{"id":3476,"date":"2015-08-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-26T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/whats-personalization-got-to-do-with-it-on-the-road-to-college-and-career-success\/"},"modified":"2020-02-05T12:55:50","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T17:55:50","slug":"whats-personalization-got-to-do-with-it-on-the-road-to-college-and-career-success","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/whats-personalization-got-to-do-with-it-on-the-road-to-college-and-career-success\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Personalization Got to Do with It? On the Road to College and Career Success"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am delighted to have the chance to visit the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative<\/a> in Hazard, KY and meet with educators in their Next Generation Leadership Academy this week. They are spending time reflecting on the different ways to think about college and career success. Below is my presentation on how we might begin to think about college and career success in a competency-based structure.<\/em><\/p>\n

The districts that are part of the Next Generation Leadership Academy at the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative have been investing in many different ways to improve their schools. These include the Appalachian Renaissance Initiative to advance blended learning, efforts to raise student voice and leadership, personalized approaches to educator effectiveness, ways of approaching children wholistically, including early childhood health and trauma-informed services, and STEM.<\/em><\/p>\n

What\u2019s more even more impressive is that they are building their capacity to use design \u2013 enabling districts to begin to weave all these pieces together into the next generation districts and schools.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

Designing anything always starts with having a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Sometimes, this is described as a problem you want to solve or something you want to improve, such as less expensive or more cost-effective. Or it may be described as your goal, the change you want to make happen in the world.<\/p>\n

The question we have to ask ourselves in thinking about next generation education is what we want for our graduates of high school. We need to describe the change or, if you want to use a business lens, describe the product. However, there is also a big problem we are trying to solve that will shape every step of the design process. We haven\u2019t yet been been able to figure out how to make sure all students become proficient in grade level skills, get a diploma, or are fully prepared for college. We need to think about the elements of a system that will be more reliable.<\/p>\n

Today, we will spend sometime thinking about the goal, the system that would reduce inequity, and what it is going to take to get us from here to there.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

Doesn\u2019t it seem like we\u2019ve been talking about this for a long time \u2013 at least twenty years? Each time we lift our expectations or deepen our understanding, we learn some more, and the conversation starts over again.<\/p>\n

In the next series of slides, I\u2019m going to introduce a number of different ideas of how we define what students will need to know and be able to do to be successful in their lives beyond high school. I don\u2019t think there is any perfect way to define it \u2013 consider this just food for thought.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

This probably looks familiar to you. We have been using credits or the Carnegie unit as a proxy of learning for 100 years. About ten or so years ago we increased expectations for students by increasing the number of academic courses they needed to take. But the problem remains \u2013 we really don\u2019t know what students know or are able to do just because they completed a course. The courses vary in their academic level and in their rigor, teachers may grade differently, and students may get credit even though they really didn\u2019t learn.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a>
From EPIC<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We recently came to the understanding that academic content alone isn\u2019t sufficient for being prepared for college. We are aware that students have to have a range of other skills, higher order skills\u00a0or metacognitive skills, in order to be successful. This is an example of a framework developed by David Conley and the team at EPIC trying to capture many of the so-called non-cognitive skills.<\/p>\n

The EPIC framework has four categories of skills \u2013 in addition to content knowledgeb there is transition knowledge such as financial aid; learning skills such as ownership of learning or what is often referred to as student agency; and cognitive strategies, sometimes referred to as process skills, such as problem formulation.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll take a minute here to point out a potential problem in this framework for low-income students. This framework was designed for college readiness but underestimates the importance of career development as part of transition knowledge. Students who are not exposed to careers through their family and social networks, or who might encounter discrimination in their own efforts to enter the labor market, need extra help. It is hard to imagine taking the risk of getting an expensive college education if you are not already deeply motivated by the desire and belief that you can develop a career.<\/p>\n

I raise this as a reminder to review any frameworks through an equity lens to make sure it is going to work for all of your students.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

We are also now beginning to understand that social-emotional learning has a direct impact on academic learning. This is a framework released by the Frameworks Institute using the metaphor of weaving strands together to make something stronger to help explain this expanded way of understanding the skills that students learn. Your efforts to integrate trauma-informed services is really important and can be a vital step in helping students who have experienced repeated violence, disruption, or failure in their lives to build agency.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

A team at the University of Chicago approached the question of what we want students to know and be able to do a bit differently by asking What do we want for young adults to be successful?<\/a> They weren\u2019t looking at it just from a K-12 perspective.<\/p>\n

They introduce the idea that agency, competencies such as critical thinking, and integrated identity are the goal for what young people need to be successful. Underlying these three factors are four foundational components \u2013 a growth mindset, knowledge and skills, self-regulation or social-emotional learning, and values about what is important in life.<\/p>\n

I find this framework particularly interesting for two reasons.<\/p>\n

First, integrated identity is a very important concept, one which we often forget when we don\u2019t make room to talk about the different experiences that African-American, Asians, Latinos, or Native Americans might have \u2013 cultural experiences, the impact of encountering discrimination, and trying to bridge different worlds. This also leaves room for how young people are growing up in terms of their gender and class.<\/p>\n

Second, they think about this as a developmental process with different benchmarks at different ages. Again, this helps us to think about the different stages students go through on their way to developing what they need to be successful as a young adult.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a>
From the Lindsay Unified Website<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In some districts, they engage students, parents, and the community in defining what they want for their graduates. This is an example from Lindsay Unified School District, a leading personalized, competency-based school in California. Each of these items describing their expectations for their students has a detailed description of what this means. It is also driving how they are redesigning their school.<\/p>\n

I often see the phrase “lifelong learners” rather than “college and career readiness” used in districts that engage their community. Community members tend to develop much broader expectations than educators\u00a0working\u00a0in isolation will.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

Increasingly, we are hearing of states, districts, and schools defining graduation requirements by a set of competencies. Here are examples from New Hampshire\u2019s graduation competencies. These are the big goals they want student to know and be able to do. The standards are then aligned with these big goals for each grade or academic level. They also have work-study competencies such as communication and creativity.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s pause here for a minute to talk about this new language of learning that is being developed. It is sometimes confusing as we try to figure out new terms, clarify the meaning, and understand what it means to operationalize.<\/p>\n

One of the most confusing is competency. To help me keep it straight, I think of being proficient or competent as an adjective, competency as a noun, and competency-based education as a phrase describing the structure or system.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

A fourth term we have to get comfortable with is calibration or tuning. Because even if we define the competencies, we still have to make sure that educators understand what it means for student to demonstrate proficiency. This usually happens in professional learning communities or departments. To build a shared understanding of writing at the different academic grade levels at Memorial Elementary School in Sanborn New Hampshire, they set up a wall with all the academic levels with samples of student work and then placed stars to indicate how many students in each grade were writing at each academic level.<\/p>\n

I would argue that one of the reasons we haven\u2019t been able to get sustainable agreement on what college and career readiness really means is that we haven\u2019t tried to embed calibration into districts and schools. We depend on NAEP to tell us how our understanding of what is proficient varies or ACT rather than expecting educators to have this as part of their professional knowledge. This is a tremendous change to embed this knowledge within schools.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a lot of conversation about what the difference is between a competency and a standard. Competency implies that you can transfer the knowledge or apply it to a new situation. It implies higher order skills. If we just relied on standards, first of all it is too easy to start to thinking of them in a linear sense as they are written that way. One of the problems in the first year of a competency-based structure is that teachers turn to worksheets, marching students through the standards. The second thing is that the granularity of the standards can create difficulties. We can get lost in them \u2013 and it’s important to keep the big ideas close to us.<\/p>\n

We want to be able to explain to students why they are learning something and its purpose over all. Students can hold on to these big ideas and how they will be able to use them…much more than each and every standard. We want to bring learning alive.<\/p>\n

\"Slide<\/a><\/p>\n

Assuming we have a broad set of knowledge, skills, and characteristics that we want our graduates to have, let\u2019s take a bit of time to think about the system we want that will support it.<\/p>\n

At Pittsfield School District<\/a> in New Hampshire \u2013<\/p>\n