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
