CompetencyWorks | August 2019

Dear Colleagues, 

CompetencyWorks wrote in August about the Eastern Carver County Schools, a district of 10,000 students near Minneapolis. The series begins with district leaders sharing strategies to shift the whole district toward competency-based education since 2011.

A visit to Eastern Carver’s competency-based alternative arts high school describes a deeply personalized approach to embedding visual arts, culinary arts, horticulture, and textile design into core academic subjects. The school tailors standards to students’ interests and shares evidence of mastery transparently in close collaboration with the district.

The competency-based transformation in Pioneer Ridge Middle School offers lessons learned about successful scale-up, scheduling, software, and assessment strategies. Two final posts about Eastern Carver share strategies to build student ownership of their learning and the district’s framework for lifelong learning skills, including how behaviors such as interacting collaboratively with peers are promoted and assessed.

CompetencyWorks also featured two terrific posts from other blogs:

• Maya Kaul shares lessons learned from schools in California and Hawai’i about how to make performance assessments culturally responsive in diverse contexts by centering relationships, student stories, and civic engagement.
• In “What Do You Mean When You Say ‘Student Agency’?”, Jenny Poon shows how terms like voice, choice, and ownership fit into a coherent whole and a robust literature on the topic. Her outstanding infographic is worth going back to again and again.

Last, iNACOL recently released the policy brief Modernizing the Teaching Workforce for Learner-Centered, Competency-Based, Equity-Oriented Education: State Policy Recommendations. The policy brief recommends steps that state policymakers can take to advance a new vision for the teaching profession.

Wishing you well as the new school year begins.

Eliot Levine,Susan Patrick, Ashley Jones
iNACOL CompetencyWorks