On Five Musts for Mastery

Are there other articles or essays that you’ve seen about how technology can be used to respond to students and personalize classrooms in a competency-based environment?

There is a rapid conversation going on across our country to better understand how blended learning and education technology can support students and help them stay on pace and make progress in competency-based schools. Catlin Tucker’s Five Musts for Mastery in the EL issue on Getting Students to Mastery gives us a start in thinking about this – using technology to offer more opportunities for creativity and play; more voice and participation (what she calls student-centered learning); more choice; and timely feedback.

Tucker describes shared goal-setting as one of the musts. This is a must whether teachers do it with technology or not.  In almost every competency-based classroom I’ve been in there are shared vision statements, co-developed with students and the teacher, about how the classroom community will operate.  There are some fears, not shared by me, that competency education will become entirely individualized undermining the importance of helping students develop the skills and values of community-building.  However, the importance of creating shared vision or goals, a collective activity, sets the stage in competency-based classrooms that we are all in this together, supporting each other in our learning regardless of where we are starting on our learning progressions or our tempos of learning along the way.

As competency-based districts and schools think about how they engage students I do hope they will look beyond the narrow bifurcation of Tucker’s work/play. There are lots of ways for students to find meaning in learning, lots of ways for students to have fun beyond games and play.  Students can find meaning because of their interests or even the interests of someone in their life, because something helps them do something they want to be able to do, because it helps them better understand their lives, because it feels good to be “in the zone” conquering a challenging task.

Are there other articles or essays that you’ve seen about how technology can be used to respond to students and personalize classrooms in a competency-based environment?  I’d like to pull together the 4-5 best ones and see if we can make this easier for competency-based schools to integrate blended learning.

photo credit: twitter.com/ctuckerenglish