What’s New in K-12 Competency Education?

Staying the course for over twenty years, Chugach has developed a personalized, performance-based system that places students at the center and deeply values teaching and teachers. CompetencyWorks released a new report on Chugach School district and how they implemented a personalized, performance-based system to serve the remote villages of Native Alaska. Check out the blog post or download the report here.

Upcoming Event: On April 20, CompetencyWorks is hosting an introductory webinar on competency education. Register here to attend the webinar and learn how we define competency education, explore how schools are implementing competency education, and discuss why educators and communities want to convert to a competency-based structure.

Resources

• iNACOL released an issue brief on innovation zones and how they work to create policy flexibility for personalized learning.
• The New England Secondary School Consortium released a new briefing in its Leadership in Action series on student portfolios.
• Foundation for Excellence in Education released a state policy communications toolkit for competency education.

Policy Updates

• Under ESSA, states and localities have a unique opportunity to revisit accountability systems and rethink how they can better serve students, parents and teachers. Check out this article on how state accountability systems impact student learning.
• The Florida Senate passed a competency-based education bill, which already passed the House by a 31 to 6 vote. The bill creates pilot programs in 4 Florida districts and establishes a laboratory school run by the University of Florida. (This article explains the competency education pilot program in greater detail.)

Schools Making Gains

• Teachers from seven District 51 schools in Colorado shared with the school board the challenges and victories they’ve experienced since transitioning to a performance-based system.
• Windsor Locks, a school implementing personalized learning, demonstrated notable gains in math and reading, pulling them from the list of worst performing schools. This news story shows how Windsor Locks empowers students to discover, to design their learning, to apply it, then to document how they learned it and defend that they learned against rigorous standards.

Research Opportunity

The Students at the Center initiative at Jobs for the Future announced a research collaborative that will build, define, apply and share a robust evidence base for student-centered learning. (Read more here.) They announced 2 opportunities: an RFP on student-centered learning, with a preference for basic exploratory research; and nominations for Students at the Center Distinguished Fellows. Two additional opportunities are expected to release in May. Check here for the most updated information.

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