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Thanks for downloading this podcast from Teacher. I’m Dominique Russell.
We hear a lot about the role of educators and schools in developing the essential skills students need for learning and for life – things like critical thinking and collaboration. But, it’s not necessarily a simple thing to support the development of these things in the classroom.
I’m delighted to welcome Dr Claire Scoular back to the Teacher podcast today. You may recognise her name – Dr Scoular is a Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research and she’s been working on developing frameworks for the essential skills for learning. The frameworks are designed to support educators to understand the essential skills by defining the skill, breaking it down into aspects that comprise it, and presenting those aspects as observable behaviours. It also identifies different levels of proficiency in the skill. This work has involved collaboration with more than 30 countries around the world to identify and select 5 essential skills. Those 5 skills are: Critical thinking, Creative thinking, Collaboration, Communication and Self-regulation. Now, some of you may know that frameworks have already existed for Critical thinking, Creative thinking and Collaboration – and, we’ve spoken about these on Teacher before, so I’ll leave the links to our previous content on this in the transcript of this podcast episode, which you can find at our website, teachermagazine.com – but the frameworks for Communication and Self-regulation have only just been released.
So, in this episode, Dr Scoular is going to take us through these 2 new frameworks in detail. We’ll break down what the skill is, the aspects that comprise it, and also what proficiency in the skills might look like. Let’s get started.
Dominique Russell: Dr Claire Scoular, welcome to the Teacher podcast. Thanks for joining us. We’re here today for a catch up on ACER's Essential Skills Framework that you've developed. Keen readers of Teacher will know that we've published content on 3 of the 5 skills in the past that make up this framework – so, we've spoken with you about critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration before. And, for our listeners, I'll just let you know quickly that we’ll include links to all of that past content in the transcript of this podcast episode, which you can find at our website teachermagazine.com. But today we're talking about the final 2 skills, communication and self-regulation, that we haven't touched on at Teacher yet. You developed those with your colleagues Jonathan Heard, Ian Teo and Adam Wardell. So, that's what we're getting into in this episode, but beforehand I thought it would be useful to take a little bit of a step back and catch up our listeners. So, can you give us a bit of an overview on the Essential Skills Framework in general?
Dr Claire Scoular: Sure can. There's a large and increasing amount of constructs that are deemed important for students in the 21st Century and beyond, to really focus on their holistic development through school, but also to prepare them for life. And the concept of 21st Century skills has become somewhat of a dumping ground for everything that isn't academic knowledge. And we’re increasingly putting in new skills, attributes, characteristics, values – you name it. This is becoming increasingly burdensome for schools/systems/teachers and we really wanted to narrow it down for educators to what the key, essential, high impact skills are, that we think they should be focusing on.
There is obviously the natural apprehension from educators as to how to actually embed those skills effectively and the large number of theoretical frameworks that are out there are well intended, but don't necessarily always reflect sort of key, observable behaviours that we might associate with students in classrooms. So, we really wanted a set of operationalisable frameworks that connect with what students are doing in classrooms, that are also validated based on current practice.
So, rather than focusing on quantity of skills/attributes/dispositions we've taken a more manageable, hopefully sustainable, and of course, realistic, approach for education systems, and then, by proxy of that of course, educators, to basically focus on the high impact essential skills.
Our frameworks define each of the skills conceptually and they break the skills down into their strands and their aspects. And it's really those behavioural aspects that we then focus on. These are observable behaviours that we can see in our learners. And through this we also have developed progressions that outline the levels of proficiency for each of the skills.
The essential skills that we identified, as you mentioned, we’ve got critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration and also now communication and self-regulation. So, all 5 of these skills are essential for learning, for student development, they’re teachable and they’re measurable through assessments. And we can also identify levels of proficiency, measure and monitor these skills overtime. I do want to point out that that isn't to say that other skills/values/dispositions aren't important, but what we've done is try to narrow these down to the ones that have the highest impact.
So, for example, particularly post-pandemic, many educators are wanting to see more resilience in learners. When we think about how that might manifest through the development of these essential skills – if we're able to pull apart problems (which is creative thinking; looking at them differently), being able to identify between reliable and less reliable sources of information (critical thinking) and maybe being able to identify reliable people; reliable people to lean on, to ask questions to, or people that will support our resilience. So, all 3 of these skills can really help us actually build more resilient learners.
Wellbeing is also a really large focus for many schools and education systems. And taking responsibility for ourselves, being able to self-regulate our emotions and behaviours, and being able to communicate well and receive information effectively will really help us make more informed decisions and really help feed back in to positive wellbeing. So, again, those essential skills can really help build on other really important outcomes like resilience and wellbeing.
As we lean more in towards the 2 skills we're focusing on (communication and self-regulation), these skills are tapping into also social emotional learning which is another really large area that education systems are wanting to focus on.
DR: So, let's get into more detail on those, then. Let's look at communication first. Can you give me a bit of an overview of what communication actually is in this context?
CS: Yeah, in this context – and bear in mind, the context we're discussing is in the classroom in the context of learning and in the context of the pursuit of goals, of achieving something for the purpose of output. So, communication is really thinking about effectively and clearly transmitting information. It might be to exchange ideas or convey some meaning. Ideally, we would be looking at communication in order to achieve common understanding about information between people.
DR: And so why was it important to develop a framework for communication? I mean, you gave some very valid points just there, but can you expand on that at all?
CS: Of course. Communication is vital to learners’ success in school, because it really allows them to develop a capacity to articulate their ideas, form not just explanations of their own ideas, but actually to ask relevant questions. They might learn how to adjust their communication style based on to whom they're communicating to. But, of course, in school we know it's important for them to listen to instructions and respond appropriately and that's all a part of our communication framework. Where students are able to demonstrate these communication skills, they are actually doing better academically and emotionally, in terms of their emotional intelligence as well. So, 2 really good outcomes from being able to build those communication skills.
Some of the literature also suggests that we can build better social relationships if we communicate better, which sounds very logical, but the outcome of that of course then is that we have greater wellbeing and greater engagement in our social learning and capabilities. In that sense communication’s really vital not just in school, but beyond in terms of building long-term interpersonal relationships. So, being able to communicate with others improves our ability to cope with real world problems and hurdles, it reduces our levels of stress and of course enhances our levels of wellbeing as I mentioned.
And it's perhaps not surprising, then, that communication, when we look at the research, is one of the most highly sought after skills in the workforce. In national surveys here in Australia of employers, both oral and written communication is consistently ranked as the most important skill. And in a recent global survey as well, we had saw that communication was found to be the single most important skill for both employers and the professional development demands from employees.
DR: And so, let's discuss the framework itself in a bit more detail now. There are 3 strands to the framework, and they present the expected observed behaviours of proficient communicators. Can you take me through them in a bit of detail and also perhaps give a couple of examples for the teaching and assessing of those in the classroom?
CS: Sure. So, our framework breaks communication down into 3 strands and we start with the first strand which is strategising. So, this is actually really allowing, as learners, to understand the context of what it is that we're trying to communicate and the context in which we're going to communicate. So, we've kept the framework fairly generic so that it can apply to all types of communication, but in all types of communication we need to understand what the context in which we're working, and of course then tailoring that context to which we're working to be relevant.
We also want to consider our own capacity in how we're going to communicate. So, if we're going into a situation which we're having to communicate, we want to reflect on what we actually can already do, what we're able to communicate effectively and maybe what we would struggle with or what we don't have the capacity to do. And if we bring in some of that self-awareness or self-knowledge we can actually communicate more effectively.
And regardless of what context we actually communicate in, we need to select the appropriate mode and the appropriate media. So, we need to think about to whom we’re communicating – modes are things like visually or orally or spatially communicating, and medium is things like whether we're presenting face-to-face or in print and, of course, more and more in education and in life, were communicating through online platforms (Zoom, Teams and so forth) so we need to make sure that that's appropriate for the type of communication. So, that first strand of strategising is really thinking: ‘OK, if we can align the context and the mode and media and reflect on our own capacity, we're really setting ourselves up for a strong foundation of how we communicate going forward.’
The second strand is the actual conveying. So, that’s us composing and actually delivering the messages or information. So, this might be one of the most obvious things, but we have to determine what the content is. So, what is the actual message or the information that we're trying to convey? We don't always necessarily have a clear, conscious set of thoughts around this, necessarily. It may be implied, or it may be sort of more subconscious, but we found that when you have a sort of clearer, more strategised approach to working out what are your key messages, then it can be much more effective and delivering it.
Structuring the content as well. Regardless of the context in which you are presenting, how you actually structure – make a decision around sequencing the information or arranging the information – can vary and could help with the delivery and the reception of that information. So, different groups of people might prefer to learn in different ways or hear information in different ways and process that and it's really good to be able to be flexible. And lastly within this strand, thinking about the actual delivery of that information in non-verbal or ‘paralanguage’ context. This could be making eye contact, posture, facial expressions (so, we can communicate through our body language) and then more verbal capacities, you know, the tone, the pitch, the pace. Making sure that how we actually communicate is really, really effective.
And then lastly, in our third strand, we reflect more on the receiving. So, if we go back to the very start when we were talking about the need for communication or the purpose of the communication, for us, a large part of that is whether the information has been appropriately and effectively received by someone or a group of people. We're not just kind of putting information out there, but we're interested in how it's received, and we use that reception to kind of judge how effective we are as communicators. So, there's a reciprocal level that we take into consideration as well. So, we not only need to actively attend to other people's communications (and that might be, again, visual or verbal cues around how well they understand how we’re conveying the information) but we also want to allow for the clarification of understanding to ensure that the information has been interpreted correctly.
After the break, Dr Claire Scoular will take us through the self-regulation framework. But first, here’s a quick message from our sponsor.
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DR: So, let's turn to self-regulation now. Let's go through the same kind of forms of questioning. Can you describe what self-regulation is in this context?
CS: Of course. So, self-regulation is really about taking responsibility for our own learning. And if we expand that beyond the classroom, taking responsibility for ourselves. But the context in which we think about self-regulation really is in the context of learning for this particular framework. And we kind of, in self-regulation, cycle through 3 phases: we tend to plan, then we monitor our actions, and then we evaluate how effective those actions have been. But our framework kind of breaks those phases down into cognitive regulation, behavioural regulation and emotional regulation.
DR: And so why was it important to develop a framework for self-regulation?
CS: So, self-regulation is another skill that is in high demand from employers, but it also features very heavily in many education systems as a priority. And there has been increased importance of explicitly teaching self-regulation as a way of integrating social emotional skills into the curriculum. Of course, self-regulation is important for how we take responsibility for ourselves in the classroom, but learning that in that environment will also support us to act, behave, express ourselves more appropriately in life beyond schooling as well.
We know in this modern world we have no shortage of stimuli, and the affordance of technology ensures that we're consistently presented with an abundance of information daily, if not on an hourly basis. We're continually receiving all of this information. And how we actually manage that influx of information, how we deal with what we attend to, how we can manage filtering of that information, can stem from strong self-regulation skills so that we don't become overwhelmed, or we stay on task, and we persevere with the key tasks that we need to engage with, and we don't get distracted.
So, you know, most education systems, the key goal is to produce world-ready citizens and providing support for students to develop that self-regulation helps them to navigate distractions, attend to important information and really persevere on tasks despite there being, maybe even competing interests potentially along the way.
We’re seeing quite a large impact of self-regulation skills on other outcomes. So, it might sound obvious, but, you know, if you've got really good self-regulation skills then you're more likely to achieve your longer-term goals, you're more likely to be resilient (that I mentioned before) and able to adapt to hurdles and challenges that come your way. And that, therefore, you know, this applies in school when we're learning. We will always come across sort of hurdles and problems, but this will also apply to students beyond schooling in their personal and professional success.
DR: So, finally then, let's take a look at the strands for this framework as well. Can you take me through these 3 strands and also perhaps give some examples for their teaching and assessing of these in the classroom?
CS: Sure, so, I think I mentioned before we’ve got the 3 strands again (just coincidental). The first strand is about cognitive regulation. So, this is really understanding our own mental processes that help learners kind of look at what a particular task that we're faced with completing or problem that we're faced with completing, what that demands of us, what that requires. It helps us determine an approach to the task, so that could be setting some goals, planning out a plan of attack around it and employing appropriate learning strategies. So, there's a lot of different strategies outlined in the literature. Not all strategies are going to be appropriate for all tasks and for all problems, so having a good sense of how we approach things is really beneficial.
Part of this first strand too, beyond setting goals, planning, understanding what strategies will work best, is also having some of that self-reflection. So, understanding our own capacity, our own skills and knowledge that will be beneficial to undertake this learning task that we're about to embark on. So, this brings in quite a bit of metacognition which is a skill that goes across, really, all of our essential skills – which basically is about knowing what we know and having a good understanding of ourselves. And if we have a good understanding of our own knowledge, awareness, and skills, then we're able to apply ourselves more appropriately.
The second strand is about behavioural regulating. So, we’ve moved away from those mental processes we're now thinking about more perhaps the physical regulation, the management of our own actions and behaviours that allow us to effectively achieve any learning goals that we've set. So, in that sense we have to manage the resources that we have. This could be the learning environment in which we work – making sure it's conducive to what we need, you know, whether it's quiet space, or enough actual space to conduct what we need to do. But obviously a lot of the time we have competing tasks, competing demands for our time, so making sure that we not only complete tasks efficiently and effectively, but we look at prioritisation, we can meet deadlines and so forth.
So, resource management is a big one in this strand. That can also actually extend to social resources which brings the social emotional aspect too. Often knowing to whom we can ask questions; the people that will actually be able to help us. You know, in a classroom environment it's going to be more helpful probably to ask your teacher to clarify the instructions than ask a peer. So, just being skilfully aware about who our resources are socially in that respect.
Monitoring progress is a big part of this second skill, so we're actually actively monitoring how well we're moving through our learning activities or tasks. Ensuring that, you know, we're reflecting on whether we're actually making progress or we're not. Are we procrastinating too much or have we deviated too much from our goals that we set as part of those cognitive regulations?
And finally, adaptive help seeking. So, we want to support students to be able to seek help appropriately. That's – you know, if we think about maladaptive help-seeking, we might see students who ask for help too quickly. They haven't necessarily read the instructions themselves, they haven't independently sought the answers, and they can too readily ask the teacher for help, ask for additional resources, ask questions. And sometimes as an educator we can tell who those students are. What we want to then encourage them to do is to do a bit more independent thinking first and seek the clarification a bit later on once they've put their thoughts together, once they've had a chance to think about where it is that they really need that help. And quite often when we built the capacity for students to do that, we find that they don't often come back to us at all with questions. They've actually built the resilience and the foundation for themselves to do that learning themselves.
And then lastly, we have our emotional regulating, which kind of rounds out our social emotional aspects. And this is about identifying our own emotions and whether they’re appropriate in the learning context. So, we, naturally in life, are going to experience a range of positive and negative emotions and whether they’re positive or negative, those emotions can be maladaptive in learning environments when they’re too extreme, perhaps, or they're not appropriate. So, we're all going to have bad days or bad experiences. Unfortunately for some children they come from homes that can be quite challenging and it's really difficult to leave that at the door and suddenly turn our brains on and be receptive to learning. It's difficult for many of us as adults to do that. So, we want to build some of that resilience in our students early, allowing them to be able to manage their emotions effectively in order for them to move through their learning as effectively as possible. So, we don't want students to feel like we need to get rid of any emotions, but it's about managing those emotions effectively. So, reflecting on those, being mindful of those, are some really great strategies that we work with students on developing.
And exercising restraint. So, this is a bit distinctive from just managing our emotions, but this is, you know, about managing our impulses. And again, doesn't limit to students, you know, how even as adults do we stay on task do we stop ourselves from just running off and immediately rewarding ourselves for every small thing that we do throughout the day? We have to develop that perseverance in students as well. So, rewarding small goals can be really beneficial, but ensuring that students stay on track, exercising that restraint, thinking about longer-term goals and achieving those, rather than just focusing on short-term pleasures or impulses. And we found that students who demonstrate this higher level of perseverance and restraint achieve higher grades. It's actually a better predictor of success than IQ and even talent, so being able to manage those impulses and persevere. So, that all comes under self-regulation.
And then finally just managing our self-efficacy. So, how well we believe in ourselves and believe in what we can do. Having that growth mindset that we often hear about is really beneficial for learners. And that plays into motivation as well. So, ensuring that we stay motivated. And we use motivation to keep us on track and to keep us engaged, but we can use motivation also to manage our wellbeing as well. So, we can actually manage stress, for example, in a way as a motivator rather than as a deterrent. So, we can work with students to develop those skills and strategies to help them manage their emotions in the classroom.
DR: Well, thank you, Claire. What a fantastic explanation of all those different elements that come into those 2 skills. That was really, really insightful. Before we wrap up for this podcast episode, was there anything else that you wanted to mention?
CS: So, hopefully the definitions of these skills – you know, focusing on the aspects rather than the whole skill, the concept is that learners should be able to engage in these skills more, again through that self-awareness, that metacognition. But it breaks it down to more manageable, bite-size chunks for teachers. So, instead of walking into the classroom and saying: ‘OK, today we're going to learn about critical thinking’, it may be more: ‘today, we're going to learn to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information’. So, we have a more clear, targeted agenda and aspect to work on.
And the other real intended benefit of these frameworks is that we're using a consistent terminology. So, all teachers within a school across learning areas can use these 5 skill frameworks. That means they're using the same language, not only to describe the skills, but obviously to embed them, teach them, assess them and monitor them through the learning progressions, the levels of proficiency in our documents. Of course, beyond that, it’d be wonderful for there to be consistency across schools, across systems and so forth – more of an aspiration, but if we're all talking the same language it makes a lot easier to have a sustainable and effective approach moving forward.
The last thing I just want to highlight was the importance of those levels of skill development, those progressions. Because it is really beneficial to have a sense of how well our students are demonstrating these skills, but to us, the most important thing is that we're actually nurturing them and developing them over time. And so those progressions really allow us to, not only identify where students are at, at the moment, but identify how they're progressing and moving up, ideally, on those progressions. And of course, they are a pedagogical tool in the sense that we can look at those levels higher up, to identify what we can actually further do with students to then increase their capacity moving forward.
DR: Well, thank you again, Claire, for joining us on the Teacher podcast. Thanks for taking the time.
CS: Thanks for having me.
That’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. You can head to our website, teachermagazine.com to access more content on the essential skills. Don’t forget to follow our podcast channel wherever you get your podcasts from, so you can be notified of any new episodes as soon as they land. It also helps more people like you to find our podcast and it’s a really big help for our team.
You’ve been listening to a podcast from Teacher, supported by Sora, the student reading platform that provides access to curriculum and popular digital books for schools. Learn more at discoverSora.com/global.
References and related reading:
Earp, J. & Scoular, C. (2025, February 24). Expert Q&A: 5 essential skills for learning. Teacher magazine. https://www.teachermagazine.com/au_en/articles/expert-q-a-5-essential-skills-for-learning
Heard, J., Ramalingam, D., Scoular, C., Anderson, P., & Duckworth, D. (2025). Creative thinking: Skill development framework. 2nd edition. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-753-3
Heard, J., Scoular, C., Duckworth, D., Ramalingam, D., & Teo, I. (2025). Critical thinking: Skill development framework. 2nd edition. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-752-6
Scoular, C. (2024, July 1). Teaching creative thinking: 6 considerations for practice. Teacher magazine. https://www.teachermagazine.com/au_en/articles/teaching-creative-thinking-6-considerations-for-practice
Scoular, C. (2020, July 27). Resources: Teaching tools and skills frameworks for 21st Century learners. Teacher magazine. https://www.teachermagazine.com/au_en/articles/resources-teaching-tools-and-skills-frameworks-for-21st-century-learners
Scoular, C., Duckworth, D., Heard, J., & Ramalingam, D. (2025). Collaboration: Skill development framework. 2nd edition. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-751-9
Scoular, C. (2025). Essential skills for learning. Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-748-9
Scoular, C., Heard, J., & Wardell, A. (2025). Communication: Skill development framework. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-749-6
Scoular, C., Teo, I., Heard, J., & Wardell, A. (2025). Self-regulation: Skill development framework. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-750-2
Dr Claire Scoular says one intended benefit of these frameworks is the use of consistent terminology. What is your definition of Communication and Self-regulation, within the context of your school setting? If you were to ask a colleague for their definitions, would they match? If not, where are the differences? How do your definitions differ to those offered in these frameworks?
