Renate Wesselink

Competence-based VET in the Netherlands: background and pitfalls

Abstract In the Dutch Vocational Education and Training (VET) system, competence-based education is the leading paradigm for innovation, both at the system level and at the level of learning environments. This article provides an historical analysis of the development of competence-based education in various countries and explores the concept of competence and its popularity. Possible pitfalls with respect to the concept of competence, standardisation, school and workplace learning, determining learning activities, assessment of competencies, changing teacher roles/identity and competence-based management will be discussed. Taking these pitfalls into account, roads for future development will be sketched. A learning policy connecting governance, practice and research is believed to be the most fruitful way to develop flexible VET systems that are suited to the emerging knowledge-based economy.

Towards Competence-Based VET: Dealing with the Pitfalls.

This article builds on a previous 2004 Journal of Vocational Education and Training (JVET) contribution by Biemans et al., in which several possible pitfalls in designing and implementing competence‐based education (CBE) were discussed. The present article reports on the results of an extensive research programme on competence development and CBE consisting of four empirical studies carried out in schools for secondary and higher vocational education in the life sciences in the Netherlands in the years 2004 to 2008. Based on the research findings, the article examines how the CBE pitfalls have been dealt with in Dutch VET. The conclusion can be drawn that the various pitfalls have received attention during the design and implementation of CBE, but not all problems have been solved yet. The article provides clues as to how the various pitfalls might be further addressed in the future to improve the quality of competence‐based VET.

Using an Instrument to Analyse Competence-Based Study Programmes: Experiences of Teachers in Dutch Vocational Education and Training.

Competence‐based education is becoming increasingly popular. Competencies are used more and more as the starting point for designing curricula and instructional methods, especially in vocational education and training, to realize authentic and self‐steering study programmes. Despite its popularity in both research and educational settings, there is no shared understanding of what competence‐based education should look like. Earlier work developed a model for competence‐based education that outlines eight features that are important for competence‐based education. This paper presents a study designed to determine the extent to which the model for competence‐based education can be understood and perceived as useful by teachers in vocational education and training in the Netherlands. The study included 12 teams of teachers in the process of designing or re‐designing their study programmes to be more competence‐based. Teachers reported that the instrument helped them understand the state of affairs of their study programmes, and empowered them to make decisions about the extent to which they want to make these programmes more competence‐based.

Developing competence profiles for educators in environmental education organisations in the Netherlands

This qualitative study explores the meanings and possible merits of introducing competence profiles for enhancing professional development in the environmental education sector in the Netherlands. It presents the three most important environmental education jobs and their underlying competencies alongside their core professional challenges, as identified by environmental educators and experts in the Netherlands. The jobs are: education practitioner, programme leader, and organisational manager. The core professional challenges for the education practitioner entail: developing demand‐driven instructional programmes and spontaneous, ad‐hoc programmes, and addressing task and goal orientations. For the programme leader, they are acquisition of new projects, quality assurance, and project management; and for the organisational manager, they are human resource management, financial management, representing the organisation and showing its performance. The results of the study should inform educational institutions how to develop relevant programmes for future environmental educators, and for the professional development of environmental educators in environmental education organisations.

Exploring the links between interdependence, team learning and a shared understanding among team members: the case of teachers facing an educational innovation

Teams are increasingly regarded as the building blocks of organizations, for teams of employees are better able to deal with complex problems and ever-changing demands than individual employees. The effectiveness of teams depends, to a large extent, on team members learning together and developing a shared understanding of the complex problems they face. As a way to meet the call for more research on conditions that foster team learning, we conducted a multiple case study in which three teacher teams participated. The data showed links between teachers’ goal interdependence, their engagement in team learning activities, like observing each other and preparing lessons together, and a shared understanding of the educational innovation they had to implement. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Self-directed lifelong learning in hybrid learning configurations

Present-day students are expected to be lifelong learners throughout their working life. Higher education must therefore prepare students to self-direct their learning beyond formal education, in real-life working settings. This can be achieved in so-called hybrid learning configurations in which working and learning are integrated. In such a learning configuration, learning is typically trans-boundary in nature and embedded in ill-structured, authentic tasks. The goal of this study is to develop a set of design guidelines for an intervention that would strengthen students’ capacity for self-directed lifelong learning within a hybrid learning configuration, a one-semester elective course at a university of applied sciences in the Netherlands. The research approach was educational design research. An intervention was designed, implemented and evaluated during two iterations of the course. Evaluation methods included interviews with students and the course facilitator, questionnaires, and students’ logs and reports. We developed five intervention design guidelines that will promote self-directed learning. Our conclusion is that the intervention was usable and effective: at a basic level, the students did develop their capacity for self-directed lifelong learning. Further research is needed to investigate conditions for realizing higher levels of proficiency in self-directed lifelong learning throughout the curriculum and beyond.

Contextualizing Individual Competencies for Managing the Corporate Social Responsibility Adaptation Process : The Apparent Influence of the Business Case Logic

Companies committed to corporate social responsibility (CSR) should ensure that their managers possess the appropriate competencies to effectively manage the CSR adaptation process. The literature provides insights into the individual competencies these managers need but fails to prioritize them and adequately contextualize them in a manner that makes them meaningful in practice. In this study, we contextualized the competencies within the different job roles CSR managers have in the CSR adaptation process. We interviewed 28 CSR managers, followed by a survey to explore the relative importance of the competencies within each job role. Based on our analysis, we identified six distinct managerial roles, including strategic, coordinating, and stimulating roles. Next, we identified per role key individual CSR-related competencies as prioritized by the respondents. Our results show that the context, as indicated in this study by CSR managers’ job roles, indeed influenced the importance of particular CSR-related competencies, because each role seems to require a different combination and prioritization of these competencies. Moreover, the results suggest that the relative importance of these competencies within each role may be driven by business logic rather than an idealistic logic. The results are presented as a competence profile which can serve as a reflection tool and as a frame of reference to further develop the competence profile for CSR managers.

The current status of teaching staff innovation competence in Ugandan universities: perceptions of managers, teachers, and students

How competent are university teaching staff to deliver effectively their present and future university duties in Uganda? This question was explored in this study by collecting data from managers (n = 90), teachers (n = 126), and students (n = 179) through a questionnaire administered at Kyambogo University. The results show that teacher performance in the role of innovating; knowledge society facilitating; collaborating and networking; higher education designing and developing; and entrepreneurship, could not be considered as satisfactory. It was also established that there are significant differences in the perception of the aforesaid among the respondent categories. The findings suggest that urgent intervention is needed to develop teacher innovation competence if Uganda wants to have an effective higher education. This study also highlights the centrality of using various internal key stakeholders in the educational system such as students and educational managers if effective teacher performance evaluation is to be attained in universities.

Designing Competence-Based Vocational Curricula at the School-Work Boundary

In this chapter, competence-based education (CBE) will be studied from the perspective of the curriculum. We will give an overview of what CBE entails, and review current practice and research on the status quo of CBE in Dutch VET. For this, we shall use peer-reviewed research and more practical, so-called ‘grey publications’. After a brief historical sketch of its rise in the Netherlands, we will give a characterisation of CBE. The conclusion is that CBE curricula in the Netherlands share the following characteristics: (1) integration of knowledge, skills, and attitude in competencies; (2) orientation on acting and integration in the professional domain, both in learning and assessment processes; (3) focus on the individual (i.e. flexibility) supported by the teachers; and, (4) focus on the development of the individual’s career competencies. The main difficulties of CBE implementation are introduced, which are pedagogical, conceptual, and cultural in nature and may help to explain why implementing CBE to its full extent is a time-consuming process. Although all the difficulties described hinder smooth CBE implementation, the difficulty in connecting learning in schools with learning in the workplace must be considered the central problem in implementing CBE in VET curricula. The remainder of this chapter takes a closer look at insights concerning the school-work boundary; it is first explored at the institutional level of co-development between education and workplaces, second with the aid of learning mechanisms in learning environments and after that through the means of a two-dimensional model. The chapter concludes with a closer look inside a learning environment at the intersection of the school-work-boundary that is the result of co-development efforts.

Using Transactivity to Understand Emergence of Team Learning

Team learning is a recurrent topic in research on effective teamwork. However, research about the fact that team learning processes emerge from conversations and the different forms this emergence can take is limited. The aim of this study is to determine whether the extent to which team members act on each other’s reasoning (transactivity) can be used to understand how team learning processes emerge. Research on teacher teams was used as the case study: Video recordings of three different teacher teams were used as primary data, and the data were analyzed using qualitative interaction analysis. The analysis shows that the content of team learning processes changes when team members act more closely on each other’s reasoning. In particular, team learning processes related to the storage and retrieval of information took place only in sequences in which team members acted closely on each other’s reasoning.