What’s New in K-12 Competency Education?

School Designs

• New Hampshire’s Making Community Connections Charter High School is connecting students to the real world through internships, and shaping the future of learning.
• The Manchester School of Technology High School (New Hampshire) is reinventing high school through competency-based education and cutting-edge academic innovation.

Grade Levels

• New Hampshire is moving beyond grade levels and graded assessments through a new program called NG2 (no grades, no grades), with seven participating elementary schools.
• Incoming freshmen at Windsor Locks (CT) will be the first class to graduate under a proficiency-based approach, which forgoes letter grades and asks students to demonstrate mastery of skills.

High School Transcripts

• More than 100 private schools across the U.S. formed the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) and are embracing a new high school transcript, in hopes to transform the college admissions process. (More on this from EdSurge and the Christian Science Monitor.)
• The upcoming Portland, Maine freshmen class will become the first cohort to implement proficiency-based diploma requirements, which apply to English, math, science and technology, and social studies. (More on this here.) Nine school districts in Maine will award proficiency-based diplomas beginning in 2018.
• Parents in Portland schools grapple with proficiency-based diplomas and the college admissions process.
• Connecticut is poised to pass legislation to implement new diploma requirements. 

News

• Daren Houck, headmaster at Lyndon Institute, makes the case to replace the Carnegie unit system with proficiency-based learning structures.
• This article describes the challenges across the field in defining competency education.
• The Buck Institute for Education shared a blog on 5 reasons why proficiency-based education needs project-based learning.

Updates in New Hampshire

• A researcher found that students in PACE districts outperformed their peers in non-participating districts across the board, starting in the second year of the program’s implementation. But the her most notable finding? Special education students in PACE districts did basically as well as students who weren’t on special education plans.
• Tom Raffio, former State Board of Education chairman, reflects on important changes in New Hampshire’s education system over the last ten years.
• New Hampshire’s Parker-Varney school released an excellent case study, Putting Kids at the Center: Building Parker-Varney’s Future of Learning, which shares their vision and journey toward competency education.

Updates in Maine

• Maine student Gabriel Ferris weighs in on Maine’s proficiency-based learning models, and highlights the need to include student voices when implementing these changes.
• Proficiency-based learning could be the key to closing Maine’s skills gaps, according to Steven Pound.
• Maine’s York High School is seeking to hire a second assistant principal to support all students through enrichment and intervention.

States Exploring Competency Education

• McComb School District (Mississippi) is exploring a competency-based design where grade levels are eliminated.
• Maryland is considering moving toward personalized, competency education.
• Melrose Public Schools (Massachusetts) is shifting their thinking about teaching and learning and exploring competency education.

Teacher Collaboration

• KnowledgeWorks shares what teacher collaboration can look like in competency-based models, including a video from Marysville Exempted Village School District (Ohio).

Resources

• Digital Promise and Education Elements released the Competency-based Education (CBE) Toolkit, the culmination of over a year’s work in ten forward-thinking school districts who are sharing lessons learned from their CBE implementation journey. The toolkit shares highly actionable advice and thoughtful reflection from the contributing districts, and is intended to help other district leaders and teachers at any phase in the CBE implementation journey.
• The Center for Collaborative Education and Essential Personalized Learning released a white paper, A Vision for Personalized Learning in Massachusetts.
• LEAP Innovations released the second edition of the LEAP Learning Framework, designed to define and guide the implementation of personalized learning in K-12 schools. The new release includes strategies for the fourth component of the Framework, “Learner Connected,” which helps teachers create real-world learning experiences for students.
• Marzano released A Handbook for Personalized Competency-Based Education, which explores approaches, strategies, and techniques that schools and districts should consider as they begin their transition to a personalized, competency-based system. The authors share examples of how to use proficiency scales, standard operating procedures, behavior rubrics, personal tracking matrices, and other tools to aid in instruction and assessment.

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