioned earlier, the Skills Builder framework helps to break down each of the skill steps into distinct parts:

• The building blocks: These are the key pieces of learning that students need.
• Reflection questions: These can be used with students to assess what they already know.
• What you need to know: This is the content that students will need to know and understand in order to build the skill.
• Teaching it: This suggests how you might go about teaching this skill step, and how you might structure a lesson around it.
• Reinforcing it: This is how you might go about revisiting and strengthening the learning of a step in the classroom and the broader curriculum.
• Assessing it: This is how you might go about checking whether your students have now mastered that step.

Look again at the Skills Builder framework and select a skill or skills you would like to focus on. The framework will help you to model how you can break down building the steps you have chosen.

Choose at least one of the steps from a skill that you want to focus on for your students and click on the ‘build it’ button:

• Read through the step in detail. As you are reading through the step, think about how the suggestions might work with your students.
• What would you need to adapt or change?