This is the fifth post in a series about the Eastern Carver County Public Schools in Minnesota. Links to the other posts will be provided at the end of this article.

Competency-based education can lead to some interesting conversations. One exchange that stuck in my head after a recent visit to Pioneer Ridge Middle School was:

Student: “Can I go to the bathroom?”

Teacher: “Is that what’s best for your learning?”

A teacher shared that exchange as an example of how his team relentlessly seeks to build student ownership of their learning. The teacher’s message is “If you need to go, then definitely go.” But he also likes to convey, “Let’s be honest with each other. Are you really just asking because you need a break? Because if what you need is a quick walk or some type of support to help you refocus on your learning, that’s fine too.” (Yes, this gets personal, but teachers know the out-sized role bathroom discussions can take on.)

So many conversations at Pioneer Ridge were about having a task become collaborative between teacher and student, rather than a compliance exercise in which students were just following orders. The goal was for students to learn about themselves as learners, while they’re still in K-12 education with a safety net. For the student mentioned above, maybe they start out taking some kind of quick break every 20 minutes. Maybe over time it becomes every 30 or 60 minutes. But their agency, self-knowledge, and self-direction are the fundamental issues.

One teacher told me about a student who was in tears because he hadn’t met his learning targets by the end of the school year. The student was able to see and acknowledge that he didn’t use his time wisely. The teacher told me, “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I didn’t learn that until my freshman year of college, when I was wasting a $40,000 tuition!’ So sometimes students are off task, but it’s such a different conversation, where we’re helping them identify behaviors that are best for their learning.”

Many aspects of the personalized learning approaches in the Eastern Carver schools call for student ownership and self-direction while also building these qualities, in a virtuous upward cycle. As described in recent posts, students at the Integrated Arts Academy develop intensive projects related to their interests, and students at Pioneer Ridge Middle School learn to allocate their own learning time based on transparent information about their progress in different courses. An 8^th-grader at Pioneer Ridge told me, “If you’re ahead and you’re done with stuff in one class, then you can really focus on the class that maybe you’re not doing as well in, and keeping hitting those seminars and focus flexes and coaching workshops to spend time with the teacher and really understand the topic you’re working on.”

Pioneer Ridge Principal Dana Miller described seeing a group of students engaged in what was clearly a coaching workshop, but there was no teacher present. She realized that a student, not a teacher, was leading the workshop. The student had mastered the material and was passionate about the topic, so she offered to coach her fellow students. Perhaps this suggests another dimension of ownership—taking responsibility for other students’ learning. But teaching a topic often solidifies the knowledge for the teacher, so the student coach was likely well-served too. Miller pointed out that part of what facilitated the student-led coaching was that “The roadmap of our standards and learning targets is so clear. It wasn’t a secret anymore what we wanted them to know.”

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This is the fourth post in a series about the Eastern Carver County Public Schools in Minnesota. Links to the other posts are provided at the end of this article.

Pioneer Ridge Middle School demonstrates that it’s possible to start shifting to competency-based education with a small program and limited resources. In 2012, near the beginning of Eastern Carver’s district-wide efforts to increase personalized learning, Pioneer Ridge began researching ways to let students be primary drivers of their own learning.

The district gave permission for a small program with three teachers and 60 students. Students were in the program for four hours per day—one hour each for science and social studies, and two hours for English language arts, per state requirements and to operate within the rest of the school’s bell schedule. (Math has been added since then.) They started with 6^th grade and added a grade each year, so the first cohort will be seniors this fall.

The initial cohort had been in a traditional, accelerated track in 5^th grade, but the school quickly realized that the personalized approach was appropriate for all students. Subsequent cohorts were open to all students, and the school offered presentations and school visits to help parents understand what personalized learning looked like. In the second year, about half of the 200 students opted into the personalized track. The eventual goal was for all teachers and students to shift to the personalized track, which has now been achieved.

The three teachers who started the program—Carly Bailey, Jen Larson, and Dan Thompson—are still there, thrilled with the results, and continuing to innovate. They recounted their original personalized scheduling system, a white board with 240 magnets, to schedule 60 students for four periods each. Too often the magnets fell, got lost, or were moved by the wrong students. Now they use scheduling software created for them by a local programmer, as well as the Empower learning management system to organize student work. After students learn how to use Empower, they make a presentation about it at home and bring any questions from their parents or guardians back to the school.

Scheduling takes place during a daily morning meeting when teachers describe the seminars and small-group instruction sessions that they will offer throughout the day. Students can schedule themselves for these activities or other types of individual or student group sessions. The figure below shows part of a daily signup that illustrates some of the available session types—focus flex, group flex, fishbowl discussion, coaching workshop, and review/summative assessment.

Teachers also have the ability to assign students to specific activities in a way that’s either locked in or just suggested. There are ways for teachers to automate aspects of the scheduling, such as locking all students who haven’t taken a particular summative assessment into a block where that material is being addressed. The process of creating these types of efficiencies has been ongoing for seven years, in collaboration with the programmer who developed the scheduling software.

To keep class sizes manageable, teachers often offer the same seminar more than once. One teacher described asking a student why she showed up to the same seminar two days in a row. The student said, “Yesterday I came to take notes. Today I came to listen—to make sure I understand the notes I took yesterday.” Clearly this student is gaining the essential skill of reflecting on her own learning and recognizing when she needed some additional exposure to challenging material.

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This is the third post in a series about the Eastern Carver County Public Schools in Minnesota. Links to the other posts are provided at the end of this article.

Conversations at many of my school visits come around to how schools are managing accountability to state standards while also personalizing learning for each student. A discussion at the Integrated Arts Academy, an arts-based high school discussed in the previous post, shed valuable light on this topic. The following is part of my conversation with Tera Kaltsas, IAA’s Principal, and Brian Beresford, Eastern Carver’s Leader of Personalized Learning and Innovation. It provides insights into strategies for satisfying diverse stakeholders in the development of a complex, competency-based system. It also illustrates the “tight vs. loose” decisions that are made in evolving CBE systems, and it touches on the state’s role in facilitating innovation.

TK: The district has “power standards” with many learning targets. What we learned was that, for our school, that was too specific. So we spent many years working with teachers to figure out which power standards must be met, and how to make them user-friendly for IAA—so they’re more applicable for life. For example, a physics teacher from another high school helped us figure out how to make the physics standards more applied and less math-focused. Also, students can take classes at the high school if they want; one of our students recently took AP Calculus at the high school.

EL: What do you say to stakeholders who insist that every student needs to meet every standard?

TK: Well, we’ve worked closely with the math specialists in the district to become more project-based, and there are times when students need to do old-school worksheets and “you just need to know this and learn it in a traditional way” kinds of math activities. And let’s not forget that students in conventional schools don’t always finish the textbook; it happens all the time.

But part of the idea of being an alternative learning center is that it really is alternative. When we as the district were creating and designing it, I refused to just be a smaller version of the mainstream high school. If kids are coming here because they’re disengaged from the whole learning process, then how are we going to reengage them? If the old system didn’t work in a big high school, why would we think that just making it smaller will make them engage in the same worksheets and sitting in rows and being compliant? That’s not going to happen. It’s going to be a colossal waste of time.

IAA’s Aquaponic System

Our system has some checks and balances. Students need a learning plan that everyone signs off on. We hold to our standards, but we get there by different pathways. I’ll give you an example: We have a student who loved our aquaponic system. She spent hours and hours creating her own aquaponic system, helping create the school’s aquaponic system, getting a grant for the aquaponic system. So in her learning plan, I gave her a biology credit for going that in-depth on a handful of biology standards. She didn’t meet all 10 biology power standards, but she went so far in depth with a couple of them. But then everyone signs off on that. That doesn’t happen often, but it happens.

EL: What is the district’s perspective on that? (more…)

This is the second post in a series about the Eastern Carver County Public Schools in Minnesota. Links to the other posts are provided at the end of this article.

The Integrated Arts Academy (IAA) in Chaska, Minnesota brings a deeply personalized approach to embedding visual arts, culinary arts, horticulture, and floral and textile design into core academic subjects. Most of the high school’s 125 students arrive as juniors and seniors who struggled with academic engagement at their previous high school. The school used to be a program for these students in one of the district’s two large, comprehensive high schools.

The leaders wanted to do something different, because the program’s graduation rate was too low. They decided to create a program where arts drove the learning. In 2012 they moved to a different building and began developing studios—one or more classrooms—related to several career paths. Some students come with a specific career in mind and spend much of their time in a single studio. Others want to be in an arts setting but don’t have a particular career in mind, and they divide their time across multiple studios.

My visit was the day before the school’s Annual Gala, where students display and sell products from their projects. The halls were covered with displays of visual arts and flowers, the hydroponic gardens were in full bloom, and culinary students were preparing food for the event.

Principal Tera Kaltsas and a senior who had focused on culinary arts spoke with me and led my tour of the school. The student had earned a 3.7 GPA at their previous high school but seldom went to class. “I would do my work and then go take a nap. I literally napped in school daily. I was just there to get the grades, and that’s it. Then I went to the IAA gala at a friend’s invitation and was like ‘Oh my gosh, you like going to school and get to learn about things you want to learn about?’ I was a good student, but I wasn’t learning anything important. I was just doing worksheets and turning them in and then doing nothing. Then I came here and ran a coffee shop and became part of a great community. At my old school there were 3,000 kids. That’s too big for a school, and I didn’t know anyone. I wasn’t part of it. Here I know everyone and they all talk to me. It’s a community.”

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This is the first post in a series about the Eastern Carver County Public Schools. Links to the other posts are at the end of this article.

The Eastern Carver County district in Minnesota has worked intensively since 2011 to transition to more personalized, competency-based learning. Located about 25 miles southwest of Minneapolis, the district has 16 schools and almost 10,000 students in four communities that span a region of 88 square miles.

During a recent visit to two Eastern Carver schools, I spoke with students, school staff, and district officials. Superintendent Clint Christopher, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Amy LaDue, and Leader of Personalized Learning and Innovation Brian Beresford provided valuable reflections on the strategies, challenges, and rewards of district-wide transformation.

A key strategy has been creating a district-wide definition of personalized learning but then allowing it to take shape differently in different schools.  Personalized learning can take many forms, so the district strives to be clear about what they mean. The focal point of their definition is “the Star,” illustrated in the graphic above, which provides a compelling way to communicate the district’s approach to learning. The star is accompanied by powerful language on the district’s website, explaining the rationale for personalized learning. Some samples include:

• Purposeful Learning – “In the past, teachers stood in front of the class for each lesson, expecting all students to learn in the same way and at the same pace. This is becoming a thing of the past. Teachers in Eastern Carver County Schools not only lead instruction but also facilitate learning for each student. They teach by guiding students toward mastery of content and instilling 21st century skills. Students have access to a variety of resources and tools, and teachers connect students to learning beyond the classroom.”
• Collaborative Environment – “Design of spaces and their furnishings reflect purpose: how we live, how we work, and how we learn. We are redefining learning spaces with a variety of furniture, layouts, and technology that facilitate collaboration, creativity, comfort, and safety. They also convey a sense of belonging and purpose. School should be a place where students feel welcomed and empowered to learn.”
• Learner Voice and Choice – “Students have the freedom to design the way they showcase their learning based on individual styles, experiences, passions, and needs…Treated as co-designers, students take greater pride in their success and ultimately find meaning in their work.”
• Purposeful Instruction, Assessment, and Feedback – “Learning is continuous in our schools. This means that students are not limited by their age or grade. They are able to work at the level that is right for them. Students are consistently challenged…With teachers as facilitators, students effectively communicate their learning journey and progress. They then work with their teacher to determine their next steps for learning.”

Christopher is clear that they plan to transform the entire district, but says “it’s not going to happen overnight. We know it’s a long journey.” He emphasizes that Eastern Carver has 16 buildings with 16 leaders, faculties, student groups, cultures, and parent communities. The district has a document for each building that identifies where it is with personalized learning and the next steps to move forward.

“We need gentle pressure, relentlessly applied,” he said. “We need that constant focus on this, moving forward, adjusting, identifying what’s working. And what our board pushes back on, rightly so, is that we have pockets of excellence throughout the district, so how do we identify that and bring it to scale? This is also an equity measure, so the experience you’ll get in this district doesn’t depend on where you live. It may look different in different schools, but student outcomes need to be the same. We allow buildings to have some flexibility in that journey but are clear on what the parameters are around that.” (more…)

This post originally appeared Next Generation Learning Challenges on June 4, 2019.

At the heart of the shift toward more student-centered models of learning and assessment is an understanding that learning is socially embedded and that the broader communities that students exist within matter to their learning. Emerging findings from brain science reveal that students’ cultural contexts, in particular, are fundamental to their learning. These findings are not new. They are built upon a rich history of research highlighting how central culturally responsive pedagogy is to providing all students with a high-quality education.

One powerful means of bringing students’ culture into the classroom is through culturally relevant performance assessments. Performance assessments center students’ identity and experiences by asking them to show what they know and can do through multidisciplinary projects, presentations of their learning in front of a panel, and reflections on their educational trajectory. At their core, such assessments provide a critical space for students to reflect on and share their personal stories and their identities as learners.

Lessons From Hawai’i: Defining “Cultural Relevance”

Representatives from the Hawai’i education department and the Hawaiian-focused Charter School (HFCS) network recently shared the ways their state policy and the work of the HFCS school network work together to support culturally relevant assessments that center Native Hawaiian culture in schools across Hawai’i. During a fall 2018 convening in which leaders from HFCS came together with practitioners from districts across California to share lessons from their respective performance-assessment systems, one of the biggest questions that emerged was: What would it look like to employ culturally relevant performance assessments in diverse contexts in which there are many cultures with which students identify?

Charlene Hoe—founder of the Hakipu’u Learning Center in Hawai’i—responded that “culture” is defined by a student’s local context or history: It may include students’ personal racial or ethnic background but it is also defined by their neighborhood, their school, and their home. Making an assessment “culturally relevant” in diverse contexts means allowing students to draw connections between their learning and their direct, daily experiences with the world, and treating those experiences as an asset in the classroom.

Cultural Relevance in Diverse School Systems: Lessons From California

Given this understanding of cultural relevance, it is possible to understand how to design and implement culturally relevant performance assessments to serve diverse student populations. One such context is the California Performance Assessments Collaborative (CPAC), a Learning Policy Institute initiative. CPAC represents policymakers, researchers, and a professional learning community of districts, networks, and schools across the state of California working to study and advance the use of performance assessments. CPAC was founded to help build systems of assessment that more equitably serve all students within diverse student populations; this concern for equity has been a central organizing tenet of CPAC since its inception.

The work of CPAC is being led by school districts such as Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified, and Pasadena Unified, which are using performance assessments to operationalize their respective district profiles of college-, career-, and community-ready graduates. These district visions call for students to move beyond the mastery of academic-content knowledge to reflect on their learning, cultivate social-emotional skills, and become civically engaged within their communities.

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At the recent New Hampshire Learning Initiative conference, long-time teacher Terry Bolduc led a session about powerful strategies to help students develop lifelong learning skills and dispositions. This work is central to competency-based education. Bolduc’s presentation focused on New Hampshire’s Work Study Practices (WSPs), the state’s term for “behavioral qualities or habits of mind that students need to be successful in college, career, and life.” (Other common terms are personal success skills, 21^st century skills, transferable skills, building blocks of learning, and non-cognitive skills.)

The four WSPs are collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction. Bolduc has developed strategies for promoting and assessing the WSPs in two New Hampshire elementary schools in the Sanborn and Timberlane regional school districts. She and other staff from Sanborn shared their WSP strategies in a series of CompetencyWorks posts in 2015. One insight was that students needed more help understanding what the WSPs looked like in practice. The 2015 posts describe a series of strategies to accomplish this, such as relating the WSPs to characters in books they were reading.

Bolduc uses graphic organizers that allow students to set goals for each WSP and then reflect on their progress at the end of each week. Over time, with input from her students, she has elaborated these organizers to include separate reflections for each academic subject, as shown in the figure below. In addition to academic subjects, she has used a similar organizer that includes recess, cafeteria, bus, classroom, and specials.

The acronym “CARES” in the figure stands for Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy, and Self-Regulation/Control. Sanborn was already using the CARES framework from the Responsive Classroom when the New Hampshire WSPs were rolled out, so they created a crosswalk between the two frameworks and kept using CARES. For each academic subject, students select one of the five elements of CARES and use it as their goal for that academic subject for the week. During morning meetings, students tell each other their goal, and at the end of the week they reflect on their progress out loud and written on the graphic organizers. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Mastery Transcript Consortium on June 23, 2019.

“Too many students … experience high school as a cutthroat competition for admission to a selective college,” writes Tony Wagner, a Mastery Transcript Consortium board member and globally recognized voice in education. “There is a better way.”

This month, approximately 3.5 million high school seniors will be granted diplomas. The rest of us will (and should) applaud their achievements, but we must also stop and consider: What did these students have to do to earn their diplomas, and what, exactly, has their schoolwork prepared them for? In 1892, The Committee of Ten, led by Harvard President Charles Eliot, created a standardized framework for the high school curriculum that, in turn, dictated essential prerequisites for college admissions. This system requires that students earn between 18 and 24 “Carnegie Units” in order to graduate. A Carnegie Unit is a standardized measure of “seat time served” in a given class — roughly 120 hours of a class over the course of a year. Students’ grades in a particular class are supposed to represent how well they served that time, and students’ grade point average and class rank are taken as measures of how well individuals have performed compared to peers. And these numbers still make up the typical high school transcript, which is required by virtually every college and university in America in order to be considered for admission.

But these measures are more than a century old, and hopelessly obsolete. In this era of innovation, all students need essential skills and dispositions for work, learning, and citizenship—habits of mind and heart that cannot be measured by Carnegie Units. Students who can take initiative, learn through trial and error, collaborate, persist, understand and solve problems through interdisciplinary approaches, and who have strong moral foundations are set up to thrive in the future. The students who are merely good at the “game of school”—those with high grades but without those skills—are not.

If school is a game, then “losing” comes with stark emotional consequences. Too many students in our “best” suburban and independent schools increasingly experience high school as a cutthroat competition for admission to a selective college. Bright and resilient students who receive poor grades or don’t get into the “right” college often see themselves as losers for life. And, as we have seen recently, the college admissions process is even more problematic than we might have imagined. Some parents are going to extreme measures that are harmful to their children and unfair to others.

There is a better way. The Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC)™ is working with a growing network of nearly 300 public and private member schools to codesign the Mastery Transcript, which takes the high school transcript from a flat, two-dimensional accounting of student time spent on single subjects to an easy-to-read, interactive, digital transcript. It is an effort to change the game by creating an entirely new way to report the quality of student work and their readiness for postsecondary learning—one that is based on real evidence of mastery, rather than a grade or time spent in a particular class.

The new reporting will indicate the skills and knowledge that students have mastered. But it can also include qualities of character that make their humanity visible and help admissions officers make better decisions when it comes to an applicant’s “fit.” The design will help colleges better understand students’ skill sets and potential to succeed on campus, and allows students to present themselves more authentically to admissions officers. The MTC is still in development; it will be built, refined and tested over the next several years. But the goal is to finally see students’ educational record in clearer focus, and in three dimensions.

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The New Hampshire Learning Initiative serves as a catalyst to oversee and support scaling of New Hampshire’s work toward an integrated, competency-based education system. I recently attended their annual Powerful Learning Conference, where hundreds of school and district personnel attended keynotes, sessions, workshops, and daily “team time” (with school teams or groups of individual attendees) to advance their practices related to competency-based education.

The annual conference is one of many initiatives that NHLI provides throughout the year to support transformation at the school, district, and state levels. Their work is closely tied to New Hampshire’s Performance Assessment for Competency Education (PACE) Pathways Network. PACE provides an opportunity for districts to administer locally developed performance assessments that support deeper learning. These assessments are designed to be a meaningful and positive learning experience for students—a key component of competency-based education. The PACE system is approved by the U.S. Department of Education through its Innovative Assessment Pilot program, section 1204 of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

NHLI is explicit that both their work and PACE are not just about assessment and accountability, however. As shown in the figure below, PACE also emphasizes project-based learning, teacher leadership, competency design, student agency, student exhibitions, extended learning opportunities (NH’s term for out-of-school learning activities), and work study practices (NH’s term for lifelong learning skills such as collaboration and self-direction).

NHLI leads a diverse set of initiatives that provide a series of “on-ramps” to deeper implementation of each of these elements of quality competency-based education. Just as CBE promotes meeting students where they are, NHLI’s on-ramps meet educators and administrators where they are. And sometimes “where they are” includes being unclear on what performance assessments are, fearful of starting because of obstacles to full implementation, or concerned that not all teachers or school committee members are on-board.

The different on-ramps enable any school to become part of the PACE network regardless of where they are. This fits well with New Hampshire’s status as a national leader and innovator in competency-based education. Three of NHLI’s many initiatives are described below, and could inform efforts in other states seeking to deepen their competency-based practices. (more…)

(This blog post began as a comment that Joy Nolan wrote on a recent CompetencyWorks post about recognizing outstanding student achievement in competency-based schools. Thanks, Joy!)

Celebrating learning can be moving and uplifting, and like all other aspects of education, we need to get it right, which may mean unlearning and improving upon ideas and practices that don’t serve our students (meaning: all our students) as well as possible. Chris’s ideas about honoring progress are cool, and so is the practice of sharing out and recognizing excellent project-based learning.

Schools are both places of learning, and issuers of credentials . . . and we need to be thoughtful about all aspects of practice.

One of the newer member schools in NYC’s Mastery Collaborative (www.masterycollaborative.org) recently realized they needed to rethink honor roll and start recognizing students whose mastery has grown most, as well as students who have reached high levels of mastery. Their thinking: Both are amazing and meaningful accomplishments, so let’s celebrate both—especially as this is a more equitable way to roll in a world (our world) that inequitably advantages and disadvantages students in many ways that can show up on transcripts.

If our vision is genuine educational equity (aside: not everyone shares this vision, and some will agree in word and not in action), we need to be intentional and critically conscious to bring it about. We’re looking at you, beliefs, policies, and practices. We have much actionable, research-based and road-tested knowledge about what works to support learners and to bring about more equitable schools—yet we know we’re a long way off from this vision. Moving toward a more equitable steady state—a world we have yet to see— requires learning, unlearning, and collective action. We have our circles of practice and community, along with the principles of student-centered learning, competency-based education, and culturally responsive-sustaining education to guide us.

We know that learning is a cognitive process that is not most helpfully framed as a competition nor as a race. We know that ideally grades are neither rewards nor punishments, but instead messages about where a student is in terms of mastery of key skills and knowledge—at a point in time.

We know that mindsets for learning—growth mindset, and its less famous but powerful cousins, value mindset (“There is value for me in the effort and time I put into academic work”) and belonging mindset (“My school is for me; I am an important part of a community; it matters that I am there”)—are vital dispositions that power the multidimensional set of achievements every student must reach to graduate high school. Do we foster or discourage these mindsets by separating out a small number of students who “really” got there in some way that may have to do with technical aspects of credentialing systems, and a variety of answers to “What’s in that grade?” What aspects of learning are we valuing over others when we post honor rolls and choose valedictorians based on GPA?

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