Essential Skills and Dispositions: Developmental Frameworks for Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Self-Direction

In 2012, states within the Innovation Lab Network (ILN) defined college, career, and citizenship readiness as a function of the interdependence of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. The ESD Developmental Frameworks were created in recognition of the many discipline-specific resources for content-area knowledge acquisition and application, with far fewer resources dedicated to skills and dispositions. The Center for Innovation in Education (CIE) and the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) collaborated with teacher leaders from ILN states to produce a research-based developmental framework for collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction in learning. Each framework defines components that constitute the skill and describes intra- and interpersonal component behaviors that a learner could display if provided the opportunities, environments, and support needed to cultivate the skill.