This post originally appeared at Next Generation Learning Challenges on August 27, 2019.

How to create authentic Project-Based Learning? In Oakland Unified, community partners and teachers are working together from the very beginning to design projects.

Young Whan Choi

Teachers are often asked to make sure that their project-based learning (PBL) units are authentic. In response, a teacher might decide to teach a PBL unit where students are putting Christopher Columbus on trial. Doesn’t it sound more exciting than simply learning the facts of the history? They might even ramp up the authenticity points by bringing in a judge or lawyer to preside over the trial.

This “expert audience” approach does add an element of authenticity. Teachers are going above and beyond the traditional curriculum when they bring in a community expert as an audience for student projects.

Teachers in Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), however, are exploring even deeper partnerships with the professional community as a way to ensure that PBL projects are authentic. These partnerships begin at the earliest moments of project design, well before the students set foot in the classroom. There are many inspiring examples of what might be called a “client”-driven model of PBL. San Diego Unified has been scaling these kinds of projects in their Linked Learning schools while here in the bay area, one of the most promising models is Y-PLAN—an initiative out of the Center for Cities and Schools at UC Berkeley. In Y-PLAN, students work on real problems of urban and regional planning.

A recent example from Y-PLAN occurred when students at Oakland High School in the Law and Social Justice Academy worked with an affordable housing developer. They visited the site of the proposed project and then conducted research to find out what the community would like to see in the housing development. For the final presentation, the students created proposals that they shared when the developer came to their classroom.

The key difference in this approach to authentic PBL is that the community partner engages with teachers from the beginning to shape the project. With this goal in mind, OUSD organized a “community partner engagement” day during our weeklong PBL Institute in June. Over 40 different partner organizations and individuals joined 120 middle and high school teachers on the second day of the institute.

OUSD teachers gathered at MetWest High School for the Project Based Learning Institute. (Courtesy of Greg Cluster)

Before the teachers showed up, we asked them to give us information on the PBL project they were hoping to plan during the institute and if they already had a community partner that they wanted to work with. Our planning team of seven central office leaders then invited relevant partners like public radio station KQED, Alameda County Public Health Department, Red Bay Coffee, Oakland Public Works, and the Museum of Children’s Art.

On the morning of the “community partner engagement” day, teachers prepared a project pitch composed of three slides—the final product students would create, a driving question, and a key learning outcome. In the afternoon, partners and teachers met to discuss the PBL project idea. (more…)

Aurora Institute News and Reports

• iNACOL is now the Aurora Institute, reflecting our evolution to focusing on systems change and education innovation through student-centered approaches to next-generation learning. A video and more information are here. CompetencyWorks – which was launched in 2012 with iNACOL as the lead organization – will continue as an initiative of the Aurora Institute.
• The Aurora Institute published What Is Competency-Based Education? An Updated Definition and a companion podcast. The report updates the 2011 definition in many ways, including new elements focused on equity, student agency, and different pathways. It also provides belief statements, FAQs, and resources to contextualize and deepen the definition.
• The Aurora Institute also published Aligning Education Policy with the Science of Learning and Development. We know more than ever about how students learn best, but education policy hasn’t kept pace with these advances. The report explores research and offers recommendations to align policy with what we know about student learning.

Resources

• In A Path Forward to Educational Equity, Karla Vigil and Emily Abedon of the Equity Institute share a framework they have developed and additional suggestions to guide teachers and leaders looking to become fluent in multicultural education and more culturally responsive in their practice. Also see their Culturally Responsive Walkthrough Tool.
• The Student-Centered Learning Continuum provides a rich description of the characteristics of high-quality, student-centered learning. A series of rubrics provide clear and measurable ways to assess the depth of the four key SCL tenets—that learning is personalized, competency-based, anytime/anywhere, and student-owned—in an educational setting. The research-based continuum was developed by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the RAND Corporation.

Professional Learning

• A webinar on Scaling Up Deeper Learning Approaches in Public Schools will be offered by the Learning Policy Institute and the Alliance for Excellent Education on December 11 at 2:00pm ET. Experts from the field and researchers will discuss the challenges and opportunities educators and district leaders face in expanding deeper learning. The Assessment for Learning Project will be holding a National Conference February 11-13 in San Diego with four practice-based strands on formative assessment, performance assessment, exhibitions & defense of learning, and graduate portraits. The goal is to reframe thinking about assessment and enabling conditions while grounding learning in proven practice.
• Global Online Academy is offering a new online program, “Competency-Based Learning: From Theory to Practice,” in which teachers will work with a coach to create a personalized pathway through five key shifts toward implementing competency-based learning. Other upcoming GOA courses focus on rethinking the roles of students, teachers, time, and place.
• Jane Szot of Distinctive Schools in Chicago shares her network’s Personalized Learning Innovation Fellows model that supports teachers in leading change toward personalized learning. The fellows pilot new strategies, drive efforts emerging from the network’s partnership with LEAP Innovations, and model exemplary practices in their own classrooms.

Eliot Levine is the Aurora Institute’s Research Director and leads CompetencyWorks.

This post originally appeared at the Center for Collaborative Education on November 13, 2019.

In our large, urban school district—Jefferson County Public Schools, Kentucky—we are challenging ourselves to do more than ask students to bubble in circles to “prove” what they know. We are expecting students to demonstrate and provide evidence of their abilities, skills, and dispositions. We know we are not alone. Across the world, schools are creating profiles of learners and portraits of graduates to describe the aspirations of their students. Schools are organizing exhibitions, demonstrations, presentations, and defenses of learning. Schools are planning learning experiences that are engaging and relevant, and that recognize that a person’s agency grows when their work is applied to the world.

At the more than 150 Jefferson County Public Schools, this has proven to be a worthy and large task. We have set the bar high—we want to ensure that every student, every year:

• will create multiple, high-quality, ideally interdisciplinary products or performances to add to their digital portfolio, which in JCPS we call the Backpack of Success Skills.
• will experience meaningful learning equitably no matter their ability or background.
• will be empowered to determine the evidence upon which their abilities and dispositions will be judged.

As soon as the bar was set, the challenge was obvious to us. Normally, our students did not have a wide body of evidence to include in their “Backpack of Success Skills” or to use in a presentation or defense of their learning. They had too few meaningful learning experiences to refer to when discussing their Success Skills. There wasn’t much evidence of students being the agents in their own learning, of meeting the aspirations set by the Success Skills.

The Challenges

This has raised a problem of practice for teachers all across the district: How do we design learning experiences and assessments that require and create the opportunity for students to produce evidence of learning and growth?

And a problem of practice for district leaders: How do we support teachers in this design, in ways that do not undermine the principles of agency and authenticity that we know under-gird all constructivist approaches to teaching and learning, including this newest iteration – deeper learning.

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This post originally appeared at the Mastery Collaborative on June 11, 2019.

Christy works with a student at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria, NYC.

How can high-stakes testing “live” in a setting that also uses mastery-based grading? Project-based learning? Culturally responsive practices and content? Too often, innovative school design is thought of as difficult or impossible to implement amidst heavy testing requirements. But success on standardized exams is not incompatible with mastery-based grading and project-based learning. In fact, I have seen in my fifteen years in education how these two innovative approaches facilitate a wide range of success at schools.

I often hear from and read about practitioners who worry about tests, especially high-stakes tests. It is not their fault. As practitioners, we receive mixed messages with one message usually the loudest: the test is the most important, the test is the data, the test defines your teaching, the test, the test, the test.

There is a lot of valuable research and data that underscores the lack of authenticity and inequity inherent in high-stakes standardized testing. But, I hope to provide a perspective of an educator doing innovation work “on the ground” while addressing the reality of standardized tests. To be clear, this piece is not advocating for standardized tests, rather it’s a demonstration that high-stakes testing does not erase the feasibility of innovative practices like mastery-based learning.

While we wait for large-scale change in states where high-stakes testing is prevalent, replicable innovations are happening in small pockets across the country. It is possible to destigmatize “teaching to the test” when it becomes teaching skills that are prevalent on the test.

I am a teacher and instructional coach at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria (TYWLS), a grade 6-12 public school in the New York City Department of Education. Our school is just one example of a “testing” school that also uses innovative practices, including a whole-school, mastery-based grading system. Our students find success on the multiple New York State exams and AP exams they take each year. We have been able to find a successful balance between the tension of innovation and standardized testing.

As a Living Lab site for the NYC DOE’s Mastery Collaborative, we often host visitors and present at conferences about our whole-school mastery-based grading system. At every session, there are folks who quickly reveal a seemingly fixed mindset about the importance of “the test” as well as the challenges testing presents. We try to make the connection for practitioners in traditional settings that they likely do this type of work already by analyzing what’s on the test and teaching and reteaching skills and content. What is different about planning mastery-based curriculum using a project-based methodology that includes a high-stakes test is that we prepare for, but go well beyond, the test. (more…)

The Henry County Schools, a large suburban district just south of Atlanta, has spent six years transforming their district of 50 schools and 43,000 students toward personalized learning. In a session at the recent Aurora Institute Symposium, Henry County personnel and partners discussed reorganizing district functions to create an “innovation ecosystem” to facilitate the transformation.

The presenters were Karen Perry, the district’s Director of Personalized Learning; Aaryn Schmuhl, VP of Program Design and Innovation at the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement; and Jeffrey Tsang, Founding Partner of Building Blocks Education. All three have been deeply involved in the district’s “2020 Vision for Personalized Learning” redesign process and shared many of the district’s strategies and insights from this work.

Building a District Culture of Innovation

District design often evolves organically, but transforming a district requires attending deliberately to the culture of innovation. Everyone needs to hear from district leadership and the school board, “We’re about to about to embark on innovative work that’s intentionally different, and it’s going to be challenging.”

Several conditions are required for this message to take hold. First, the district and schools need to pour resources and efforts into building trust, because engaging in change requires trust. Second, it’s essential to establish and communicate a “north star” and have clear discussions about what’s needed to move toward it. For Henry County, the north star has been building student agency. Many of the district’s innovation strategies have changed over time, but the north star has stayed the same.

Third, decision makers across the district need to be meaningfully included. An inclusive process may slow down change in the short run, but it enables deeper change in the long run. Over a period of years, Henry County often gathered key decision-makers from all departments around a table at the district office and framed discussions as “Here’s a problem we need to solve; how can we do that?” rather than “We know what changes are needed; here’s what you need to do.”

This level of inclusion is essential because adopting an entirely new school model—unlike simply adopting a new textbook—involves every district department. Changes required from different departments could include:

• Information Technology – Adopting new learning management systems.
• Communications – Conveying the rationale for reforms to a range of key stakeholders.
• Student Services – Exploring implications for students with special needs.
• Facilities – Creating different types of learning spaces.
• Human Resources – Recruiting new hires with relevant skills, dispositions, and training to build the pipeline.

A Framework for Building the Ecosystem

Henry County developed a valuable framework for building the innovation ecosystem based on three sets of school needs and two sets of district actions. The three school needs are: (more…)

Today, the CompetencyWorks initiative of the Aurora Institute (formerly iNACOL) released What Is Competency-Based Education? An Updated Definition. The report updates the 2011 working definition, which helped to build the field and create common understandings of key elements in competency-based systems among stakeholders. The definition has been used by schools to support design and implementation, by states to establish supporting policies and a common vision, and by national organizations to provide frameworks for networks of states, districts, and schools to discuss their initiatives and build shared understanding.

The 2011 working definition was developed by more than 100 education innovators at the first National Summit for K-12 Competency-Based Education. Several years later, feedback indicated that it should be updated to reflect a deeper understanding of key issues and developments in the field. The new report presents the updated definition, which was developed with extensive input from field surveys, invited attendees at the second National Summit on K-12 Competency-Based Education in 2017, and a Technical Advisory Group of more than 40 experts in the field.

Updated Definition

The updated 2019 definition of competency-based education is:

1. Students are empowered daily to make important decisions about their learning experiences, how they will create and apply knowledge, and how they will demonstrate their learning.
2. Assessment is a meaningful, positive, and empowering learning experience for students that yields timely, relevant, and actionable evidence.
3. Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.
4. Students progress based on evidence of mastery, not seat time.
5. Students learn actively using different pathways and varied pacing.
6. Strategies to ensure equity for all students are embedded in the culture, structure, and pedagogy of schools and education systems.
7. Rigorous, common expectations for learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) are explicit, transparent, measurable, and transferable.

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Competency-based education emphasizes learning not only academic knowledge but also skills and dispositions. These include transferable learning skills such as problem solving and effective reasoning that enable people to perform effectively in different settings and apply knowledge and skills to different tasks. A session at the recent Aurora Institute Symposium introduced valuable strategies for assessing these skills. The tools and concepts they shared could also inform assessments of other lifelong learning skills.

The session was led by Director of Curriculum and Instruction Jeff Heyck-Williams and 5^th-Grade Teacher Katie Mancino from Two Rivers Public Charter School in Washington, DC, a school in the EL Education network. They emphasized that teachers typically prioritize whatever will get assessed, so it’s important to assess lifelong learning skills.

Rubrics for Critical Thinking Skills

The rubrics presented for assessing problem solving, effective reasoning, and decision making serve the essential function of providing both students and teachers with a clear picture of what quality looks like. This enables teachers to plan instruction oriented toward deeper learning with these targets in mind.

The session focused on assessing problem-solving skills, defined as “The ability to identify the key questions in a problem, develop possible plans for solving, follow through on those plans, and evaluate both the success of the plan and the solution.” The corresponding rubric has five components: Identifies What Is Known, Defines the Problem, Generates Possible Solution Strategies, and Evaluates Solutions. The table below contains the rubric for one of these components; the full rubric is here.

Three principles guided their rubric design process: (1) Rubrics define the construct that you want to teach and assess for students and teachers; (2) Each component on the rubric needs to be mutually exclusive but also narrow to a single dimension; and (3) The rubric should define a a continuum of growth from notice to expert.

Performance Tasks to Assess Critical Thinking

With the rubric in place, the question remains of what and how to assess. Two Rivers accomplishes this with brief performance tasks that are specific to the skill being assessed. EL Education believes teachers should experience the educational approach they plan to implement with students, so unsurprisingly we were led through a problem-solving performance task. In short, small groups were given two cups, some paper, rubber bands, paper clips, and blue tape. Brief, clear instructions launched groups into creating a bridge with a maximum span using the materials provided.

For this performance task, students at Two Rivers are assessed on how well they make their thinking visible, not how good their bridge is. This is done in writing on a handout, although teachers can scribe for students who need writing support. Before starting to build bridges, our first step was a “KWI” (Know, Want, Ideas) exercise in which we had to write about “What do you KNOW?,” “What do you WANT to know?,” and “What are some IDEAS you have about how to solve the problem?”

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The first part of our annual reflection focused on the field’s evolution and where we are now. This second part looks at how our understanding is deepening and future directions for building and strengthening the field of K-12 competency-based education.

How is our understanding deepening?

Seeing competency-based schools in action and hearing about their successes and challenges is deeply illuminating. There are a growing number of schools and districts to learn from about all stages of planning and implementation. Many of these are innovative, newer schools and districts, such as those shown in the image below from our annual strategic reflection webinar. Many more are featured in our summary of blog posts from visits to competency-based schools in 26 states.

An impressive array of new reports, books, and other publications have also emerged to deepen our understanding of competency-based education since 2010. New resources from the past two years are shown in the three figures below. If there are publications you think should be added, please email me or mention them in the Comments box below.

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With the field of competency-based education growing and changing so quickly, it’s important to step back from time to time and reflect on what we’ve learned, what has changed, and what’s needed next. At the Aurora Institute we see and hear many perspectives on the field from our school visits, research, reading, conferences, policy visits, and other connections with innovators and leaders in the field. All of these views inform a reflection we do annually with our CompetencyWorks Advisory Board.

This blog post shares some of the conclusions of this year’s reflection process. We also conducted a webinar recently with a more detailed discussion of what we learned; you can find the webinar recording and slide deck here.

Where Did We Start and Where Are We Now?

From the outpouring of resources in recent years to guide CBE design and implementation, a newcomer would never know that when CompetencyWorks started ten years ago they could only find one publication on this topic. Now there are hundreds of publications, thousands of blog posts, and schools across the country in all stages of development. They have enabled great increases in the quality, quantity, and understanding of competency-based practice.

The Stages of Development figure below gives an overview of early models and policies that were fundamental in driving the field’s development. The top row focuses on innovations in practice, and this CompetencyWorks blog post from our previous strategic reflection discusses most of the entries there. The new entries under “Scaling Strategies” include support organizations, regional professional learning communities, profile of a graduate, and integrated student supports.

Many organizations are now supporting the scale-up of competency-based practice at the school, district, and state levels. A comprehensive list across the country would be a valuable resource. These organizations have grown in number, influence, and the range and sophistication of services they provide. Their growth reflects the expansion of the field and increased demand for these services. The growth of these organizations has also driven demand, because districts now have more support options than ever before. Expansion of competency-based practice has also been driven by the increased implementation of PLCs, improved student supports, and the number of districts and states that have developed a profile of a graduate. These graduate profiles enable new definitions of student success that align to and support more holistic student learning outcomes.

Another development is a revised definition of competency-based education, which the Aurora Institute has worked on in collaboration with dozens of leaders in the field for the past two years. The revised definition will be released by the Aurora Institute in November. It reflects a deeper understanding of key issues and developments in the field since the original definition was developed and published in 2011, after undergoing a similar process of deep discussion among early innovators. It will also include materials to help contextualize and understand the definition, including a set of belief statements, frequently asked questions, common misconceptions, and resources.

The revised 2019 definition also reflects an increased recognition from leaders in the field that addressing inequity in student opportunities and outcomes—a fundamental impetus for competency-based education since its inception—is not happening quickly enough and that greater effort is needed. The revised definition will have a new element that is specifically about equity, and the accompanying belief statements include:

• Equity is a central goal of advancing competency-based education systems.
• Communities that aspire to achieve equity must work toward implementing a competency-based education system.
• Competency-based education is driven by the equity-seeking need to transform our educational system so all students can and will learn through full engagement and support and through authentic, rigorous learning experiences inside and outside the classroom.

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For 17 years, iNACOL has been a leading voice advocating for expanding K-12 educational opportunity and access. CompetencyWorks is a collaborative initiative focused on sharing knowledge on the field of K-12 competency-based education, drawing on the knowledge of its partners and an advisory board. CompetencyWorks was launched in 2012 with iNACOL as the lead organization.

Over time, iNACOL’s work has shifted from an explicit focus on the delivery vehicle for education, namely online learning, to an expanded view of the systemic changes required to ensure all students are prepared for success in our rapidly changing world. CompetencyWorks has been an essential part of this shift.

We’ve just marked another important milestone in our journey. I’m proud to announce that iNACOL has become the Aurora Institute. CompetencyWorks will continue as an initiative of the Aurora Institute going forward.

Why did we decide to change our name? First and foremost, because every learner deserves a clear path to future success, and we believe that a clearer brand identity will better position us to prepare those pathways. However, changing our name also creates three other important solutions for us:

• We get a name that defines us as an organization committed to systems change in K-12 education. For 20 years, we’ve been the brain trust for a growing field working toward activities as diverse as school redesign, redesigning assessment, providing technical assistance to policymakers, and dismantling inequities in the structure of public education. Our networks have looked to us to set agendas, unify our frameworks, and craft narratives about our collective work.
• The change in name responds to a shift in our mission, vision, and values. Our founding in 2002 grew out of a concern that current models of K-12 education were not providing access to the teachers and the courses students needed, nor fully preparing students for future success with an orientation toward lifelong learning, which we know is critical for the rapidly evolving world in which we live.

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