{"id":1852,"date":"2019-01-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/celebrating-a-champion-of-competency-based-education\/"},"modified":"2019-12-16T12:56:28","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T17:56:28","slug":"celebrating-a-champion-of-competency-based-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/celebrating-a-champion-of-competency-based-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating a Champion of Competency-Based Education"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chris Sturgis (r) receiving the Outstanding Individual Contribution to Personalized Learning Award from iNACOL President & CEO Susan Patrick at the 2018 iNACOL Symposium.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We are entering a new year and a new season at iNACOL. We have bid a fond farewell to Chris Sturgis, a titan of competency-based education, whose mark on our work, and our lives, will be felt for many years to come. \u00a0We celebrate her tremendous body of work as co-founder and project manager of\u00a0<\/span>Competency<\/span><\/i>Works<\/span><\/a>, and we congratulate her on her new journey as founder of\u00a0<\/span>LearningEdge<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Chris and I started <\/span>collaborating 10 years ago<\/span>, we challenged ourselves to find the leading innovators across the United States who were building education systems based on mastery. Together, we were envisioning a new dawn and a path forward. By learning from the field, we wanted to share knowledge for building a bridge to transport thinking and doing in reimagining our nation\u2019s education system for what it could be. We hosted the first National Summit on Competency-Based Education in 2011. We spoke in an entirely different language than other \u201creforms,\u201d and much of our work was stoking the imagination of school leaders and policymakers around the country to understand that our schools weren\u2019t appropriately centered around student learning or youth development or true transparency that drives toward continuous improvement, quality, depth of learning and equity strategies every day.<\/span><\/p>\n

We made up our minds that we would crowdsource the voices of educators and practitioners \u2014 as many as were willing to listen and share \u2014 to build a collective vision of redesigning the learning environment away from being a time-based, ranking-and-sorting system and one that purveyed meaningless credentials into one in which success is community-defined, sets a high bar for all students for their future success and ensures students advance by demonstrating mastery.<\/span><\/p>\n

As like-minded, yet geographically siloed education leaders joined our ranks, Chris deftly took up the mantle of leadership \u2014 and of continuous learning \u2014 and did the work of shepherding our emerging field. Put simply, she has been one of the most prolific contributors this field will ever see. The countless hours of deep collaboration with experts, practitioners and leading educators all over the country; the willingness to give generously in mind and spirit sage advice, counsel and mentoring to professionals and school districts; the insatiable curiosity that produced hundreds of questions and led to years of inquiry has built a formidable ally to competency-based education in Chris Sturgis.<\/span><\/p>\n

In just the last nine years alone, Chris has authored 19 major publications for <\/span>Competency<\/span><\/i>Works, including these recently:<\/span><\/p>\n