all children to reach their potential, given their individual talents and interests (Aslan & Reigeluth, 2015; Thomas et al., 2005)
• Lower the cost of education, especially by lowering administrative costs (Egol, 2003; Reigeluth, 2018)
• Reduce the bureaucracy, empowering teachers and empowering parents to play a larger role in their children’s education (Reigeluth, 2018)
• Improve the quality of life for educators, and consequently reduce the teacher shortage and improve teacher quality (Reigeluth, 2018).
So how can you do PCBE well? This is a matter of vision.
What Is the Vision?
In today’s fractured society, it is not easy for your school system to come up with a shared vision of education that will meet students’ needs as they face an uncertain and rapidly changing future. To tackle this task, it is important to think about changes in both what students learn and how they learn it.
What Students Learn
What students need to learn has been changing dramatically as we evolve deeper into the post-industrial age, partly because information is so readily available through the internet, partly because knowledge work is replacing manual labor as the predominant form of work, and partly because our society and its institutions and tools are becoming so much more complex.
We suggest that the major criterion for deciding what students learn should be its relevance to students’ current and future lives—what they need to learn to become happy, successful adults who contribute to their communities. Several influential educators (for example, Collins, 2017; Prensky, 2016) propose that the curriculum should focus on helping individual students find their passion, cultivate their individual talents to pursue that passion, and develop the skills necessary to achieve their goals, such as the ability to think critically, problem solve, and learn how to learn. This requires more than piecemeal changes to the curriculum—more than just adding some new courses. It requires a fundamental change, which we describe in chapter 3 (page 57).
How Students Learn
How students learn has also been changing dramatically in the post-industrial age, partly because learning sciences and instructional theory have greatly improved our understanding of how people learn and how best to help them learn, and partly because technological tools that can personalize learning have become more powerful. We suggest there are three keys to maximizing student learning: (1) student motivation, (2) scaffolding to support learning, and (3) a supportive learning environment.
1. Motivation: You can’t make a student learn. To maximize student learning, you must motivate the student to learn. Psychologist David McClelland (1987) identified three powerful motivators in his Three Needs Theory: the need for achievement, the need for affiliation, and the need for power. Instruction is more or less motivating to the extent that it addresses all three needs. PCBE addresses the need for achievement through a competency-based approach to learning that emphasizes real-world accomplishments. Student progress is based on mastery rather than time, so every student feels a sense of pride and accomplishment, and students learn by doing authentic projects that impact their world. PCBE addresses the need for affiliation through collaborative learning in a supportive environment. It also fulfills the need for power through self-directed learning with agency, voice, choice, and development of grit (Dweck, 2016).
2. Scaffolding: Motivation alone cannot maximize learning. Students also need personalized support that empowers them—scaffolding. This scaffolding may entail adjusting the difficulty or complexity of each project, coaching the student during performance on the project, or tutoring the student in new knowledge, skill, or understanding just before it’s needed in the project (Reigeluth, Myers, & Lee, 2017).
3. Supportive learning environment: Finally, a caring, supportive learning environment is essential to maximize student learning. It’s been said that if a student doesn’t think that you care, the student doesn’t care what you think. This requires building relationships that endure over more than just one year and includes relationships among students as well as relationships between students and the teacher. Caring means that the teacher knows about personal difficulties each student faces and helps the student deal with them. Trauma-informed teaching, a growing school movement that places students’ social and emotional needs at the center of the schooling experience, is an example of this.
Systems Thinking for the Vision
Transforming what students learn and how they learn it requires systems thinking. Educational reforms have often focused on changing one part of a school system at a time: open classrooms, personalized learning, self-directed learning, project-based learning, collaborative learning, computers in the classroom, site-based management, and the list goes on. Each of these is good. The problem is that most of these individual changes are incompatible with the other parts of the school system, thereby reducing their potential benefits and endangering their sustainability. For example, we know an elementary school in the Midwest that decided to move to competency-based learning and placed students in math classes according to their skill rather than their age. But the school still used teacher-centered, large-group instruction. As a result, all students in the class moved on to a new topic at about the same time. So, the competency-based approach had become a form of large-scale tracking, and poor test results killed the effort.
To successfully maximize student learning, we must pay attention to which other parts of the school system must change to support any important shift we want to make. As Marzano and colleagues (2017) put it in A Handbook for Personalized Competency-Based Education, “For a PCBE system to be effective, it must be designed so that each piece works in concert with the other pieces” (p. 10). This is the essence of truly systemic change, or paradigm change (Reigeluth & Karnopp, 2013). A paradigm is a completely different pattern and structure for a system. It is more comprehensive than a model—there can be many models within a single paradigm. In educational systems, the one-room schoolhouse is one paradigm (for the agrarian age), the current teacher-centered factory model of education is another (for the industrial age), and the personalized competency-based paradigm is a third (for the information or digital age).
Only paradigmatic change can help teachers maximize student learning and prepare students for the future. Paradigm change is not new to education. The one-room schoolhouse, or agrarian-age paradigm, was different from the industrial-age paradigm that predominates today (Reigeluth & Karnopp, 2013). We call these Education 1.0 and Education 2.0. The personalized competency-based paradigm, or post-industrial paradigm, is Education 3.0.
What Are the Actions?
It will not be easy to implement the vision for personalized competency-based education that your team develops. Many aspects of your school or district will need to be changed at once, because the success of each change depends on the other changes. Fortunately, much has been learned about how to succeed at paradigm change. For example, the actions (transformation process) must include many stakeholders and give them ownership over the process to reduce resistance to the changes. The process must operate by building consensus, rather than by majority rule. Finally, the process must recognize that changes in mindsets and other kinds of learning are the most important outcomes of the effort.
Transforming to PCBE is a difficult and treacherous process. The guidance we offer in this book will help your team succeed in this essential undertaking for the future of our children. We offer guidance about the transformation
