Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

This post originally appeared at iNACOL on February 5, 2018.  It is the eighth blog in a series that explores the ideas in the iNACOL report, Next Generation Learning Model for English Language Learners: Promising Practices and Considerations for Teaching and Learning. Read the first post here.

The following case study represents promising practices in the field using personalized, competency- based learning specifically for ELL students. Each case study in this blog series is considered promising in that they incorporate many of the core principles for next generation learning to support ELL student success. All case studies are examples of programs taking a longer view and a more holistic approach to student outcomes over time – defining the goal as helping students to achieve at high levels over the course of their schooling – in addition to becoming English-proficient. (more…)

This article reviews some of the new state policy resources and highlights the types of discussion and initiatives taking place in the individual states. Nevada is joining the group of states that are supporting innovative districts, and Mississippi is supporting an innovation network. The most important thing to pay attention to is the discussion and debate in Maine as they decide whether they are going to continue to believe that their students and educators can learn to high standards and will keep learning how to support students in doing so…or if they modify expectations. Fingers crossed that the discussion moves from what’s wrong to what we need to make sure all of our students learn!

State Policy Resources

Across the country, state policymakers have been engaged in thinking through how they can strengthen their policies and infrastructures to better support personalized, competency-based education. Take some time to check out the resources at KnowledgeWorks‘ Every Student Succeeds Act: Mapping Emerging Trends for Personalized Learning in State ESSA Plans to get a sense of how policy directions are shifting.

Other resources that you might finding interesting and/or helpful are:

• Rethinking State Accountability to Support Personalized, Competency-Based Learning in K-12 Education by iNACOL
• What Gets Tested Gets Taught: Cautions for Using College Admissions Tests in State Accountability Systems by Achieve
• State Policy Implementation: An Imperative for Equity by Joey Hunziker, Program Manager, Innovation Lab Network, CCSSO
• The Nature of Accountability is Ready for Change from Colorado Education Initiative
• How ESSA and IDEA Can Support College and Career Readiness for Students With Disabilities: Considerations for States from American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) and the College & Career Readiness & Success (CCRS) Center

What’s Happening in the States

Colorado

• Westminster school will reopen as a Marzano lab school ‘to take on problems we haven’t solved yet’

Florida

• Mastery-based learning proposal fails in Florida Legislature (more…)

This is the third in a three part series by Kathleen McClaskey, co-author of Make Learning Personal and How to Personalize Learning. Read the first and second posts.

In the CompetencyWorks paper based on the 2017 National Summit on K-12 Competency-Based Education, Designing for Equity, one of the four key issues in advancing competency-based education is “meeting students where they are.” It describes that a high quality competency-based system connects learning in relationships and requires educators to understand their learners as individuals and then select strategies based upon that knowledge. Before we look at how to meet learners where they are, let’s review what has presented in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. (more…)

Dr. Cynthia Lamkin, Lead Learner at Otken Elementary

This is the seventh post on a series about McComb School District in McComb, Mississippi. Start here.

Otken Elementary, serving 500 students in grades 1-3, is in the first year of the the transition to personalized learning. They began the roll-up in 2017 with conversion to personalized learning in first grade followed by second year, next year, and so on.

Dr. Cynthia Lamkin, Principal or Lead Learner, described the early steps to implementation. Otken started by organizing a site visit for their first grade teachers to visit Kennedy Early Childhood Center to learn about student-centered learning and the blended learning rotation model. In amazement, they asked their Kennedy colleagues how they were able to get kindergarteners to all be working on task and to take responsibility even when the teacher was out of the line of vision. The teacher practitioners at Kennedy explained that it wasn’t magic. It started with a series of everyday practices such as creating a shared vision, goal-setting, and target trackers. Kennedy is finding that it takes about eleven days to introduce scholars to the routines of student-centered learning and station rotation. They all affirmed, “There is no excuse that first graders can’t learn to do this.”

Reflections of the Lead Learner

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There has been so much on assessment lately that I thought it best to dedicate a What’s New just to this one topic.

The most important (if you haven’t seen it yet) is 10 Principles for Building a High-Quality System Of Assessments (Jobs for the Future). This report offers important guidance on how states, districts, and our nation can bridge from the current status of assessments to high-quality systems that advance college and career readiness, equity, and student-centered learning.

The Assessment for Learning Project has a potpourri of different projects on assessment. They’ve produced a paper A Movement Towards Personalized Professional Learning on microcredentialing. Two other projects are highlighted in the resources below: (more…)

Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

This post originally appeared at iNACOL on January 29, 2018.  It is the seventh blog in a series that explores the ideas in the iNACOL report, Next Generation Learning Model for English Language Learners: Promising Practices and Considerations for Teaching and Learning. Read the first post here.

The following case study represents promising practices in the field using personalized, competency-based learning specifically for ELL students. Each case study in this blog series is considered promising in that they incorporate many of the core principles for next generation learning to support ELL student success. All case studies are examples of programs taking a longer view and a more holistic approach to student outcomes over time — defining the goal as helping students to achieve at high levels over the course of their schooling — in addition to becoming English-proficient. (more…)

It is April. This month brings with it various seasons for various people. For some, April brings the start of Spring. For others, it brings tax season. For sports enthusiasts, it brings the prospect of another baseball season. But for principals like me, it brings hiring seasoning. This is the time of year where we make decisions about continuing current staff contracts, are informed about retirements and resignations, and begin to hire staff for the next school year. Hiring season brings with it the complex dance of screening applications, interviewing, hiring, and determining how to best support these new hires. For principals, hiring season should also bring a time on introspection centered on cultural responsiveness – before the aforementioned process begins. Researchers (Johnson, 2006; Terrell & Lindsey, 2009) have shown that principals must clearly understand their own assumptions, beliefs, and values about people and cultures different from themselves in order to lead effectively in settings with diverse student populations. If a school principal serves a diverse student population, he/she must know what he/she believes about culture and race BEFORE engaging in the hiring process. (more…)

This is the second in a three part series by Kathleen McClaskey, co-author of Make Learning Personal. See How to Personalize Learning. Read the first post here.

A core objective of personalized, competency-based schools that is described in the Teaching and Design Principle “Activate Student Agency and Ownership,” is to cultivate agency, “the ability to direct one’s course in life.” (See Designing for Equity for an overview of the design principles.) If we are to realize a personalized, competency-based system that nurtures and develops agency with each learner, then we do need to look at how a school could achieve that. You see, once a learner develops agency, he or she can self-advocate for the way they learn for a lifetime and “lead their own learning trajectory.” (more…)

Felicia Thomas, Lead Learner at Kennedy Early Childhood Center

This is the sixth post on a series about McComb School District in McComb, Mississippi. Start here.

The next stop in my visit to McComb School District was the Kennedy Early Childhood Center.  We met with Lead Learner (Principal) Felicia Thomas; Dr. Alicia Walker, Site Based Curriculum Coordinator; and Angel McMillian, Literacy Specialist. Kennedy is designed to have all the kindergarteners in McComb introduced to personalized learning. They currently have over 200 kindergarteners as well as fifty younger scholars in preschool. The school day is organized into blocks around the academic domains of social studies, science, literacy, and math. (more…)

The MC community is always digging in to rubrics! Here, teachers take advantage of a bulletin board at KAPPA International to see rubric criteria.

This post and all images originally appeared at Mastery Collaborative on February 27, 2018.

Recently Meredith Matson, Assistant Principal/Mastery rockstar, facilitated a professional development about enriching rubric criteria for the staff at MC Active Member School Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction. Below, three take-aways from Meredith’s session.

1. Rubrics too often contain “laundry-lists.”

Learning tasks should push students to higher-order thinking. Because rubrics guide these tasks, the criteria for mastery should reflect the deep thinking students need to engage in.

Non-example: Cite at least three sources.

Example: Provide sufficient evidence and reasoning to support your claim. (more…)