Transitioning to Competency

Imagine a day when instead of asking “what is my grade”, a student asks “what is my learning velocity?  Or what can I do to change my learning momentum?   Would I reach competency faster with a different approach, maybe some mental training, or maybe a different model?  How confident am I that I’ve “got” this. 

John Hattie's book on “visible learning” is really just the idea that we have to get student centered in education!  This is the toughest mental change for teachers who have grown up with and grown accustomed to teacher centric schools.  But then here we sit with mostly teacher centric or classroom centric methods and tools for support.  From Report Cards to GPA’s the system has just built itself around the fixed paced classroom.  If you have read "Disrupting Class" then you know how hard it is for a system to disrupt itself.   You go out on a limb once and succeed.   Now you are defined by what you do and not what you could do so you just stay the course.   But then you become obsolete when the tipping point actually arrives.

It usually happens as a series of patches that ultimately evolve into the main idea, so you often can’t see it coming before it is too late.   In Portland for example (see ref) many fixed pace dropouts who could not keep up ultimately graduate and still go to college or at least earn a high school education.  But the Mainstream is not the variable pace.  That option still exists outside of the current program rather than inside. And the label of "Dropout" still exists.  So getting methods that can live just fine with the current "fixed pace", classroom or teacher centric structure and then quickly or slowly morph into supporting a variable paced "student centric" variable paced structure is critical if we expect schools to change.

Current technology allows for about 90% of student evaluation to be in a teachers head and maybe 10% on paper or technology.   Competency education tends to put more of that evaluation onto paper or technology as knowledge scores are collected that were once just buried into the summary grades based on the pace of a curriculum.  So attacking the measurement overload dilemma from as many directions as possible is important.  For example, Bob Marzano once said that at least 5 measurement topic scores were required to give teachers a learning trend outlook on a student.  But rarely did any teacher have the time to collect that many per student per measurement topic that needed a score.  To make this transition really possible, several internal changes also need to occur around measurements of student knowledge or skill. 

First there has to be more focus on the reliability of the measurements. More reliable measurements mean fewer measurements. That reliability could easily come from a simple consensus of

a. Student self-measurement (personal confidence)
b. Trained observer/assessor opinion (more authentic assessment)
c. System confirmation (Common test).

Next the system needs to somehow allow only focused measurements. Not Every student needs every assessment possible for every skill. Once a reliable consensus of competence on a learning goal has been reached for a student you can stop measuring! But this means teachers have to tackle the legacy fairness problem. How come I had to take the extra test and he or she didn't?   The easiest answer is because they passed the 1st one if we can make that work.

Third is the realization that traditional grades in some form are still required to report a student’s level of effort applied to the learning goals and degree in meeting an “Expected” although not required learning pace. But that these grades are not conclusive of specific knowledge and should not be used for antiquated evaluations like GPA’s or Valedictorian types of recognition.  And they ultimately can't be derived in the traditional fashion of simply averaging classroom grades over time.

And last but not least is the creation of new focus of measurement statistics like learning acceleration, velocity and momentum where acceleration is the speed of change per learning goal, velocity is the current rate of progress in mastering learning goals, and momentum is the combined learning progress over time.

These may seem far fetched, but a students learning acceleration could help evaluate the value of specific content per learning style.  And their learning velocity could be indicative of students in need of more assistance at a given point in time.  And their learning momentum is probably a good predictor of the level of effort a student is applying to the learning process and more indicative of a traditional grade.

Making these disruptive changes in philosophy with students, parents and communities has proven itself a very difficult task. Districts that take on the challenge of teaching communities first and transitioning only after this understanding is in place are showing good progress. Those who think the understanding will just happen on its own are paying some heavy prices for the over-site.