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CHAPTER 2

Building the Foundation of a Competency-Based Learning System Through PLCs

Teacher collaboration is one of the best supports a school leader can provide to his or her school staff (DuFour et al., 2016). In this chapter, we explore how that ongoing process, one in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve, best supports a competency-based learning model. We identify the PLC framework as the single best support network that schools need in order to successfully implement competency-based learning. When implemented correctly, the PLC framework cultivates teachers who become collectively responsible and mutually accountable for the learning of students in their school. Teachers become supports for each other, and teacher teams become integral parts of both the decision-making process and instructional leadership for competency-based learning. And, the work of collaborative teams and work done throughout the school is transparent. Student learning, a collaborative culture, and constant reflection become the norm, and these are the levers that will effect change through the work of the PLC.

Any systems change requires hard work, dedication of the entire staff, and the understanding of why the change is necessary. It is imperative to have the foundational structures in place to allow collaboration to occur within a school. The PLC framework is the vehicle for this change.

It is important to recognize, however, that transforming into a PLC does not happen overnight. Many administrators and educators have sought a silver bullet that not only allows them to build and implement high-functioning PLCs but also simultaneously implement standards-based grading and competency-based learning. If high levels of learning for all learners is the why, we maintain that PLCs are the how, and competency-based learning is the what (see figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1: Competency-based learning and PLCs.

To attempt to embark down the road to a competency-based learning system without working as a highly functioning PLC will lead to failure.

Competency-based learning and PLCs are a true fit if implemented correctly and with fidelity. To attempt to embark down the road to a competency-based learning system without working as a highly functioning PLC will lead to failure. We’ve seen it happen, and it undercuts this learning model before it even has a chance to get off the ground. The implementation of PLCs provides the initial steps that must develop in a competency-based learning model.

The Foundation of a PLC

The architects of the PLC model, Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, and Robert Eaker, along with Thomas W. Many and Mike Mattos (2016), describe the four pillars of a PLC—the mission, vision, values (collective commitments), and goals—as the foundation of a PLC. Questions guide each of the four pillars, providing opportunities for staff members to engage in dialogue to build consensus. Utilizing the four pillars of a PLC can help a district or school build a road map for competency-based learning. Educators and other staff must understand and commit to the reasons for transforming their educational system. Outlining the mission, vision, values, and goals of the organization together helps build a common understanding and commitment to the work. From there, teams in PLCs will work collaboratively to define the specifics at each grade level.

Mission: Why Do We Exist?

The first pillar of a PLC is the mission. The mission answers the question, Why do we exist (DuFour et al., 2016)? Staff must explore this question together. There are many successful ways to do this; the common thread is that conversations occur in an honest and safe environment at both the district level, within the collaborative leadership team at schools, and within teacher teams. Those within a school must be clear on their fundamental purpose, and those within a community should be clear about student expectations within that community. This common understanding at all levels promotes a sense of “we are all in this together,” leading to a collective effort to achieve a mutually desired outcome.

Schools transitioning to a competency-based learning model should frame their work around this question: “Do we accept high levels of learning for all students as the fundamental purpose of our school and therefore are willing to examine all practices in light of their impact on learning” (DuFour et al., 2016, p. 14)? This one question will not only frame short-term conversations as teams work together to develop the mission and vision, determine collective commitments (values), and build goals together but also the many follow-up conversations for years to come.

This question should be the beacon for a school implementing such transformative change. Staff members can go back to this question to determine if a strategy truly supports the belief that all students in the school are learning at high levels, and staff won’t make excuses when multiple data points suggest things should be done differently.

Successful competency-based learning schools typically use data to identify groups of students who are not demonstrating the expected growth over the course of many years. When this happens, it makes sense that a school will need to take a hard look at its practices. This is a difficult and time-consuming process, and even after several years of implementation, it is important to continue to analyze multiple data points to ensure growth is occurring for all students.

Competency-based learning meets learners where they are and allows them to progress at their own speed along a developmental continuum.

Competency-based learning meets learners where they are and allows them to progress at their own speed along a developmental continuum.

Asking the question of why an educational institution exists will lead to learning for all. Remember, a competency-based learning model is based on what students learn, not what they earn. It wholly supports the mission and vision of becoming a system that focuses on learning and provides students every opportunity to demonstrate that learning at a high level.

Vision: What Must We Become to Accomplish Our Fundamental Purpose?

The vision question (DuFour et al., 2016) specifically asks teachers to focus on what needs to change. The school can determine the answer only through honest and open dialogue. The outcome of that dialogue provides inspiration not only to educators within the school but also the greater community.

In many schools going through this reflective process, adults in the school identify their focus on adult issues instead of what they should be expending their energy on—the student-centered issues that truly matter within their school. Once staff make that distinction, it becomes much easier to focus collective energy. Teachers will start to look at how the school can truly commit to learning for all.

In many successful U.S. competency-based learning districts, educators have made a concerted effort to deeply involve their communities in the systems change process. The Lindsay Unified School District in California asked the following five questions of its entire community to frame its shared purpose (or vision):

1. Why do we exist?

2. What are the values that will govern how we interact with each other?

3. What are the principles by which we will make decisions?

4. What is our vision for the future?

5. What is the description of our graduates? (Sturgis, 2015, p. 22)

Chugach School District is small, but spread out over twenty-two thousand miles in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Chugach began its journey to a competency-based education system in the mid-1990s and has made impressive growth since. Director and founder of MetisNet (www.metisnet.net) Chris Sturgis (2015) describes Chugach Superintendent Bob Crumley’s effort:

Chugach solidified the school board and district leadership commitment to a long-term strategy and created an intentional communication strategy that reinforced the idea that the system transformation will take several years. They also used data to intensify the sense of urgency by reminding people of the poor results in the traditional system as well as celebrating small steps of progress. Most importantly, they kept their community engaged so members could continue to deepen their understanding and celebrate alongside the students who were beginning to thrive and enjoy coming to school. (p. 64)

Superintendent Crumley was honest when communicating to the local school board and community; he made it very clear that the change process would take years, and that the traditional system resulted in poor outcomes, further amplifying the need for change. Sharing this upfront is incredibly important.

Similarly, John Freeman, superintendent for Pittsfield School District School Administrative Unit (SAU) 51 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, describes his district’s move to competency-based learning as a process developed with the entire community, literally during a pig roast.

Practitioner Perspective

Virgel Hammonds, Chief Learning Officer, KnowledgeWorks; Former Principal, Lindsay Unified High School; and Former Superintendent, Regional School Unit 2

Though thousands of miles apart and culturally very different, Lindsay Unified School District (LUSD) in California and Regional School Unit 2 (RSU2) in Maine share a common vision for learning. Both aspire to empower students to be drivers of their education in a highly personalized, competency-based system. Each learning community’s journey is unique, but the vision is the same: to ensure every child’s dreams become reality.

In 2005, LUSD was at a crossroads. The city of Lindsay and the school district had made concerted efforts to improve and had seen some gains; however, the school and community both believed growth could be accelerated. School district and city leaders agreed to hold a series of community forums to discuss how LUSD could become a world-class district. Neighbors, businesses, civic and school employees (LUSD is the city’s largest employer), community organizations, clergy members, nonprofits, and students were invited to collaborate on how to make this vision a reality. Over the course of a year, the LUSD community established guiding principles for how they would serve and support one another. They established a commitment to lifting each stakeholder while holding all accountable to the vision of Empowering and Motivating for Today and Tomorrow.

Purposely, the community left out the words child, learner, student, and so on as they believed this vision was an opportunity to collectively support the evolution of everyone in or serving the community. At that point, the school district and city had come together to form a strong, collaborative union—a learning community.

Like any great school district, LUSD provided its instructional teams with strong professional development. With a large migrant population, the district placed heavy emphasis on literacy and instructional pedagogy. The staff focused on grading practices and had hard conversations about averaging and scoring work. Educators and support staff established collaborative teams to discuss strategies, data, and lessons learned in the classroom. Despite LUSD’s efforts, student gains were not as strong as the district desired. Staff believed the district, their learners, and the community could do more; however, the next step toward making the vision a reality was unclear.

In the summer of 2007, LUSD was finalizing its plans for a new high school—an opportunity to rethink learning strategies in the high school. The secondary team took an instructional audit and realized they had a passion for ensuring each learner’s success. The team always strived to support its learners both within the classroom and throughout the community. However, academic success did not reflect their efforts. As a team, members dug deeper. They asked one another, “How are you holding students accountable and to what expectations?” Realizing their expectations for teaching and learning varied greatly, the team members made a commitment to establishing common expectations for learning (designed competencies for all courses) and agreed to advance students solely based on mastery, not seat time. And, if that wasn’t a large enough lift, they created a new learning ecosystem where students were empowered and motivated to prove their mastery in highly personalized ways. These action steps were bold, but the team believed it (and its learners) was up to the challenge.

After daily process checks with staff, learners, and parents, teams made adjustments and refinements—such as grouping and regrouping kids, strategic direct instruction, design thinking, refinement of personal goals, assessment, and so on—and implemented them immediately.

Process checks were so frequent, the teams became masterfully collaborative. Discuss, confirm (data), design, implement, observe, and repeat became the Lindsay High School routine. At times the team did the twist, but often it was poetry in motion.

At the conclusion of the 2007–2008 school year, LHS had far surpassed its previous academic gains. Adequate yearly progress (AYP) target scores quadrupled. More important, stakeholders were excited. With support from the superintendent’s office, LHS shared its momentum with other district schools that then replicated (in unique ways) its successes. In 2017, LUSD is known as an exemplar in personalized and competency-based learning. And LHS ranks in the top 1 percent of schools on the California Healthy Kids Survey, which focuses on school climate and learner success.

When the Maine school consolidation law passed, many communities expressed Dorothy’s sentiments—“We’re not in Kansas anymore.” In 2007, the Maine legislature passed LD 2323, An Act to Remove Barriers to the Reorganization of School Administrative Units (Maine Department of Education, 2008). The law was established to ensure learning opportunities, rigorous academic programs, uniformity in delivering programs, a greater uniformity in tax rates, more efficient and effective use of limited resources, preservation of school choice and maximum opportunity to deliver services in an efficient manner.

With this passage, the State of Maine saved $66 million annually, but it also forced highly independent school districts into a loss of local control to consolidation and thus their culture and community identity. This loss of local tradition and processes was a concern.

A tornado of anxiety tore through the state.

Regional School Unit 2, which serves the towns of Dresden, Farmingdale, Hallowell, Monmouth, and Richmond, saw this law as an opportunity to think differently about how they could collectively support the unique needs of the 2,400 students living within this new, extended family within five towns. The region held countless meetings in schools, homes, churches, town halls, farms, theaters, and any other location where people congregated within each community. Everyone—from students to the senior town spokesperson—was invited to discuss how all RSU2 community members could support each student in meeting learners’ desired personal and professional goals.

RSU2 educators discussed the following four questions with the community.

1. What is our ultimate commitment to each student?

2. What are we preparing our students for?

3. How may each community member be a part of the solution?

4. How will the support of our community accelerate the growth of our students and our five towns?

Throughout 2009, the RSU2 towns evolved from five independent communities into one community of learners focused on putting students at the center of all learning decisions. The RSU2 learning community wanted to establish an ecosystem that embraced learner voice and choice through varied year-round learning opportunities occurring both inside and outside the schools.

The RSU2 learning community would work collaboratively to support highly personalized, competency-based learning opportunities via community projects that needed new solutions; internships with community and state partners; experiential learning engagements nurtured by educators and community members alike; and the students themselves. RSU2 parents and business leaders wanted their high school graduates to analyze and think critically, write and speak effectively, and collaboratively solve complex problems today and in the future. Equally important, the learning community requested students also be given the opportunity to learn at different paces based on their individual learning needs.

RSU2’s engagement of the entire community allows for the exponential growth of learning supports available to students, educators, and families. Though the consolidation law forced RSU2 communities to collaborate, it also allowed them to think differently about their schools, students, and commitment to regional prosperity.

LUSD and RSU2 are two unique stories separated by thousands of miles, but unified by one common vision: “A Community of Student Centered Learning.” To establish a highly personalized learning ecosystem, schools cannot continue to solely depend on the miraculous measures of our educators. (V. Hammonds, personal communication, October 2016)

Values: How Must We Behave to Achieve Our Vision?

As education visionary Thomas J. Sergiovanni (2007) writes:

When people are gathered together to share ideas and to commit to these ideas, their relationships change. They make promises to each other—implicitly perhaps, but promises nonetheless. And thus they are likely to feel morally obliged to keep their promises. (p. 3)

The values pillar is crucial. As Richard DuFour (2015) writes in In Praise of American Educators, the shift in thinking changes from the future of the vision to today. Shifting to competencies is a result of educators identifying the need for change today to prepare students for tomorrow.

As districts and schools move forward in their learning together, they must adhere to three specific collective commitments that will guide them. These commitments align precisely with the three big ideas that drive the work of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016).

1. We accept learning as the fundamental purpose of our school and therefore are willing to examine all practices in light of their impact on learning.

2. We are committed to working together to achieve our collective purpose.

3. We will assess our effectiveness on the basis of results.

Schools must then delineate what each of these ideas will look like. This is a very important part of the process because these commitments state the conditions for what everyone will expect of each other. A safe, orderly, and respectful environment for all learners within a school, for example, is inclusive of both students and adults. The moral authority and collegial pressure of such an expectation is far more effective than any edict from an administrator deeming certain behaviors inappropriate.

Schools and teams need to revisit these three collective commitments and, using multiple data points, determine their growth within each area. They can then refine their practices based on this data.

Goals: How Will We Mark Our Progress?

The fourth pillar involves developing shared goals (DuFour et al., 2016). The process of developing school, team, and individual goals is an indicator of progress toward attaining a shared purpose. This process allows educators to confront their current reality together, and then make informed decisions about how they can move forward both as a system and as individuals to effect positive change.

SMART (strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and time bound) goals are a very productive way to track progress on a short-term or longterm basis (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014). Schools that develop building-level goals based on their current reality provide common goals for teams to build their own goals based on their own data. Teams should formally assess their SMART goals at least midyear and again at the end of the year, although ongoing data collection and analysis are imperative throughout the year. During the midyear check, teams can report on which goals they are on track to meet or not meet, and how they are going to address any areas of deficiency. This provides teams with a road map to make any needed changes. During the end-of-year reporting, teachers should identify what helped them achieve each goal and what instruction may have been missing that didn’t allow students to effectively progress. This helps teachers become cognizant of each student’s individual needs so they can adjust instruction appropriately to provide the support and intervention necessary for continued growth.

Teams that develop SMART goals have a clear understanding of why the goals are important, how they relate to daily instruction, and how they support and, in many ways, define the work of their PLC. Teams can report progress on these goals to parents, the community, and a district’s school board throughout the year.

SMART goals allow schools to become even more focused as they transition to a competency-based learning model. Teams look very closely at growth data across all cohorts and even down to each individual student in the school. When teachers are aware of this information, it causes them to change instructional practices to become crystal clear about how to help each student attain growth in demonstrating the competencies.

Transparency is crucial in any system, and schools and districts that successfully navigate this change process openly acknowledge areas of progress and areas in which progress has proven difficult. There will be times of celebration, but there will also be times when the trajectory may need to change. Leaders must recognize and act during these times. If leaders believe strongly that what they are doing is best for students and their school, then they must be willing to communicate in an honest and forthright manner. This makes parents aware of the progress (or lack of progress) being made as a school and begins to develop the trust necessary for the community to work hand in hand with the school.

The Four Critical Questions of a PLC and Competency-Based Learning

One of the greatest indicators as to how well a PLC will support competency-based learning is by examining the four critical questions of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016). As DuFour (2015) states:

[The] curriculum needed to provide all students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for the 21st century will be far more rigorous and challenging than either teachers or students are accustomed…. Educators must now ensure that every student who graduates from high school is ready for college or a career. (p. 138)

This quote speaks directly to competency and the need for a system to ensure that all students have opportunities to engage in experiences that provide chances to practice and learn these abilities:

› Critical-thinking skills and problem-solving skills

› Creativity and innovation

› Effective communication through clear and convincing written and oral expression

› Collaboration skills

› Inferential reasoning

› Analytical-thinking skills

› Self-directed learning (in other words, having learned how to learn)

› Transference of learning to new situations

› Evaluation of sources for importance and credibility

› Openness to and utilization of critical feedback (DuFour, 2015, p. 138)

Competency, by definition, is the “ability to transfer content and skill in and/or across content areas” (Bramante & Colby, 2012, p. 65). So the four critical questions of a PLC help determine precisely what students must be able to demonstrate to successfully show their competency, assist teachers in building assessments that allow students to demonstrate competency, and provide integrated opportunities for support or extension, depending on each student’s needs.

We will examine each question to further support this assertion.

What Do We Expect Students to Know and Be Able to Do?

Teachers should be crystal clear about what students are expected to know and demonstrate in their learning. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) outline a backward design process for answering this question:

We cannot say how to teach for understanding, or which material and activities to use, until we are quite clear about which specific understandings we are after and what such understandings look like in practice.” (pp. 14–15)

Utilizing a backward design planning system, teams make the outcomes for any unit clear to learners.

Many educators have difficulty determining the difference between a standard and a competency. In their book Off the Clock, Bramante and Colby (2012) describe standards as the what of learning and competencies as the why of learning. Another way to look at it is to think of competencies as the umbrella, with the leverage and enduring standards beneath the umbrella of competency.

Larry Ainsworth (as cited in DuFour et al., 2016) provides clarity on priority standards (those that provide leverage and those deemed to be enduring) by explaining that students will be able to apply leverage standards across subject areas, while with enduring standards, students will need to know and be able to demonstrate competency beyond the specific course or grade level.

It is impossible for any teacher to cover the sheer number of existing standards. Competency-based learning focuses on depth over breadth. As Robert J. Marzano and Mark W. Haystead (2008) note, “Schooling, as currently configured, would have to be extended from kindergarten to grade 21 or 22 to accommodate all the standards” (p. 7). The important skills involve transfer at a depth of knowledge (DOK) level 3 or 4. Norman Webb’s (2005) depth of knowledge refers to the complexity of thinking required to successfully and appropriately complete a task or assignment (Aungst, 2014):

Level 1: Recall and Reproduction