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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Competency-Based Education
This chapter discusses four principles for competency-based education that are universally helpful for maximizing student learning and guiding all students to reach their potential. It then offers detailed guidance to help your team develop this aspect of your vision for your classrooms, school, and district. While this core idea focuses on competency-based education, please keep in mind that the remaining five core ideas are essential and interdependent aspects of the PCBE paradigm of education.
We do not offer these principles and guidelines as a blueprint for what you should do. Rather, we offer them to assist your team as you engage in rich discussions and collaborations to design an ideal PCBE system in your unique context. For guidance on forming your team, see steps 1.2 and 2.1 in chapter 10 (page 189) for an independent school or steps 1.2 and 2 in chapter 9 (page 159) for a school or schools in a district.
Principles for Competency-Based Education
For an education system to be focused primarily on learning (rather than sorting), student progress must be based on learning (not time). This requires learning targets to be clearly established, student assessment to measure what each student has actually learned, and student records to indicate what each student has learned, rather than comparing students to other students. Thus, competency-based education is a four-legged stool. The four legs are the four principles within this core idea.
Principle A: Competency-based student progress
Principle B: Competency-based student assessment
Principle C: Competency-based learning targets
Principle D: Competency-based student records
If any one of these legs is missing, the stool will fall. So, what should each of these legs be like? The following is an introduction to each of these principles.
Principle A: Competency-Based Student Progress
In a competency-based system, students move on when they have learned and can demonstrate the understandings or skills. If it’s important enough to teach, it is important enough to make sure students learn it. Thus, no student moves on before mastering the current topic, and each student moves on as soon as he or she masters the current topic. Student progress is based on learning rather than time (Bloom, 1984). This means many students in a classroom are working on different topics at any given time, which requires a personal learning plan for every student. This may seem like too much for a teacher to manage, but that’s only true if you try to do it within an Education 2.0 system. The use of different teaching tools (such as the self-correcting materials in the classroom vignette at the beginning of part I, page 11), the use of technology to track student progress, and a totally different way of organizing learning in a PCBE (Education 3.0) system actually make teaching easier and more rewarding for teachers, as well as better for student learning (Kulik, Kulik, Bangert-Drowns, & Slavin, 1990).
Principle B: Competency-Based Student Assessment
For a student to move on as soon as he or she has learned the current material, the teacher must know when the student has mastered it. This is a very different purpose for assessment than in Education 2.0, which is typically norm-referenced assessment, designed to identify how much a student has learned compared to other students (Gallagher, 2003). Hence, PCBE requires a different paradigm of assessment—criterion-referenced assessment—which compares student performance to a standard (or criterion). Competency-based assessment requires a completely different set of psychometrics from norm-referenced assessment, making it a truly different paradigm of assessment.
New Hampshire
“Students across New Hampshire are evaluated not on pop quizzes, but on demonstrated competency tied to teacher-driven, performance-based assessments” (Dintersmith, 2018, p. 24).
This kind of assessment must be performed on each individual competency, or learning target (see Principle C: Competency-Based Learning Targets), when the student is ready for it. This is in contrast to the current practice of a large test that covers many competencies—whether or not the student is ready for it—and students pass even if they have not mastered up to 40 percent of the competencies (Marzano, 2006, 2010). In fact, competency-based assessment does not have to be in the form of a pencil-and-paper test. Rather, it should be performance-based and follow the motto of practice until perfect— the performance on practice becomes the test (Patrick, Worthen, Frost, & Gentz, 2016; see Principle F: Instructional Support, page 29). Furthermore, it is important to assess the student’s ability to combine many smaller competencies into broader competencies, or standards. This fits the concept of badges.
Badges are an assessment and credentialing mechanism to validate learning in both formal and informal settings. Like scouting badges, they are a way of certifying mastery of a set of specific competencies. Digital badges are being used increasingly in K–12 and higher education settings.
Principle C: Competency-Based Learning Targets
To know when each student has learned the current material, the teachers have to define the content in the form of learning targets, which are more detailed than typical state and national standards (Educational Impact, n.d.). A good target is a kind of learning goal or objective that provides enough information for the teacher—and the student—to judge that the student has achieved mastery. Criteria for mastery are key. Even deep understandings and social-emotional learning can be formulated as learning targets.
People are right to caution that breaking down standards can lead to fragmentation in instruction (Wiggins, 2017), but learning by doing (principle E) places the learning targets within a holistic, meaningful context, while instructional support (principle F) allows the teacher to assess mastery in a broad range of relevant, realistic situations. This means that state standards must be broken down into learning targets that have criteria for mastery. Furthermore, there are different levels of mastery for most learning targets, and those levels constitute a proficiency scale (Marzano, 2010), which Marzano defines as “a series of related [learning targets] that culminate in the attainment of a more complex learning goal” (p. 11).
Principle D: Competency-Based Student Records
To make decisions about what a student should learn next, one must know what the student has already learned. Current student records (report cards with a single grade for each course) tell you nothing about that—they only tell you the courses the student attended and how well the student did compared to other students. What you need instead is a list of individual learning targets the student has mastered, often accompanied by a portfolio, rubric assessment, or other proof of mastery, sometimes called a digital backpack. Student records should also provide information about who the child is as a learner—interests, strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and so forth.
Technology can make this more comprehensive kind of student record easier to maintain than the norm-referenced report cards commonly used today. When students take a tutorial on a digital device while they are working on a team project, the results can be automatically entered into the record-keeping system, as is already being done by Khan Academy and many other learning management systems. Even when teachers need to observe student performance (for example, public speaking) and enter information about mastery into the record-keeping system, a handheld device with a rubric or set of criteria can ease the task of keeping detailed records of competencies mastered by each student.
Some skeptics worry that changing student records will be a problem for college admissions. However, according to Ken O’Connor, Lee Ann Jung, and Douglas Reeves (2018), “a growing number of college admissions officers find grade-point averages to be of little use (Marklein, 2013)…. Grades do not typically represent student achievement but rather an amalgam of achievement, behavior, compliance, and test-taking skill” (p. 67). Many post-secondary educational institutions have developed alternatives to the grade-point average (GPA) for deciding on admissions, due to several factors. One is the growth of the homeschooling movement, which has no GPAs. Another is the growing number of high schools, districts, and even states that have adopted competency-based report cards (see Competency-Based Report Cards for an example). Furthermore, more than a thousand accredited colleges and universities are “test optional” or otherwise de-emphasize the use of standardized tests (FairTest, 2019). Some parents feel compelled to compare their student to others. To satisfy this need, they can compare the number of competencies mastered by their student in a given period.
Competency-Based Report Cards
From 1998 to 2004, New Hampshire launched competency-based education pilots in twenty-seven high schools. In July 2005, the New Hampshire State Department of Education allowed school boards to award credit based on either seat time or demonstrations of mastery of the required course competencies. For the 2008–2009 school year and beyond, the state required local school boards to adopt policies for all students to earn high school credit by demonstrating mastery of required competencies for a course, as approved by certified school personnel. For example, at Sanborn High School in Kingston, New Hampshire, all courses use a competency-based grading and student record system. Throughout this process the department sought to respect local control.
Source: New Hampshire Department of Education, n.d., 2016.
Systemic Requirements for CBE
Chris Sturgis and Katherine Casey (2018) identify the systemic nature of competency-based education by identifying sixteen design principles for CBE in three categories:
A. Purpose and Culture
1. Center the school around a shared purpose
2. Commit to equity
3. Nurture a culture of learning and inclusivity
4. Foster the development of a growth mindset
5. Cultivate empowering and distributed leadership
B. Teaching and Learning
6. Base school design and pedagogy on learning sciences
7. Activate student agency and ownership
8. Design for the development of rigorous higher-level skills
9. Ensure responsiveness
C. Structure
10. Seek intentionality and alignment
11. Establish mechanisms to ensure consistency and reliability
12. Maximize transparency
13. Invest in educators as learners
14. Increase organizational flexibility
15. Develop processes for continuous improvement and organizational learning
16. Advance upon demonstrated mastery
Source: Sturgis & Casey, 2018.
Detailed Guidance for Competency-Based Education
We recommend that you read all the sections titled Principles in chapters 1 through 6 before reading the Detailed Guidance section in any of those chapters, because the principles are so interrelated and interdependent that it is crucial to understand the big picture before getting into specific details. Any effort to move to PCBE that focuses on one core idea without making changes in other core ideas is likely to fail.
We begin with considerations for implementing the principles in the classroom, followed by school-level considerations, and finally district-level considerations.
Westminster Public Schools
The Westminster Public School District in Colorado is one of the leading school districts in the United States for implementing PCBE. It uses the New Art and Science of Teaching instructional model designed by Robert J. Marzano (2017). You can visit www.westminsterpublicschools.org/Page/9094 to learn more.
Classroom-Level Considerations
To implement competency-based education at the classroom level, your team must make decisions about student progress, assessment, learning targets, and student records. First think in the ideal for a long-term vision (step 2.1 in chapter 10, page 196), and then compromise as necessary for your initial implementation (step 2.3 in chapter 10, page 200).
Principle A: Competency-Based Student Progress
Your team needs to decide about moving from time-based student progress to learning-based student progress. Here is the main question you should consider.
How can we foster and assess each student’s learning individually, rather than having everyone learn the same content at the same time and take the same test at the same time?
Ideally, the teachers should find or, if necessary, create learning resources that students can use on their own. Several organizations provide a wide variety of learning resources, both free (called open educational resources; see Open Educational Resources) and for a fee. Teachers should also try to integrate their assessments with their instruction, as is done in Khan Academy (Thompson, 2011), where students practice a competency, progressing through five levels of mastery, until they reach a criterion of, say, ten practice items correct in a row (Khan Academy, n.d.). This way, the practice is the test—there is no need for a separate test.
Teachers can accomplish this by using online resources such as Khan Academy or Engage NY. If technology is not available for teachers, a second option is to have students work in pairs with explanation and demonstration sheets and practice worksheets accompanied by answer sheets with rubrics. One student uses the worksheet to do the practice, while the other student uses the answer sheet (with a rubric) to judge mastery and provide immediate feedback when the performance does not meet the criteria. To do this, teachers would need to find or prepare several sets of worksheets with at least twenty items on each, so that the second student wouldn’t use the same worksheet that the first student used. Generally, the faster learner should answer a worksheet first, because the slower learner will learn a lot while assessing and giving feedback to the other student.
If technology is not available to use online instruction and it is not feasible for teachers to create the needed worksheets for all the learning targets, then teachers will need to use large-group assessment and instruction, which will significantly weaken your move to competency-based education. You might consider holding off until a more suitable solution is feasible.
Open Educational Resources (OERs)
Amazon Education (https://amzn.to/2MaVsGZ) offers a variety of services, including Amazon Inspire, which provides educators—regardless of funding or location—access to free digital teaching resources with rich features such as search, discovery, and peer reviews. It also allows schools to upload, manage, and share OERs.
Engage NY (www.engageny.org) is sponsored by the New York State Education Department and offers a free online library of Common Core–aligned curricula funded through a $700 million federal Race to the Top grant in 2010. As of 2019, it has about five thousand lessons, modules, units, primary resources, and texts.
GoOpen Campaign (tech.ed.gov/open) is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, and provides information about the twenty states and roughly one hundred school districts that it supports to offer OERs.
Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) provides a wide range of tutorials that include explanatory videos and practice to mastery. It also provides an automatic record-keeping system for keeping track of student progress and mastery.
OER Commons (www.oercommons.org) is a nonprofit organization sponsored by the Institute for Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) and offers free OERs and fee-based services.
Open Up Resources (openupresources.org) began as the K–12 OER Collaborative, a thirteen-state initiative to provide free, high-quality, standards-aligned educational resources. They also provide support to districts and schools for implementing these resources by offering such services as professional development and printing.
Summit Learning (www.summitlearning.org/guest/courses) offers a complete, standards-aligned curriculum for grades 4–12 in core subjects. It comes with projects, teaching and learning resources, and tests.
Principle B: Competency-Based Student Assessment
Your team should decide about moving from norm-referenced assessment (comparing student learning to that of other students) to criterion-referenced assessment (comparing student learning to a standard to determine mastery). You also need to develop those assessments. Marzano and colleagues (2017) offer detailed guidance and tools in A Handbook for Personalized Competency-Based Education for unpacking standards into essential topics with their associated learning targets and proficiency scales. Eric Hudson (2018) proposes that you consider the following questions as you develop competency-based assessments.
What competencies should we assess?
Competencies are typically expressed as learning targets. As such, we will discuss that aspect of assessment under the detailed guidance for principle C: competency-based learning targets (page 23).
What criteria and evidence should we use to assess mastery of each competency?
We suggest you form a task force of teachers for each level of learning (as described in step 2.3 in chapter 10, page 200) to determine what criteria are appropriate for each competency. With the criteria in mind, the teachers can decide what evidence would best demonstrate that the criteria have been met. Then the teachers should create a rubric for each competency to help them and the students to assess mastery. It is unwise to begin your implementation of PCBE until you have decided on criteria and evidence for each competency.
What tools should we use to keep track of competencies mastered?
In addition to decisions about competencies and the criteria and evidence for mastering them, you will need a way to keep track of the competencies that students have mastered. Digital badges are an excellent choice for doing this. They are an effective and flexible tool to guide, recognize, assess, and spur learning (Muilenberg & Berge, 2016). Digital badges can also recognize the soft skills not captured by standardized tests, such as critical or innovative thinking, teamwork, effective communication, and social-emotional learning. They are an indicator of accomplishment, along with evidence of that accomplishment, and are housed and managed online. Research shows that they enhance student motivation and self-direction skills (Dyjur & Lindstrom, 2017; Grant & Shawgo, 2013). David Niguidula (2019) offers field-tested guidance for using digital badges to demonstrate student mastery. Many badges have already been created that teachers can use, and many public schools use badges.
Badges in Public Schools
The 40,000-student Aurora Public School District in Colorado initiated a digital badging program in 2014 within its college- and career-success department based on discussions with local employers about important skills for their graduates to have (aurorak12.org/category/digital-badges). There are now different sets of badges in grades preK–2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–12. Each badge represents one of the 21st century skills in Colorado’s state standards, and a set of four or five “journey” badges amounts to one “summit” badge. Evidence accompanies each badge, so others can judge whether the student has met the criteria for mastery. More than twenty badges have been externally validated by community partners. The school district has a badge ambassador to build relationships with community partners.
The San Diego Unified School District started using digital badges in 2016 in their elementary, middle, and high schools (www.sandiegounified.org/badges).
Boston Beyond is piloting skill badges for middle school and high school students. Their website (bostonbeyond.org/initiatives/digital-badges) has some useful information.
These are just three of many public schools using badges.
Digital Badges
Open Badges (openbadges.org) is a technical standard for issuing, collecting, and displaying digital badges that includes such contextual information as what the badge represents, how and when it was earned, who issued it, and the criteria for awarding it.
Credly (credly.com) is an online web service where teachers can design, manage, and share digital badges.
Accredible (www.accredible.com/digital-badges) offers a free comprehensive guide and tools for designing and awarding digital badges.
HASTAC (www.hastac.org/initiatives/digital-badges) offers a collection of digital badges and webinars.
Principle C: Competency-Based Learning Targets
Competency-based assessment requires clear specification of competencies to be assessed. So, you should consider this question.
How can we break down topics and standards to the level of detail required for assessing mastery of each individual competency?
This can take a great deal of time, but it is likely that others who have transformed to PCBE have already done this work. Your challenge, then, is to find it and adapt it to your setting. See Resources for Learning Targets for some resources that may help. If you can’t find a detailed list of learning targets (preferably with criteria for mastery), your teacher task forces will need to take the time themselves to develop these essential tools. If you can’t afford the time, you should hold off transforming to PCBE until you can. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2011) offer guidance in the form of the Understanding by Design framework for creating your own learning targets.
Resources for Learning Targets
Marzano Resources offers a set of proficiency scales for learning targets in English language arts, math, science, social studies, and such additional content areas as metacognitive skills, cognitive analysis skills, knowledge application skills, life skills, and technology (www.marzanoresources.com/educational-services/critical-concepts).
Center for Curriculum Redesign supports the Assessment Research Consortium (curriculumredesign.org/assessment-research-consortium), a collaborative entity whose goal is to redesign systems of measuring students’ progress, aligned to 21st century competencies and desired education outcomes.
Competency Works (www.competencyworks.org) is an online resource dedicated to providing information and knowledge about competency education in the K-12 education system.
Mastery Collaborative (www.masterycollaborative.org) is a network of New York City schools that are transforming to mastery-based, culturally responsive education. It includes Living Lab, Incubator, and Active Member schools.
Performance Assessment of Competency Education (PACE) (www.education.nh.gov/assessment-systems/pace.htm) is a New Hampshire state initiative that offers a reduced level of standardized testing together with locally developed common performance assessments.
Principle D: Competency-Based Student Records
You need to decide how to keep track of what learning targets each student has mastered. You may find the Mastery Transcript Consortium (www.mastery.org) to be a helpful resource. It is a growing network of public and private schools that are creating a high school transcript to capture the unique skills, strengths, and interests of each student. Here are two questions you should consider.
How can we arrange to replace the traditional report card with a new student record that keeps track of each individual learning target that each student has mastered, including those for social-emotional learning and creativity?
If your school district will not allow replacing norm-referenced report cards, you will need to consider having both kinds of student records and decide how you will generate the grades on the norm-referenced report based on the targets mastered on the competency-based record. Marzano and colleagues (2017) offer advice on several ways to do this based on proficiency scales for each measurement topic. A common way is to give grades based on the number of learning targets mastered within the grading period, so that higher grades are given to students who have mastered more targets.
How will we maintain the record of learning targets mastered?
A digital learning management system (LMS) will greatly reduce the amount of time teachers need to spend on this task. We earlier explained that assessment should ideally be integrated with the instruction, so every student continues to work on a target (or set of targets) until it is mastered. Record keeping should also ideally be integrated with assessment so that the LMS automatically enters the learning target into the student’s record when it is mastered. Such a system can also keep other valuable data about student progress, performance, and interests. There are many learning management systems available, both for free and for a fee. A few are listed in Learning Management Systems, but we encourage you to explore other options, too.
Learning Management Systems
Edio facilitates project-based learning for teacher-designed, co-designed, and student-designed projects. It supports self-directed learning as students plan, manage, and revise their project work via movable taskboards and visual checklists. Every student’s progress is tracked through customizable reports, dashboards, and transcripts.
Empower delivers curriculum, instruction, and assessments and tracks, reports, and monitors progress for every student. It also has the Learner GPS, a tool for students to set goals and track their progress.
Moodle is a free, open source, modular LMS with a plug-in-based design. It has instruction, assessment, and reporting modules. It can be customized or modified through modular, interoperable plug-ins, and commercial and noncommercial projects can be shared without any licensing fees.
Canvas is a cloud-based learning management system that allows teachers to build lessons, set learning objectives, give feedback, and communicate with students. It contains a variety of resources and integrates with many other digital tools to simplify the logistics of teaching and learning.
Blackboard Classroom promises to personalize learning, increase student engagement, and boost teacher productivity with its Personalized Learning Designer and ability to use mobile devices. It also offers seamless integration with such productivity tools as Google, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Box.
D2L Brightspace helps teachers personalize learning by supporting self-pacing and pacing based on mastery, creating lessons aligned to standards using an intuitive course-building tool, tracking student progress through the school year with simple dashboards and reports, and integrating seamlessly with your existing tools, among other features.
Khan Academy provides a wide range of free tutorials that include explanatory videos and practice to mastery for student assessment. It also provides an automatic record-keeping system for keeping track of student progress and mastery.
Project Foundry, while not a complete LMS, scaffolds project-based learning with tools to help students plan, manage, collaborate, assess, and report their own learning.
Schoology is a K–12 learning management system that includes instructional tools and assessment management, allowing teachers to personalize learning for students.
More information about using competency-based education on the classroom level can be found in A Handbook for Personalized Competency-Based Education (Marzano et al., 2017), Making Mastery Work: A Close-Up View of Competency Education (Priest, Rudenstine, Weisstein, & Gerwin, 2012), Breaking With Tradition: The Shift to Competency-Based Learning in PLCs at Work (Stack & Vander Els, 2017), and When Success Is the Only Option: Designing Competency-Based Pathways for Next Generation Learning (Sturgis & Patrick, 2010).
School-Level and District-Level Considerations
As an individual school within a district or even an individual classroom within a school, you can implement competency-based learning targets and assessments. However, competency-based student progress and student records require some fundamental changes on the school and district levels. In PCBE, students should be able to move on to learn content at the next-higher grade level as soon as they are ready, and teachers should avoid reteaching content that a student has already mastered (though periodically reviewing or refreshing competencies is beneficial). For example, students who complete fifth-grade math halfway through the school year should be allowed to move on to sixth-grade math right away and not have to repeat it the next year. This requires that PCBE be implemented across classrooms in a school and even across schools in a district. Similarly, changing to competency-based student records must be done schoolwide, if not districtwide. Your change team should address that scope of change (see chapter 8, page 147 for guidance on that).
How will we allow students to move on to learn content at the next-higher grade level as soon as they are ready, and how will we avoid reteaching content that a student has already mastered?
Your classrooms will need the resources to help students learn content one or two grade levels higher than their current grade. Multi-age classrooms help in this regard, but teachers should perhaps also collaborate with teachers at the next-higher level. They can offer some of their resources to the next lower level and forward information about what the students have already mastered when they move to the next level. For students in their last year at your school, a teacher would need to collaborate with teachers at their next school or post-secondary institution.
How will we change the student record-keeping system for our school and district, so as not to overburden teachers with two systems?
Your team should work with stakeholders in your school, other schools in your district, and your district’s central office and school board to develop a districtwide (or at least schoolwide) competency-based record-keeping system to replace the norm-referenced report card. We recommend that this new system have two major parts: (1) a list of learning targets mastered and (2) evidence of such mastery (for example, portfolios, videos of performances, observer ratings, test scores), along with such information as date of mastery, who certified mastery, and so forth. In addition, you should consider bundling mastered learning targets into badges, certificates, certifications, licenses, or other kinds of credentials that are more useful than a huge list of individual learning targets.
What if we are unable to bring about change of that scope?
You can move toward that ideal in a single classroom or school by having teachers keep their own records of competencies mastered by each of their students, and then convert those records to the school or district format at the end of each grading period. However, the work of keeping two systems will overburden teachers, and, therefore, failure to implement competency-based student records districtwide will endanger the sustainability of your PCBE transformation.
Summary
This chapter described four principles for competency-based education that are universally helpful for maximizing student learning.
Principle A: Competency-based student progress
Principle B: Competency-based student assessment
Principle C: Competency-based learning targets
Principle D: Competency-based student records
It then offered detailed guidelines to help your team develop part of your shared ideal vision for your classrooms, school, and district.
