What’s New in K-12 Competency-Based Education?

News

• The Aspen Institute launched the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development to unite leaders from education, research, business, health, and the military to re-envision what constitutes success in our schools.
• This Education Week article explores 5 steps for reimagining world-language learning goals through competency-based education.

States

• Illinois launched its first competency-based learning pilot with a call for applications, which will allow 12 innovative school districts to replace high school graduation course requirements with a competency-based learning system.
• This article discusses how New Hampshire’s PACE program is a great way to build fundamentals, learn through real-world experiences, increase engagement and rigor, and develop 21^st century skills.
• The Tennessee Department of Education partnered with BloomBoard to pilot a competency-based professional learning program supported by micro-credentials.

Practitioner Perspectives

• Brian Stack, Sanborn Regional High School (NH) principal, explains why personalized, competency education works to develop college- and career-readiness in this Hechinger Report article.
• Joy Nolan, co-director of the Mastery Collaborative for the New York City Department of Education, wrote an article in Kappan Magazine on how New York City schools are transitioning toward mastery-based education, shares teacher and student perspectives, and provides takeaways from year one.
• Practitioners from RSU-24 share their vision of education for the future, including using a performance-based system to close achievement gaps and prepare students for 21^st century learning.
• Here are 3 tips for introducing competency-based education based on conversations from the iNACOL Symposium.

Agency

• Fletcher Elementary School students are hiring staff for next fall, including job searches, reviewing applications, writing questions and conducting interviews—as a means to promote student leadership, agency and engagement.
• Winooski School District shared a video highlighting their story of how personalized learning opened opportunities and prepared students for college and career.

Community Engagement

• Colorado’s District 51 is engaging their community and setting a new vision for K-12 education by asking, “What skills do we want our graduates to have?”
• The Vermont Department of Education has made stakeholder engagement part of their continuous improvement project as they transition to ESSA.
• This article is an example of how one might work through the many concepts undergirding the shift to personalized learning—by questioning a broader way of defining student success and proficiency-based learning. How might you respond to someone who raises these questions in your community?

Lindsay Unified School District

• This article explains how Lindsay Unified School District uses a performance-based system to boost learning outcomes and help students develop grit and perseverance.
• This more detailed article further explains Lindsay’s system and portrays the substantial gains in learning outcomes over the seven years since transformation began.

Resources

• Great Schools Partnership released Global Best Practices (2^nd Edition), an internationally benchmarked self-assessment tool for secondary learning.
• The Lumina Foundation hosted 126 experts and educators in postsecondary education to discuss new types of learner records that move beyond the transcript. They also released an FAQ on Comprehensive Student Records and Focus Magazine from Fall 2015: Tomorrow’s Transcript.
• AIR released Designing Competency-Based Articulation Agreements:  A Framework for State Educational Agencies and Postsecondary Institutions, an interactive guide on how to identify and convene a team of stakeholders who will set the vision and assess the readiness of the state to develop a competency-based articulation agreement with postsecondary institutions.

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