school district and for individual schools. But we caution that it is not wise to try to transform an individual school within a school district, because it will become incompatible with the rest of the district, which will then automatically try to change it back. Many successful pilot schools have been unsustainable as a result.
What Are the Criticisms of PCBE?
As described in the preceding sections, personalized competency-based education has a laudable and needed goal: all students achieving mastery of whatever they are attempting to learn. Yet some people are critical of it (Herold, 2017b). Why? At the root of the criticisms is a lack of conceptual clarity. PCBE is many different things to different people. There are many ways to do PCBE, and many of them don’t work well.
Personalized learning alone is a one-legged stool. So is competency-based education alone. There are four parts of competency-based education—competency-based approaches to (1) student progress, (2) student assessment, (3) learning targets, and (4) grading and student records—but they are not always used together. To work effectively, all four parts of competency-based education should be used together, along with personalized, collaborative, project-based, and self-directed learning—all supported with appropriate technological tools and teacher training. If you try to implement one of these at a time, your stool will fall over long before you can assemble all the legs.
Table I.1 shows some conceptualizations of PCBE that are destined to disappoint, along with remedies to those flawed conceptualizations.
Table I.1:Flawed Conceptualizations of PCBE and Corresponding Remedies
| Flawed Conceptualizations | Remedies |
| Students working alone on computers | Also using collaborative projects extensively |
| Competencies as small, separate objectives | Using more comprehensive objectives that are more meaningful and address higher, deeper, integrated, and sometimes unmeasurable kinds of learning |
| Assessment and remediation as separate events at the end of a considerable amount of instruction | Integrating assessment with the instruction, so the instruction provides whatever remediation may be needed |
| Using traditional bell-curve grading when evaluating mastery of competencies | Moving to records in the form of proficiency scales and lists of competencies mastered |
| Maintaining time-based student progress where competencies must be mastered within a specific timeframe | Changing to continuous (learning-based) student progress for each student |
| Assessing a whole set of competencies at once and passing a student if 60 or 70 percent of them are mastered | Identifying critical competencies and ensuring mastery of each one |
The lesson of these criticisms is that PCBE requires full commitment. If your team is not going to implement PCBE fully, then it will be a waste of your time and effort. If you are committed to doing it well, this book will help you get where you want to go.
How Is This Book Organized?
The purpose of this book is to help a team of preK–12 teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders to improve its school or district by transforming to PCBE. We offer ideas and transformation processes for the classroom, the school, and the district. This book is intended for a team of educational stakeholders because the transformation to personalized competency-based education cannot be done effectively in a single classroom—it must be a schoolwide or districtwide effort.
Part I is about the PCBE vision. Its chapters offer ideas about what changes you might want to consider for your PCBE classroom, school, and district to better meet students’ needs in this post-industrial, digital-age society. All three levels of change should be done together (if you are an independent public charter school or private school and don’t have a district or central office to deal with, then obviously only the first two kinds of changes are important). Your team should consider six core ideas while developing your vision, each of which is addressed in a separate chapter (chapters 1 through 6). Chapter 7 presents two comprehensive case studies that exemplify the core ideas—one for an independent public school (not in a school district or charter network) and one for a school district.
Part II is about the change process. These chapters address the difficult challenge of how to transform from what you have now to what you envision (with the help of part I) to maximize student motivation and learning. Chapter 8 helps you to decide on the best scope for your change effort and describes a framework for the change process that applies to every scope. Chapter 9 offers detailed guidance on sequential activities for a school district, while chapter 10 offers such guidance for an independent public school (not part of a school district or charter network). The appendices offer criteria for assessing readiness for transformation, as well as detailed lists of helpful resources for enhancing your success.
Now that you have some understanding of PCBE, recognize that complex paradigm change is the only way to achieve strong outcomes for students, and have a sense of how to navigate this book, let’s move on to the nuts and bolts of making PCBE a reality in your school context.
PART I:
VISION
Core Ideas ofPersonalized Competency-Based Education
Part I provides ideas based on research and practical experience for you to consider building into your ideal vision of PCBE. You should form a team of teachers and other stakeholders to develop your vision (see steps 1.2 and 2.1 in chapters 9 and 10, pages 159 and 189, for guidance). We suggest that your team explore six core ideas while developing your vision (we originally introduced these core ideas in our previous book, Reinventing Schools: It’s Time to Break the Mold [Reigeluth & Karnopp, 2013]).
1. Competency-based education
2. Learner-centered instruction
3. Restructured curriculum
4. New roles
5. A nurturing culture
6. New organizational structures
Please note that all six core ideas are important and interdependent aspects of PCBE. Chapters 1 through 6 address each of these core ideas respectively. However, they do not constitute a model because they can be implemented in very different ways. Rather, they constitute a different paradigm of education, within which there can be many different models. The challenge for
