The Something Other: Personal Competencies for Learning and Life

Parents seek for their children "something other" than what they usually expect them to acquire through the regular school program, and they turn to extracurricular activities and out-of-school experiences to find it. Teachers know that each student brings to a learning task a "something other"--certain attributes that affect how the student responds to the challenge. In this paper, the "something other" is the constellation of four personal competencies--cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and social/emotional--and the learning habits that flow from them.