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.
CHAPTER 2
Learner-Centered Instruction
This chapter discusses four principles for PCBE related to learner-centered instruction. It then offers detailed guidance to help your team develop more of your shared vision for your classrooms, school, and district.
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.
Principles for Learner-Centered Instruction
Competency-based student progress requires instruction to be personalized—customized to each student’s learning needs—rather than standardized. But how can this seemingly difficult task be managed? It requires learner-centered instruction, along with new roles for teachers, students, parents, and technology (core idea 4). Learner-centered instruction has two major parts:
A focus on individual learners (their heredity, experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, talents, interests, capacities, and needs) [and] a focus on learning (the best available knowledge about learning, how it occurs, and what teaching practices are most effective in promoting the highest levels of motivation, learning, and achievement for all learners). (McCombs & Whisler, 1997, p. 11)
Four principles for learner-centered instruction have strong research support (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Lambert & McCombs, 1998; McCombs, 1994, 2013; McCombs & Miller, 2007; McCombs & Whisler, 1997; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Weimer, 2002).
Principle E: Learning by doing
Principle F: Instructional support
Principle G: Personalized learning
Principle H: Collaborative learning
These principles are highly interrelated and interdependent with each other and with the principles for competency-based education. The following is an introduction to each of these principles.
Principle E: Learning by Doing
Generally, the most effective way to learn is by doing, especially for younger students (American Psychological Association, 1993; Bransford et al., 2000; Freeman et al., 2014; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Newman, 2003; Preeti, Ashish, & Shriram, 2013; Schank, Berman, & Macpherson, 1999; Strobel & van Barneveld, 2009; Vega, 2012; Walker & Leary, 2009). Types of learning by doing include project-based, problem-based, inquiry-based, task-based, maker-based, and hands-on learning. We collectively refer to these forms of learning as project-based instruction, which enhances motivation, retention, and transfer to the real world.
Some people are concerned that project-based instruction may hurt students’ college admissions. However, efforts such as the Reimagining College Access project (Gewertz, 2018) are underway to change college admissions to focus more on students’ projects. Students from project-based schools, such as the Minnesota New Country School, are having great success with college admissions (Aslan & Reigeluth, 2016; Thomas et al., 2005).
In project-based instruction, each student chooses or designs a project as a vehicle to master specific content. Projects may be of many different types and scopes, as long as they are chosen or designed by the student and serve as a vehicle to master a predefined set of competencies, or learning targets. Giving students choice increases their motivation, but teachers and even parents may influence the choice or design of a project, especially for younger students. As students grow older, projects should increasingly focus on bettering the student’s world, not just the student (Prensky, 2016; Wagner, 2012)—see Principle I: Relevance to Students’ Current and Future Lives (page 58). This is sometimes referred to as community-based learning, service learning, or place-based learning.
• The projects are typically collaborative to prepare students for the way most projects are executed in the workplace, home, and community; but some are occasionally done individually.
• The projects are typically interdisciplinary because that’s what most authentic projects are like.
• They are of significant scope for the developmental level of the student, ranging from hours or days for preschoolers to months or years for high school students.
• The projects are also bound by time and space. They may be done in the classroom if they only require resources and activities available there, or they may be done in the real world (place-based and community-based learning) if they require resources and activities only available there. It seems likely that many real-world projects will eventually use augmented reality (Bower, Howe, McCredie, Robinson, & Grover, 2014), which superimposes virtual images, text, and sounds on a mobile device’s camera screen and speaker (for example, the game Pokémon GO), to support performance of the project. Projects may be done in a virtual world through computer simulations if such resources are available. The popular computer game Oregon Trail is an example of this, and schools will probably utilize virtual reality as that technology becomes less expensive and more powerful (Freina & Ott, n.d.). Presently the classroom is where most projects are conducted, and this will likely continue to be the case, especially for younger students.
In situations when such projects are not the best options for learning (as in the cases of literature and reading skills and some math skills, for example) other kinds of activities should be used.
Lab Atlanta
“At Lab Atlanta, a community makerspace in Atlanta run by a private school, high schoolers can take a semester-long course to invent projects that promote sustainability for their city, such as addressing air and water quality and improving public transportation” (Dintersmith, 2018, p. 24).
Principle F: Instructional Support
Gaining the ability to discover new knowledge and skills on one’s own is important, but using the discovery approach for all learning is highly inefficient (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006; Sweller, 1994). Scaffolding accelerates learning and helps all students reach their potential. It can take the form of adjusting, coaching, or tutoring.
• Adjusting entails tailoring the complexity or difficulty of the project to the level of the student. To use a familiar, concrete example, imagine a project that entails learning to drive a car. The complexity or difficulty of the project could be adjusted by requiring a standard versus automatic transmission, requiring driving in heavy versus light traffic, requiring parallel parking or not, requiring hill starts
