Key Educational Competencies (KEC)

What You Get is Who You Become

Instead of making lists of schools, we help students develop skills.

What we call Key Educational Competencies are no more or less than the skills to navigate the information and communication channels of your world.

An Outline of Key Educational Competencies

Cognitive Capabilities: Combating Cluelessness

Analytical Skills: This Is What?

• accessing information
• evaluating evidence

Interpretive Skills: So What If It Is?

• comparing elements
• generalizing to larger units

Interpersonal Capabilities: Playing Well With Others

Communication Skills: Signs of Intelligent Life

• verbalizing: listening & speaking
• writing

Adaptation Skills: Where’s This Going?

• collaborating
• initiating

Three Advantages of Key Educational Competencies

(With Asides on Snowboarding and Falling in Love)

1. UNBOUNDED: You can't have too much.
   KECs have no end point. As with the challenging activities of snowboarding or getting to know better the person with whom you’re falling in love, the moment never arrives when you can shout, “That's it–the end!” KECs continue developing over the life course.
2. ENDURING: Your key educational competencies come without an expiration date.
   Tehnological upgrades make snowboards more maneuverable. The experience of being in love changes over time:  it's not the same in the first year as in the fiftieth. Contrastingly, although the means through which we learn and communicate will change, the human need to grow and exchange ideas endures. 
3. INTEGRAL: No matter where you go, there they are.
   You may arrive at a destination only to discover that your snowboard has become lost luggage. You may be compelled to endure a season apart from your beloved. However, KECs are part of who you are in the years before, during and after college. The abilities to comprehend and to communicate are integral to your sense of self: helping you understand the world and helping the world understand you.

   An Individualized Approach to Enhancing Key Educational Competencies

At Becker Academic, LLC, we do not use packaged assessment tools to measure the KECs of our student-clients. We do not have ready-made modules into which we insert student parameters. We do not offer one-size-fits-all advice.

We work intensively with our student-clients, their parents, and, when appropriate with other education professionals, to strengthen individual cognitive and interpersonal competencies throughout the process of college selection.

We promote good organizational habits and teach executive skills.  We copy edit term papers; we stay abreast of high school assignments and deadlines. We laugh at the wicked humor in student-composed villanelles; we marvel at the elegance of student-designed chemistry labs.

We model practices for interacting with admission officers, and we practice college admission interviews.  We always enhance computer literacy; we may explain dominant American customs or the challenges of cross-cultural encounters. 

We carefully prepare our students for social situations during campus visits, and we exercise our sociological imaginations in anticipating the adventures of college life. We never do exactly the same thing twice, for the simple reason that no two teens are alike.