This is the third in a series of articles specific to the developing understanding of skills and dispositions of educators working with students in a competency-based educational system. There has been increased recognition nationally of the importance of skills and dispositions and how these are intertwined within the overall growth and College and Career Readiness of learners. The skills and dispositions are referred to in a number of ways (Non-cognitive skills, Habits of Learners, Work Habits, General Learning Outcomes, “soft skills,” etc.) Our school has been delving into skills and dispositions for the past few years, but we have found that there are limited resources to support our work, and, at times, this has caused frustration. We are very excited about the opportunity to work with the recently released Essential Skills and Dispositions Frameworks (Lench, S., Fukuda, E., & Anderson, R. (2015)) this upcoming school year to support our continued learning in this area. For the purposes of this series of articles, we will be using the term the State of New Hampshire recognizes, Work Study Practices, for skills and dispositions. Locally, we have aligned the Responsive Classroom’s CARES to our State of New Hampshire’s Work Study Practices, which are referenced in this series of articles.

To read the first article in this series, please click on the following link: Our School’s Developing Understanding of Skills and Dispositions. The second article may be accessed by clicking here: Collecting a Body of Evidence.

Memorial School is a Pre-K to Grade 5 elementary school in southeastern New Hampshire, part of the Sanborn Regional School District. As we have made our transition to a competency-based educational model, our recognition of the importance of skills and dispositions has evolved significantly. This evolution in understanding has progressed from our very early days in our journey when we realized that academics and academic behaviors MUST be separated. Today, our teachers recognize the importance of providing time for students to reflect on their own strengths as well as areas for growth within these skills and dispositions. And our growth will continue to evolve, as teachers have begun developing lessons and opportunities for learning for students within their classrooms within these important competencies.

Growth in these areas, for our elementary students, will not happen all by itself. It is imperative that teachers willingly and mindfully plan lessons that will help students to make connections and assist them along in their learning journey. It is also imperative to debrief, reflect, and provide meaningful and timely feedback, just as it is within any type of formative assessment that is happening within a classroom.

The insight of two of our teachers below outlines their work with their students specific to the instruction of these invaluable competencies within not only their classrooms but outside of their classrooms and in the greater world itself. Their reflections provide a glimpse into the world of both a first grade classroom and a fifth grade classroom, and describe how students’ increased self-awareness and understanding of the CARES (Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy, and Self-regulation) within their own learning are having a tremendous impact on not only the individual learner, but the entire classroom community as a whole. (more…)

Two major events are coming up that are opportunities to network among innovators in education.

1)    SXSWedu, March 9-12 , 2015: Last year Susan Patrick of iNACOL did a standing-room-only briefing on competency education. There are four events proposed on competency education for the 2015 meeting.  Two are on higher education and two on K-12. Jump onto the Panel Picker to vote for your favorites:

K-12

• Competency-based Personalized Learning At Scale starring Amy Jenkins and Jane Bryson, Education Elements,  Julia Freeland, Clayton Christensen Institute, and yours truly.

• Retooling for Competency Education with Tracy Weeks, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and Jim Goodell, Quality Information Partners

Higher Education

• Cost, Competency-Based Learning & The Semantic Web with Navneet Johal, Ovum, Gary Brahm, Brandman University, and Chris Etesse, Flat World Education

• Scaling Competency-Based Learning with Technology with Molly Lindsay, Boundless, Gene Wade, UniversityNow, and Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

2) iNACOL’s Blended and Online Learning Symposium, November 4-7, 2014:  This year’s speakers include Sal Khan and Michael Horn.  There is a full competency education strand, with Rose Colby leading The Competency Education Toolkit for Curriculum, Assessment, Instruction, and Grading; and Brian Stack, principal at Sanborn Regional High School, on How to Support a K12 Competency-Based Grading & Reporting System. Jennifer Davis from CCSSO and Adam Rubin from 2 Revolutions will be there to help you learn how to use the Roadmap for Competency-based Systems; Springpoint will have a team to reflect on  Designing New Competency-Based High Schools; and Kim Carter and Elizabeth Cardine from Making Community Connections Charter School will be there to describe how they are Igniting Learning, drawing on cognitive sciences, motivational theory, and educational research.

My school district implemented a K-12 competency-based grading and reporting system four years ago. The implementation included the adoption of a set of common competency-based grading practices that all teachers use in their classrooms and competency-based report cards that measure student progress toward mastery of course-based competencies. As the building principal, one of the most common questions that I am asked by students, parents, and even administrators from other schools who are considering this model for their school, is how our transcript has changed. They are surprised to learn, in fact, that little has changed about our transcript.

The purpose of our high school transcript, just like any other high school transcript, is to provide a final record of a student’s performance at our school. Our transcript lists each course a student took, their final course grade, and how many credits the student earned. Other information, such as:  Class Rank; Grade Point Average (weighted or non-weighted); Attendance Information, and Diploma Type are optional features that can also be printed on a transcript as needed.

Our transcript explains to the reader what the final grades of E (Exceeding), M (Meeting), IP (In-Progress), and LP (Limited Progress) mean. It also explains what it means for a student to get a code of NYC (Not Yet Competent) or IWS (Insufficient Work Shown), both of which result in no credit awarded for the course.

Our school has identified six school-wide 21^st century learning expectations. These include a student’s ability to effectively communicate, creatively solve problems, responsibly use information, self-manage their learning, produce quality work, and contribute to their community. Since each teacher in each course at my school assesses students on these expectations, the transcript provides a summary of these grades so the reader can see a student’s progress in mastering them over the course of their high school career. (more…)

Responsive Classroom

Last year, teams of teachers within our district, the Sanborn Regional School District in New Hampshire, became deeply involved in building Quality Performance Assessments. These assessments are designed to truly assess a student’s competency, or transfer of learning. Our teachers have worked incredibly hard at building high-quality, engaging assessments. Their overall assessment literacy, and the learning that has occurred throughout these processes, has been significant. However, it has also raised additional questions.

The most recent questions have had to do with Work Study Practices (also referred to as work study habits or dispositions/behaviors). The State of New Hampshire defines the four work study practices in New Hampshire as Communication, Creativity, Collaboration, and Self-Direction. For the past six years, our district elementary schools have identified the Responsive Classroom CARES (Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy, and Self-Regulation) as the behaviors we will assess in each student. These fit in well with the work study practices the State has identified. Within each performance assessment, teachers have been identifying a specific behavior as the one that will be assessed within the performance assessment itself. For example, a performance assessment may lend itself to having cooperation/collaboration of students assessed, so teachers are including this to be assessed, complete with its own indicators within a rubric as part of the scoring within the assessment (separate from the assessment of academic competencies). (more…)

…To Dream the Impossible Dream? Case Studies Sanborn Regional School District Flips District Reform Implementation Insights from Pittsfield School District Igniting Learning at the Making Community Connections Charter School Getting…

from Making Mastery Work

During my travels in Maine last fall to three districts in the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning that are well on their way to fully implementing competency education, an interesting question popped up during conversations with students:  What happens once a student reaches proficiency? As I talked to students, they all had different responses to how they used the time that is built into the school day (reading The Learning Edge for more information about how districts are embedding support time):

Faster:  Amidst a gaggle of 7^th grade boys, one student clearly liked to power ahead in math.  He emphasized it was only in math (his father was a math teacher) and that he was at “teacher-pace” in his other courses. If he had extra time in the class or in the day he would work on his math. Once he reached proficiency (usually described as a 3 or above), he would move on to the next unit as the learning targets, curriculum modules, and resources were available online.

Better:  In a conversation at a high school, two young women, self-described best friends, discussed how they have a competition among themselves.  They aim to get “4’s” on all assessments, in all classes, all the times.  If they have extra time in the day they work on whatever topics they needed to in order to demonstrate the application of their learning beyond what was taught in the classroom to their teacher.

Passion:  One young man, showing the slumped body language of disengagement, simply said that he does the minimum as he isn’t interested in school. He aims for a 3 at teacher-pace. With his art notebook always at his side, he uses an extra time to do the one thing he really likes – drawing.

Fun: A quiet young woman told me that it was doing the work to get a 4 that was the fun part of school. She felt that she could be creative, explore something new, apply the learning in a way that was meaningful to her.  From what I can tell, the option of a 4 was a door to the joy of learning.  (Check out the video The Box to see what this can mean for students).

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Hi all – Just wanted to let you know there is a very good article in the Christian Science Monitor on competency education called Is your student ‘competent’? A new education yardstick takes the measure.  Sanborn Regional High School and Making Community Connections Charter School are both highlighted in the article.

“Lawyers who finally pass the bar exam on their second or third attempt are not limited to practicing law only on Tuesdays” – Wormeli, 2011

Rick Wormeli

We allow people to retake their driver’s license exam as many times as they need to in order to demonstrate competency. The same is true of other professionals such as teachers, lawyers, doctors, and electricians who are required to pass a certification/licensure exam. Reassessment is a part of our real world. I find it ironic, then, that, as educators, we cringe at the thought of allowing reassessments in the classroom in an effort to “prepare kids for the real world!” I held this belief until a few years ago when O’Connor and Stiggins (2009) and Wormeli (2011) helped set me straight. Reflecting back, I now cringe at the harsh reality that, from 2001 to 2006, I sent hundreds and hundreds of students into the real world without the opportunity to reassess to solidify their learning.

At my school, Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, New Hampshire, we believe in the concept of reassessments so much that we actually have a school-wide common procedure that supports its use in all classes. In fact, we have a number of school-wide common grading procedures that are designed to support our competency-based grading and reporting system, one that is now in its third year of implementation K-12 in our district.

In a competency-based system, reassessments are a necessary part of the learning process. “True competence that stands the test of time comes with reiterative learning. We carry forward concepts and skills we encounter repeatedly, and we get better at retrieving them the more we experience them.” (Wormeli, 2011). Making reassessments a school-wide practice changes the learning culture for students from one where they are trying to earn enough points to pass to one in which they are held accountable for everything they need to know and be able to do. Reeves (2000) describes the cultural shift that will happen over time as schools implement such a policy. “The consequence for a student who fails to meet a standard is not a low grade, but rather an opportunity – indeed, the requirement – to resubmit his or her work.” Indeed, that cultural shift is happening today at my school. (more…)

ME Center for Best Practices

There are more and more people wanting to understand what competency education is and what it looks like in a school and in a classroom. It’s not easy if you live in a place far from the most innovative schools. So here are a few ways you can learn more about competency education (or proficiency-based, mastery-based or performance-based approaches).

1. Re-inventing Schools Coalition is offering a distance-learning course on how to create a personal mastery classroom. The course, Tools to Create a Standards-Based Classroom, will be taught by Greg Johnson from Bering Strait School District. The reading list includes:

•  Marzano, R. J., & Kendall, J. S., A comprehensive guide to designing standards-based districts, schools, and classrooms. (1996).
• Delorenzo, R. A., Battino, W. J., Schreiber, R. M., Gaddy Carrio, B. B., Delivering on the Promise: The Education Revolution.
• Tomlinson, C. A., McTighe, J., Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding Design.

2. Great Schools Partnership offers a series of webinars. Coming up next:

• February 11: Response to Intervention: Supporting Student Success. This is an important topic as many schools forget to build up their capacity to deliver supports the first year. Then find themselves with a lot of students not yet proficient at the end of the semester.
• March 5: Proficiency-based Learning Simplified: Supporting Students with Disabilities with Kelley Rush Sanborn, Special Education Director from Mount Desert Island in Maine. (more…)

I just took a peek at the New England Secondary Schools Consortium agenda for the conference High School Redesign in Action March 20-21. It is packed full of sessions on competency education (or proficiency-based if you live in Maine or mastery-based if you live in Connecticut) and personalized learning. Here are a few of the highlights – wish I could be there.

Agents of Their Own Learning: A District’s Proficiency-Based System Enters Maturity: District staff, principals and teachers from Maine’s Regional School Unit 2 will discuss what they’ve learned from several years of implementation, including structure, schedule, and other design elements that have empowered the district to dramatically increase personalization for students.

A Mastery-Based Lesson on Mastery-Based Learning is a look at how High School in the Community has advanced mastery-based learning to help all students take more responsibility over their own education, while they also address skill deficits, acquire college- and career-ready skills, and excel in their areas of interest. It is led by teachers Gail Emilsson and Adeline Marzialo.
(more…)