Absolutely Peter, here’s the short of it, the long of it is our 4-day seminar. You are so right, words have meaning and you have to have a shared meaning. This is what we call an Operational Definition.
I began experimenting with getting the curriculum in the hands of students in the mid 1980′s. Originally I started with competency matrices. When I went to Argentina they translated it into capacidad. When I talked with them, they have always had the concept of developing increasing capacity instead of the American concept of competency, which usually means minimum level of performance. When I used the idea of building capacity with students they loved it. People develop different levels of capacity at different rates. This also fit well with brain research on self-paced learning environments. Students were no longer competing against each other for who would be first to reach the minimum, instead they were able to support and cooperate so that everyone could reach the highest levels possible. Learning became the aim for all, instead of working for an artificial scarcity of good grades.
