ReDesign Updates 9 Essential Competencies for K-12 Students

• By Rhea Kelly
• 03/03/25

ReDesign, a provider of support and resources for competency-based education, has updated its Future9 Competency Framework to reflect the essential skills K-12 students need today to thrive in their education and workforce journeys. The free resource includes an array of guides and activities to support implementation of the competencies in the classroom.

Development of the framework was informed by an extensive external review process, in which students, educators, researchers, leaders, and content experts provided feedback on each competency's scope and content. ReDesign provided a summary of its research and survey results in a report openly available here.

The framework's nine core competencies are:

• Build Community: I can nurture my relationships and connections with others to build and sustain diverse and inclusive communities.
• Design Solutions: I can identify challenges and opportunities in the world around me and design ways to address them.
• Engage in Inquiry: I can pursue answers to meaningful questions through primary and secondary research.
• Express Ideas: I can develop and communicate my ideas with purpose and clarity.
• Learn with Purpose: I can lead my own learning while collaborating with and contributing to the learning of others.
• Navigate Conflict: I can process my feelings, attune to others, and contribute to constructive resolution.
• Read the World: I can engage with diverse ideas and a range of media to understand and critically examine the world around me.
• Reason Quantitatively: I can reason through, represent, and communicate mathematical problems and approaches to solving them.
• Sustain Well-Being: I can develop practices to support my own well-being, embrace difference, and foster cultural awareness and sensitivity.

Each competency is broken up into individual skills for future readiness, each with a developmental progression of learning stages, from "early learner" to "future-ready." The learning stages include measurable indicators of the skill in action, "to support learning, assessment, feedback, reflection, progress monitoring, and growth measurement."

"Across international and national approaches to teaching and learning, there is increasingly broad agreement on what skills young people should be building in order to be equipped to create thriving lives, now and in the future," said Antonia Rudenstine, executive director of reDesign, in a statement. "If your school or district has created a Learner Profile — or you are already using a framework like the Durable Skills or 21st Century Skills — the Future9's K-12 observable, developmental, skill progressions provide an actionable bridge as you move to classroom implementation."

For more information, visit the reDesign site.