Opening Minds

The Opening Minds Curriculum
Opening Minds is a curriculum framework for schools produced by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). The programme is based on teaching specific 'competences', which are designed to help young people learn practical life skills. The curriculum was first produced in 1999 and originated from suggestions from RSA fellows that the way young people were being educated was increasingly distanced from their real needs. As a result the RSA are committed to continuously developing the curriculum.
The curriculum is a based around the Opening Minds Framework, a broad framework designed so schools can deliver the content of the national curriculum in a flexible way. The principles have drawn comparisons with the basis of the EU Key Competences and the work of Stephen Covey.
Opening Minds is currently used in over 200 schools across the country. In 2008 the RSA opened the RSA Academy in Tipton which is the first school to be designed around the principles of Opening Minds.
The Opening Minds Framework
The Opening Minds curriculum features five categories of competences: learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information. Focusing on competences means that Opening Minds teaching is emphasising the ability to understand and to do, rather than just the transmission of knowledge.
These competences are broad areas of capability, developed in classrooms through a mixture of instruction and practical experience: children plan their work, organise their own time and explore their own ways of learning.
Subject boundaries are less defined than in traditional curriculum teaching, with schools often integrating the teaching of several subjects together into modules or topics, where competences can be developed through the exploration of common themes. Crucially, the input of teachers and the individual needs of schools are central to the planning of each Opening Minds project.
Five key competences
Each competence category contains a number of individual competences, which are expressed in terms of what a school student could achieve having progressed through the curriculum:
Learning
*understood how to learn, taking into account their preferred learning styles, and understood the need to, and how to, manage their own learning throughout life
*learned, systematically, to think
*explored and reached an understanding of their own creative talents, and how best to make use of them
*learned to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding themselves
*achieved high standards in literacy, numeracy, and spatial understanding
*achieved high standards of competence in handling information and communications technology and understood the underlying processes.
Citizenship
*an understanding of ethics and values, how personal behaviour should be informed by these, and how to contribute to society
*understood how society, government and business work, and the importance of active citizenship
*understood cultural and social diversity, in both national and global contexts, and why these should be respected and valued
*understood the social implications of technology
*understood how to manage aspects of their own lives, and the techniques they might use to do so including managing their own financial affairs
Relating to People
*understood how to relate to other people in varying contexts, including those where they manage, or are managed by, others, and how to get things done
*understood how to operate in teams, and their own capacities for filling different team roles
*understood how to develop other people, whether as peer or teacher
*developed a range of techniques for communicating by different means, and understood how and when to use them
*developed competence in managing personal and emotional relationships
*understood, and be able to use, varying means of managing stress and conflict.
Managing Situations
*understood the importance of managing their own time, and developing techniques for doing so
*understood what is meant by managing change, and have developed a range of techniques for use in varying situations
*understood the importance both of celebrating success and managing disappointment, and ways of handling these
*understood what is meant by being entrepreneurial and initiative-taking, and how to develop capacities for these
*understood how to manage risk and uncertainty, the wide range of contexts in which these will be encountered, and techniques for managing them.
Managing Information
*developed a range of techniques for accessing, evaluating and differentiating information and have learned how to analyse, synthesise and apply them
*understood the importance of reflecting and applying critical judgement, and have learned how to do so
References
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