These are very exciting and interesting times for the field of education in general and those who are exploring competency as a core component of more effective approaches to education.  Notice I did not call it a “new” approach.

On the one hand, competency has been around as a concept for as long as human beings have been around.  Our own “competence” in terms of managing and manipulating the world around us is one reason we are a dominant species.  (Give thanks to meteors and the extinction of dinosaurs as another.)  Some would say we are approaching “incompetence” in terms of our survival skills on account of how we manage conflict, over use of natural resources and how we produce mind numbingly bad television shows.  However, we are pretty good at many things and our place in the world is evidence of this. (more…)

The Endurance from Wikipedia

If competence is the core business of schooling then why does it seem like a new idea every time it emerges as a topic of reform, debate and consideration?

Part of the answer could be linked to the most important aspect of any venture – its core purpose.  The core purpose of education has long been defined by a contradictory set of principles: one explicit and noble, the other tacit and more base, but seemingly (or at least historically) practical.

The explicit and noble espoused purpose of public education is often paraphrased as being about opportunity and equity – the chance on a level playing field of making more of oneself – the chance to beat the odds of upbringing and class.  Some believe you are given your lot and you have to wait for the next time around to get a better one.  In our society there is a presumption that given certain opportunities people can exceed these pre-determinations and better themselves, their families and thus contribute to the progress of society as whole.  This is a good set of principles and it has served some leading societies well – including a good part of almost every generation of Americans. (more…)

Ready for the exam

Anyone deep in competency education is probably getting a lot of calls from around the country asking for briefings, and advice about how to move forward. So we are going to start a new category of posts aimed at making sense of competency education. We’ll just call it Understanding Competency Education, and it is designed for people who are just diving into the topic. Quite honestly, it is probably for all of us as our understanding deepens.

The first topic is something we are asked about frequently: What is the relationship between competency education and “end-of-course” exams? Does using an end-of-course exam mean that you have implemented competency education? Do you have to use end-of-course exams in a competency education system?

Let’s take this step by step. We are all working together to sharpen our thinking, so please jump in if you think I don’t have this quite right. (more…)

There is a fairly settled body of research that links the quality of the teacher to the success of the student.  As we move into a more personalized, competency based and increasingly decentralized learning environment how do we build the competencies of adults to better support the learning of students?

For the past year, I have been a student in Harvard University’s new doctoral program in Educational Leadership (Ed.L.D).   The first year involves an intense focus on one’s own “adult development” which I skeptically approached with somewhat of a “been there done that” attitude.  As a leader of a fairly large non-profit, I had my share of 360 evaluations, professional development seminars, executive coaching etc.  I was secure, almost cocky, in my understanding of my strengths and weaknesses and how they did or didn’t support the outcomes that I was hoping for in my own organization and more importantly for the almost 22,000 youth under our watch each year.  As a leader in the sector, I had grown fatigued from all of the efforts that I made to tie the “professional development” that I was being given to the goals that I was striving to achieve.  It felt like work and I had to WORK to feel personally or professionally “developed.”

But low and behold this time the journey was different and something funny happened on the way to “adult development.”  For the first time in years, I reconnected with myself as an adult learner.  Not the kind of adult learner who was trying to learn something to either be in compliance or to improve the various metrics on which I was being evaluated, but as an adult learner who had my own interests and passions, anxieties and questions.  I was asked to actually be curious, to better understand myself, and to pursue new ways of learning that often stretched me beyond my comfort zone and towards my learning edge.

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Cecilia Le, Senior Project Manager, Jobs for the Future

What would an education system look like that responded to each student’s needs and interests – and based their progression on their individual mastery of vital skills and competencies? And what would it take to get there? These were some of the big questions at Jobs for the Future’s (JFF) Students at the Center symposium. A diverse audience of 150 leading practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and funders came together to discuss the findings of nine syntheses of research on student-centered approaches to learning, funded by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation (NMEF). For two days, we approached education from the perspective of the learner, grappling with how to harness old wisdoms and new technologies to make teaching and learning work for each and every student. We heard more than a few people comment that the Common Core State Standards are providing us a precious but narrow window in which people are paying close attention to what actually happens in the classroom. So how can we capitalize on this moment? (more…)

Okay, Maine Rocks!

On the Maine Department of Education’s channel you can find the six recently released videos on learner-centered education or customized learning.They are really wonderful and could be great tools for discussion with parents, teachers, school boards and students.

If you could build a student information system for a Competency Based Learning System what would it be able to do?  I have been thinking a lot about this lately and have been wondering if there is something out there that will do everything we need.  Or does something new need to be built? Below I outline everything that I would like to see in a student information system.

1) Log progress and mastery of standards, benchmarks, and competencies.

I say progress because it would be great to see what standards, benchmarks, and competencies a learner is currently working on as well as how long they have been working on them.  It would be nice to see a percentage bar notifying what percentage of the standards or benchmarks have been completed for a competency or course.  With the inclusion of a percentage bar it would make it much easier to see when a student is struggling because they have stopped making progress.  It would also be nice to have a time stamp indicating when they started working on those specific standards, benchmarks, and/or competencies. (more…)

Ask a student about how they learn. You will get many different responses as every child is different.  From a high school student, “I want to have a choice in studying what interests me.” Other kids say, “I want to get extra help from teachers when I need it and move ahead when I am ready, not wait for everyone else.” How  do we give them different pathways to learn?

From a student in Colorado: “What if school could be more like video games? You advance when you master a level, then move to the next level.”

This last student was in a competency-based learning environment – where students can move on when they demonstrate mastery and move at their own pace.  This is how the student communicated “competency education” to adults, “what if school could be more like video games?” (more…)

Student-centered instruction must be built around the feedback and assessments that are given to students while they are learning. Unfortunately, almost all of us have been raised in learning models that focus exclusively on what students dowhile they are in the classroom, and that fail to incorporate effective feedback and measurement. We’ve experienced this model as students, and in our teacher training.

Polestar symbol

The vast majority of teachers spent years being taught how to write lessons. Single content lessons were at the heart of what we were expected to produce for most of our education courses. Assessments and tests, that were to be delivered at the end of a unit of study, were usually included in our lesson plans, but learning to write lessons was the core of our training. The result is that we are comfortable with lessons. We even feel a sense of ownership and personal identity about the lessons that we write. Our misplaced attention means that we don’t learn how to develop routine, formative assessments that provide students with feedback, and that provide us with the information we need to provide targeted instruction. Instead, we stick with what’s comfortable, and our colleagues, who have been trained just like us, reinforce the focus on lesson plans. (more…)