This is my best creative hat

Every day there seems to be one more webinar on grading. This is great that more information supporting competency education is becoming available. However, my concern is that they are not contextualized within a school culture or school-wide reform.

Earlier this week in a conversation, Rich DeLorenzo pointed that if one teacher uses proficiency-based grading and the teacher down the hall doesn’t, students, and possibly parents as well, are going to feel a real tension. One of the reasons is that in proficiency-based models we are willing to have the hard conversations “I know Bobby is in 4^th grade but he still is reading at 2^nd grade level”.  That conversation isn’t likely to come up in traditional grading as long as Bobby does his homework, attends school regularly, and demonstrates “good” behavior in  class.  DeLorenzo emphasized “When we eliminate the bell curve we change the goal of education and the pedagogy.”  Is the principal ready to support both kinds of educational models — one focused on making sure that students learn and the other that student do what is expected by the teacher?

When we eliminate the bell curve we change the goal of education and the pedagogy.

Grading, as it is so deeply related to assessment, is going to be one of the big things to change in a school.  However, it needs to be part of a school-wide change.   Grading isn’t a stand-alone practice – personalized classroom management strategies, student voice and choice, adaptive instruction, and transparency are all parts of  redesigning core operations of schools.

So tune in — but put your best analytic and creative hat on while you are listening. If you want to do move foward on proficiency-based grading, ask yourself what are the other changes that are going to need to happen in your school?

Webinars on Grading Past and Present

Today — Proficiency Scales for the Common Core, Marzano Research Laboratory, May 23, 2013 | 4:00 p.m. EDT

Wednesday, May 29, 2013: League of Innovative School Webinar on Proficiency-Based Learning Simplified: Best Practices in Grading and Reporting  | 3:00–4:00 PM EST. Register here.

Thursday, May 30, 2013: Standards-Based Grading and Assessing Student Mastery of Content. REL-NEI’s Northeast College and Career Readiness Research Alliance hosts this Bridge Webinar with Dr. Thomas Guskey to explore emergent research on proficiency-based leraning and graduation requirements, a new approach to assessing student learning and reporting on student progress.|  12:30–2:00 p.m. ET Register here.

As you may know, ACHIEVE has established a Competency-Based Pathways Work Group to examine how competency education may impact assessment, accountability, graduation requirements, and other state policies.  Working with leaders from ten states, Cory Curl and Anne Bowles are providing tools, research, and analysis so that state policymakers can assess opportunities to support competency education.

Cory and Anne have just completed site visits to Maine, Kentucky, Illinois, and Colorado, and shared their findings during a webinar (inspiring me to think about sharing insights that way rather than the blog….Hmm, what do you think?) Given that others had visited as well, we shared our insights. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Danville, Kentucky has been getting attention for their project-based learning  (See the show on PBS.) They see the ACT as a meaningful metric for determining college and career readiness and are moving toward improving ACT scores based on the college ready benchmarks.  Their website explains, “Students are considered to be college-ready by meeting specific benchmark scores for each content-area tested by the ACT. EXPLORE and PLAN also provide benchmark scores that tell us whether or not students are on track to meet those important ACT readiness scores. Scores from these assessments are also included in a school and district’s overall score.” They are now in the process of beginning to weave competency education into their work, keeping a strong focus on equity. (more…)

If you haven’t taken the time to watch the videos at Maine’s Center for Best Practice, I hope you will in the near future.  I don’t think there is anything better to understand the spirit of competency-based approaches. They’ve just released two new ones (see below).

Maine, as you probably know, has started with the goal of creating a personalized, proficiency-based system.  The P2 approach is much more powerful than proficiency-based as a stand-alone approach. The personalization opens the gate to students having voice, choice, and responsibility in their education. Although learner-centered approaches are a set of very precise practices it looks and feels like magic dust sometimes. Just take a look at the faces of the kids in History Day.

If you want to learn more about Maine’s work, join us on Friday for the webinar on state policy with Don Siviski, Maine’s Superintendent of Instruction, and Jason Glass, Iowa’s Education Director. Register Here

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History Day: Integrated Performance Assessment features Bruce M. Whittier Middle School and their annual History Day, celebration.  This event allows students to demonstrate proficiency in ELA and Social Studies standards, as well as the Guiding Principals.  Inviting the public in and having 30 members of the public serve as judges of the presentation brings a level of authenticity to the assessment that motivated many students.

The video can be found here:  http://maine.gov/doe/cbp/videos/rsu16b.html (more…)

As it has done in the past years, the iNACOL Conference will have an entire strand dedicated to competency education.  This year we would like to ask you for your guidance in identifying the most meaningful topics for workshops at the iNACOL Symposium’s competency-based education strand.

The iNACOL Virtual School Symposium name is changed – it is now the “iNACOL Blended and Online Learning Symposium” (renamed for October 2013) in Orlando, Florida at the Swan & Dolphin Resort:
·         Sunday, October 27: Pre-conference Session Workshop on Competency Education
·         Monday, October 28 – Wednesday, October 30: Main iNACOL Conference Plenaries and 10+ Break-out Sessions on Competency Education

We’d love to hear your insights to the following questions. Just use the comment section below (or you can email me):

1. For beginner sessions, what are the 5-7 most important topics that need to be covered for people who are new to competency education?
2. Given the state of competency-based education today, what are the most important topics for people that have already been working in competency education (the top 5-7 “Must Have” session topics that need to be covered)?
3. What are the five most important “competencies” that someone working to transform their state, district or school needs to have?
4. If you have gone to iNACOL VSS sessions on competency education before, what parts do you think we should definitely keep? What was effective?

Remember, we are thinking about competency education broadly, not solely in the context of online and blended learning!

Gary Chapin just forwarded me the announcement that the Maine Department of Education’s Center for Best Practice has compiled a Glossary of Proficiency-Based Education in Maine to help educators navigate the shift toward proficiency-based/learner-centered education. The lack of consistency in language is one of the major problems that educators face when implementing such a system. One district’s “standards-based” may be another district’s “proficiency-based” or “competency-based” or “standards-referenced.” One district’s “standard” may be another district’s “performance indicator” or “learning target.”

This glossary was designed specifically for inclusion in the Technical Assistance Plan required by LD 1422. It is not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive. It is intended to be useful to districts working to implement the proficiency-based diploma.

If your state is creating common language or glossary could you let us know at CompetencyWorks!

In the last three days, in three different meetings, I’ve been asked to summarize what I’m learning about competency education. In yesterday’s meeting with RTT districts I shared the following list of things people starting off in competency education need to think about earlier than later in their process…i.e. this is a place where implementation can go wrong.

1) Start With The Students:  We think a lot about college and career readiness, Common Core curriculum, and what we expect students to know and do.  If we want to get students there then we need to start with where they are.  This means when students enter your school, doing assessments to understand where they are on their learning progression and what gaps they have is essential. Teachers will need to do pre-assessments when students enter their classroom to understand how they are going to need to differentiate, group/regroup.

This is one of the game-changing dynamics of competency education. At today’s meeting with Race to the Top districts this kicked off a huge conversation. Once you do this we can no longer ignore the fact that some students are 2,3, 4 or 5 years behind or don’t have the prerequisite skills they need to do the grade-level curriculum.  Scott Benson, Gates Foundation referred to this as the “design and accountability challenge of our time “.  I call it the Elephant that we’ve been successfully ignoring for decades.  There are many ways of trying to accelerate learning…but we haven’t been systematic in researching this so that districts and schools can be sure they are deploying resources most cost-effectively. (more…)

District and school leaders constantly tell me that there is very little in federal and state policy that prevents them from implementing the most important elements of competency education…even in a policy context dominated by the Carnegie unit. They also emphasize that if state policy was more aligned with competency education and student learning they would be able to do so much more and see much greater achievement gains.

We’ve tried to capture what states are doing in aligning the policy infrastructure in the just-released Necessary for Success: Building Mastery of World-Class Skills – A State Policymakers Guide to Competency Education.

One of the most interesting a-ha’s in researching, interviewing and writing the paper was that when we are talking about policy its not just passing major legislation. It’s as much a process of creating a culture of learning from the top-down and the ground up, opening up innovation space, providing support systems for educators to learn from each other and apply their learning in their districts and schools, and then reworking critical policies such as graduation requirements (competencies, not time-based credits), flexibility in the use of time (years to graduation, yearly and daily school schedules, embedded supports), and redesigning assessments and accountability systems to meet the needs of students, not policymakers.

We are working to enhance the wiki so that it is easy for advocates and policymakers to access examples and strategies being used by states. We would deeply appreciate it if you could send us any information about how your state is aligning policies so that we can make sure that we have the best information available.  Yep, that’s crowd-sourcing for educational transformation.  It will make a huge difference.

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit Lindsay Unified for a full day tour of their performance-based system.  Delightfully it started out with a presentation from students that talked about what a performance-based system meant to them and their education. One of the strongest themes was transparency — transparency in the curriculum, in what proficiency looked like, how students were progressing, which courses were available to them… The essential ingredient for this systemic transparency was the information system Educate.  We know competency education can be implemented without an information system. However, we can’t take advantage of all the data generated without one. It’s the information systems that are going to allow us to move away from top-down accountability systems to dynamic continuous systems.

CompetencyWorks released a new paper today  Re-Engineering Information Technology: Design Considerations for Competency Education by Liz Glowa with an introductory essay from Susan Patrick. It’s chock full of information — so you’ll want to pick and choose the sections that are most important to your work. We hope you can join us at the follow-up webinar planned for February 28th 3-4 ET on the topic. You can register here.

If you are new to competency education you may want to sign up for the webinar on February 26 at 3:30 ET as well to hear from the leadership team from Maine’s Gray-New Gloucester district on their journey to whole district reform. You can register here.

Supt. Beasley

I’ve never seen anything like this in all my days of visiting schools and districts — whole district reform designed around a shared vision, similar practices, and such a high degree of transparency.  Of course we have a growing number of competency-based schools generating innovative practices, but my visits to Maine and Lindsay California have convinced me that the power of competency education is through aligning all the schools!

You’ll have a chance to hear about how a district is making this shift at our next webinar on February 26th at  3:30 – 4:30. Register here.

Bruce Beasley, Superintendent and  Karen Caprio, Director of Curriculum and Staff Development from MSAD 15 or Gray-New Gloucester, Maine will be joining us to take us through their journey.

·      Why did MSAD15 decided to embrace a proficiency-based model?

·      What was the pre-implementation process?

·      What is the overall structure or approach you use in proficiency-based education?

·      What were the major issues that developed when you first began to implement proficiency-based education?

·      How does your approach vary across elementary, middle and high school?

·      What were the major issues that developed in implementation in high school?

If you want to do some background reading before the webinar, MSAD 15 is highlighted in Making Mastery Work: A Close-Up View of Competency Education .

Interested in this topic? Join us for the Pacing and Personalization webinar on February 12^th, 3:30 ET. Register here.

From wikipedia

There is no doubt we are creating new language to describe the next generation education system. It’s emerging quickly and is going to become one of the topics that I write about.

I stumbled upon the concept of tempo in Sal Khan’s book The One World Schoolroom.  It’s a beautiful and magical word to describe the rhythm of a student’s learning and how it changes.  I doubt we’ll end up using musical language to explain the tempo of student learning such as larghissimo , andante, presto, allegro and agitato (note how those last two both indicate emotion and tempo).  I do think we will soon be creating language that helps us discern how a student is engaging in their studies:

• Slow pace with many distractions from the traumas in their life (remember how hard it was to work during 9/11? Imagine what it feels like to be a student trying to study in a school in lockdown or your mother ill with cancer
• Slow pace, challenged by the material and committed to fully mastering it.
• Teacher pace of moderate pace with deep dives to explore a topic
• Rapid pace in reviewing content they have covered before
• Rapid progress at level three, moving onto advanced material without exceeding expectations for proficiency
• Rapid pace constantly striving to exceed expectations

Or perhaps we will find an entirely different way of thinking about the tempo of student learning?

I saw a glimpse of how pacing is going to become a common way of monitoring effectiveness during my visit to Barack Obama Charter School (more to come about this and other school visits in California this week), I had the opportunity to look at how their information system, Educate, offers principals, district staff…and yes, even state officials, the opportunity to keep an eye on pacing. (more…)