School districts in every state now have the green light to establish competency-based education programs and models in their classrooms—but they have a lot of work to do on the operational side to make those efforts worth the investment of time and money.
Competency-based education refers to a diverse set of practices by which schools give students opportunities to learn at their own pace to master specific skills, often through projects of their choosing that dovetail with their interests. Several states have offered funding to schools to help them get competency-education programs off the ground, including Iowa, North Carolina, and Oregon.
Educators are interested in the model and supportive of some of its key components, even if largely unfamiliar with the practice.
Forty-one percent of educators in a recent EdWeek Research Center survey said they’d read about competency-based education but never seen it in action or tried it. Another 26 percent said they’d never heard of it before taking the nationally representative survey of 868 educators, which was conducted May 29 to June 19.
In a sign of their interest, 56 percent of survey respondents said they’d like to learn more about it, and another 13 percent said they know something about it and would like to try it. (Nineteen percent said they had no interest at all.)
Also, a majority of survey respondents said that, in five years, they expect their district or school to have at least taken steps toward adoption of competency-based education in some form.
But many are concerned about potential roadblocks to making the most of funding opportunities designed to help districts transition to competency-based education.
Slightly more than half of survey respondents said a major drawback to pursuing competency-based education is that teachers don’t know how to do it. Forty-two percent said eliminating traditional grades would confuse parents and students about how much learning had taken place.
More than a third of respondents said their schools cannot afford the staffing necessary to pull off a transformation of their district’s learning model. And slightly less than a quarter say school buildings would need to be improved in ways that would be too costly. Additional costs might come, for instance, from adding instructional space to allow more students to learn outside the traditional learning model and investing in technology students can use to learn at their own pace.
A note about this model of instruction
Competency-based education, proficiency-based learning, mastery-based learning, personalized learning, student-centered education, and standards-based education are all terms that refer to the same instructional model: one in which students make choices about how they learn and demonstrate their knowledge, learn at a pace that might differ from their classmates’, receive individualized support based on their needs, and progress based on their mastery of course material instead of seat time.
See the Aurora Institute’s definition of competency-based education for more details.
Experts on competency-based education say implementing the model is often tougher in a district where most staff members have no experience with it, or where they even lack familiarity with the concept.
“Schools and districts with a strong prior standards-based culture had an easier time adapting,” said Amy Johnson, an education professor at the University of Southern Maine who has conducted extensive research on schools’ implementation of competency-based learning.
But there are approaches that work. They take time, patience, and often money.
Roughly two-thirds of educators who answered the EdWeek Research Center survey said the emphasis in competency-based education on measuring achievement by skills mastered rather than time spent in school is a benefit. Sixty percent said the same about the opportunity for students to learn at a rate that works for them.
“When competency-based systems are implemented well, they end the paradigm of teachers feeling that they need to go into the classrooms and teach all day by themselves, that they alone are responsible for whether their students fail or thrive,” said Kate Gardoqui, senior associate for the Maine-based nonprofit Great Schools Partnership, which helps schools in several states transform their teaching and learning models. “It sends the exact opposite message to teachers.”
Here are some of the operational moves districts implementing competency-based education should consider making—and the hurdles they might encounter along the way, according to practitioners.
Get everyone on the same page
Teachers, principals, district leaders, students, and parents all need to understand their district’s specific definition of competency-based learning for the new initiative to take hold, said Gardoqui, who helped lead the transition to competency-based learning at a high school in Maine where she was an English teacher in the early 2010s.
Each school needs to have a set of clearly delineated definitions for practices like grading and reporting. No one should have to wonder what it means to be successful in school.
That would represent a marked contrast to the status quo in many schools. “Kids will often be like, everybody knows who the easy graders and the hard graders are,” Gardoqui said. “Parents will say the same thing.”
Eliminating that uncertainty helps students understand what’s expected of them. District officials can also use these changes to pitch the new initiative to parents and community members as an effort to ensure all students have comparable experiences in the classroom.
Develop a portrait of a graduate, and orient students toward it
Instructional staff next have to develop master lists of all the skills students should have before they graduate. The language from those lists can filter down into classrooms and parent-teacher conferences.
But those lists don’t materialize overnight, in large part because staff have other pressing responsibilities that get in the way. Some schools in New York City, for instance, have taken a decade to develop them because teachers and staff there had so many other responsibilities to juggle, Gardoqui said.
Schools don’t have to do all this work on their own. Many find success participating in collaboratives like the one Gardoqui helps lead in Washington state. Others seed the ground for a schoolwide competency-based model by allowing it to develop from the ground up in one or two departments that are particularly eager to forge ahead with it.
“Once one department is using those practices, they can become a little easier to spread those out across the school,” Gardoqui said.
Be open to the potential benefits
Investing in new programs can be daunting, especially when a payoff could be years away.
But proponents of competency-based learning see the potential for these initiatives to cut down on the amount of time and money schools spend trying to identify students who need additional support.
“When you have a gradebook that tracks more accurately where students are in their learning, and who needs help, you can get appropriate supports to students more quickly and more effectively,” Gardoqui said.
Competency-based education programs also encourage more direct collaboration with families, said Paulina Murton, the executive director of Great Schools Partnership. That could give schools a leg up when it comes time to ask community members to support additional school funding by raising property taxes or approving bond issues.
Similarly, Murton sees competency-based learning as a potential tool to help improve retention of teaching staff, a steep and ongoing challenge in many parts of the country. If teachers feel more connected and aligned with each other, they’re more likely to want to stick around in their school building.
“When we put students in the driver’s seat of their own learning, we can see a big increase in engagement,” Gardoqui said. “That’s just worth its weight in gold.”
