CompetencyWorks | May 2019

Dear Colleagues, 

In the past month CompetencyWorks visited Four Rivers Charter Public School, an EL Education school in western Massachusetts, and published some of their strategies to build a competency-based school:

• Building a powerful school culture through community meetings, restorative circles, awards for exemplifying the schools’ character virtues, and other strategies.
• Empowering teachers as school leaders through a deliberate shift toward distributed leadership.
• Active learning through internships and expeditions with authentic audiences that build student motivation and engagement.

The series on school self-assessment and action planning using the Global Best Practices tool continued by sharing Monmouth Middle School’s action plan and school improvement activities.

In May, CompetencyWorks shared two terrific posts from other publications:

• A reflection on Brown v. Board of Education and educational equity on the 65^th anniversary of the landmark legal decision, from Ashley Jones and Natalie Truong of iNACOL.
• A report on the Equity Summit and a student-led PD activity on equity at Casco Bay High School designed to help faculty better understand their students’ lives, especially immigrant students and students of color.

CompetencyWorks also offered an Introduction to K-12 Competency-Based Education webinar, with co-presenter Dr. Pamela Swanson, superintendent of the Westminster Public School District in Colorado, sharing lessons learned from the district’s very successful transition to competency-based education. The slides and a recording of the webinar are available here.