CompetencyWorks | June 2021

June 21, 2021

This newsletter shares recent CompetencyWorks blog posts and Aurora Institute resources, providing thought leadership and practical lessons from the field to support transformation toward personalized, competency-based K-12 schools and systems.

Transforming Learning Through Competency-Based Education

Teaching and learning are changing drastically in the wake of COVID-19, and once-skeptical K-12 system and school leaders are increasingly responding to students’ academic needs with competency-based learning models. Aurora Institute President and CEO Susan Patrick makes the case for system transformation in the latest issue of the National Association of State Boards of Education journal.

Innovation Zones: Policy Flexibility to Reimagine and Modernize K-12 Education Post-COVID-19

State legislation can create innovation zones that give schools and districts flexibility to modernize teaching and learning while reducing burdensome regulations. This updated brief by Fred Jones and Alexis Chambers of the Aurora Institute’s Center for Policy examines policy language from 10 states that have innovation zones and answers frequently asked questions.

Empowering Students Through the Lens of Adaptive Competencies

Chicago’s cohort of competency-based education pilot schools created a framework of four “adaptive competencies” (aka habits of success)—agency, collaboration, adaptability & flexibility, and leadership. Tonya Howell, the cohort’s Social-Emotional Learning Integrationist, explains how schools are helping students develop, use, and demonstrate these competencies.

Roundtable Highlights Ties Between Project-Based Learning and Competency-Based Education

PBL and CBE share many features that were explored in a recent roundtable webinar hosted by the Aurora Institute. Kristin De Vivo, Executive Director of Lucas Education Research, examines those ties, highlights implementation tips shared by the roundtable’s outstanding speakers, and shares findings from four rigorous new studies that strongly affirm PBL’s effectiveness.

Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: There Isn’t Enough Time to Cover All the Standards

We often overestimate the number of standards that can be “covered” meaningfully, a problem that is at odds with deeper learning. Jon Altbergs and Laurie Gagnon of reDesign explain the movement to embrace competencies—transferable skills, strategies, and processes along a developmental continuum—as a strategic lens to evaluate which standards are most essential for their students.

Centering Student Voice in Statewide Assessment of Student Success Factors: Oregon’s SEED Survey

The Oregon Department of Education is amplifying student voices and creating a more balanced system of assessments to highlight essential but neglected constructs such as access to learning resources, opportunity to learn, self-efficacy beliefs, and sense of belonging. The open-source Student Educational Equity Development (SEED) survey can inform educational quality improvement efforts nationally.

For more news and updates in K-12 competency-based education, sign up for our monthly newsletters and follow the Aurora Institute on Twitter: @aurora_inst.

About CompetencyWorks

CompetencyWorks is an initiative that provides information and knowledge about competency-based education in the K-12 education system. Drawing on lessons learned by innovators and early adopters, CompetencyWorks is an online resource for sharing knowledge, original research and policy advances, and a variety of field perspectives. CompetencyWorks provides an informative blog with practitioner knowledge on key topics and papers on emerging issues, with resources curated from across the field of K-12 competency-based education.

Contact: Eliot Levine
[email protected]

CompetencyWorks | Aurora Institute