In 2011, Patrick and Sturgis presented a five-item working definition of high quality CBE: 1. Students advance upon demonstrated mastery. 2. Competencies include explicit, measurable, transferable learning objectives that empower students. 3. Assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students. 4. Students receive rapid, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs. 5. Learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include application and creation of knowledge along with the development of important skills and dispositions. In K12, these five principles don’t seem so new in many respects. They have always been part of a responsive teaching environment where student academic needs receive instructional attention. However, competency based learning formalizes the approach. Plan, teach, assess, and repeat until the student meets the required level of mastery. If you scratch the surface, you’ll quickly realize that each student is held accountable to his or her own progress individually. This idea has a profound impact on instructional management and particularly how classrooms handle progress. Not all students will attain competencies at or near the same time. Under a competency-based approach, the “class” is not the defining unit for the learner; instead, the individual student is the unit and progresses along the learning path and proceeds only as competencies have been met. This requires planning. Traditional classrooms move forward based on the progress of the majority and some expected schedule. This might be an adopted pacing calendar or simply the urgency to complete the course material in the allotted time. Under CBE, planning needs to account for students who proceed quickly as much as for those who proceed more slowly. Much of the planning involved lies in the competencies themselves. According to principle two from Patrick and Sturgis, competencies need to be explicit, measurable and transferable. These three requirements are highly interdependent. A competency must be small enough, discreet enough to stand alone as an individual task. The task must be measurable as a whole, not as a sum of its parts. And finally, the transference quality of the competency allows it to become absorbed into broader more complex activities without presenting itself as an obstacle or hurdle. In more traditional terms, the learning objective must include a single clearly defined goal, a single metric to determine success, and an embedded transitional support for future learning objectives. This is a departure for many educators with regard to daily planning of instruction. Instruction under a competency-based approach lives or dies by how competencies are defined, assessed and forwarded into future learning. Not planning for frequent and formative assessment undermines the learner by stalling their progress. Not incorporating the competency into future learning weakens its value and deprives the learner of their ability to quickly extend skills and knowledge. Creating vague or overly broad competencies simply muddies the learning experience opening gateways for confusion and frustration. While it might be tempting to view competency based education as a list of skills or tasks fitting into the scope of what students need for a www.seenmagazine.us
particular course or topic, it represents a more thoughtful and integrated approach to linking skills, knowledge, and concepts to achievement at the personal level. For this reason, assessments take on a much different role. They afford the learner an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of a particular competency. Since formative assessment better reflects actual usage of the competency, they provide much more meaningful outcome data while remaining in context to the student activity. Principle three according to Patrick and Sturgis, that assessment be meaningful and positive, applies quite naturally in this case. Building an assessment into the competency as part and parcel to the learning experience creates a unifying context. Students understand the relevance. They feel more connected to the competency through the iterative nature of the learning and demonstration cycle. Outcomes become immediately beneficial. Progress becomes apparent and support needs readily identified. Each student comes face-to-face with his or her own progress at this point. They undergo a very tight feedback loop between their depth of understanding and the demonstration of that understanding. This opens the way to principle four, that students receive quick and targeted support for their own specific needs. Frequent formative measures of progress provide the needed information in a timely fashion. Fortunately, the very nature of competency based education means students can share
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SouthEast Education Network
Spring 2016
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