The Problem With Letter Grades Isn’t the Grades | Bill Zima & Michelle McCann

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Nate McClennen and Rebecca Midles talk with Bill Zima (Director of Implementation, Marzano Academies) and Michelle McCann (Professional Development Associate, Marzano Resources), two of the editors of the new book Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation, about what competency-based education means, why it’s so hard to implement well, and where letter grades fit in.

Transcript

Introduction

Nate McClennen: Welcome, everybody. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Nate McClennen, and welcome to another podcast where we unpack the future of education. Last week, I had the opportunity to visit schools, which we at Getting Smart get to do a lot, and this school was in the early implementation phases of mastery-based learning. It was really interesting, and a good reminder of some of the formidable barriers that are in the way. This particular system was struggling with how you drop zeros from a very standard grading system. How do you deal with late assignments? And some of these really technical questions that get in the way of this larger conversation around competency-based education.

So today we’re gonna talk about competency-based education broadly. It’s been talked about forever and implemented in a variety of mostly non-traditional schools and systems, and some systems have implemented it successfully, but often they have to have more flexibility, more agency, and really the demand, meaning parent demand, student demand, teacher demand, to try to break models that do not serve students well. We know, and we’ll talk about some of the research that supports, the positive impacts of competency-based education on student outcomes, and yet we also know that implementation, and high-fidelity implementation, is really difficult. And probably even more difficult is changing the mindsets and the grammar of schooling to allow competency-based education to happen.

So today we’re gonna unpack all of this, and we’re gonna lean into a great new book called Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation. I’m excited and lucky and privileged to be joined by Rebecca Midles, my colleague, who was a fellow contributor to this book. We co-wrote a chapter. We’re also joined by two of the four editors, Bill Zima and Michelle McCann, both from Marzano Resources. Bill is the Director of Implementation for Marzano Academies, and Michelle McCann is the Professional Development Associate at Marzano Resources. So welcome, everybody. This is gonna be an awesome conversation. Excited to have you all here today.

Bill Zima: Great. Thanks, Nate. Glad to be here.

Michelle McCann: So glad to be here.

What Is Competency-Based Education?

Nate McClennen: Most people listening to our podcast have some sense of, “Hey, we wanna do things differently. We wanna change the trajectory of schools and systems. We know it’s not working for every student. It works for some, but not all.” The big thing we wanna talk about first is, what on earth is competency-based education? Because I think, and you’ll probably agree, it has a very broad set of definitions. So let’s do a quick whip-around. We all work on this, and you’re trying to describe it to someone who’s not in education. How would you describe competency-based education? Bill, why don’t you start us off, and then we’ll hear from Rebecca and then Michelle.

Bill Zima: Nate, like you said, and I know certainly Rebecca, Michelle, all of us have spent long days talking about it, trying to figure it out. It’s really hard to give a synopsis or definition of it, in my opinion, because there are different ways that schools can go about implementing it, right? It isn’t one thing, but it centers around questions that you have to make decisions about, right? And the decisions you make can point you in different directions for how you wanna implement it. To me, it’s not so much a super-duper defined set of pieces, but there are cornerstones that help you build your concepts around.

I always think of them in three: clarity, evidence, and feedback. What’s gonna change is you’ve gotta get really clear with kids on what you want them to understand or be able to execute without error, right? Procedural knowledge or declarative knowledge. You have to be able to gather evidence of how they’re doing against those clear outcomes. And so assessment is no longer about points or percentages, right? That shifts the whole mindset. And then the purpose of instruction is to provide feedback to help the learner improve in that learning progression, which is represented in those clear scales. So to me, it’s those three things, and then you have to develop the whole context of the school around that shift. That’s how I think about it when I’m thinking of the 35-million-foot view. Yes, way outer space, I don’t even know what planet I would be on as I’m looking down, but it helps me get that bigger picture.

Nate McClennen: All right. So that’s great. Now we have a foundation, declared by Bill: clarity, evidence, and feedback. Rebecca, add, subtract, build upon, or build a new foundation?

Rebecca Midles: Not subtract. I would add that the irony of defining competency-based learning is that you are trying to define something that’s always iterating and evolving in different stages, depending on what it’s in service of. So I always like to define competency-based learning in service of the vision that institutions or organizations are using to get closer to. This is a model they see as the most helpful to get them to the vision they’ve identified, whether that’s embedded in a portrait of a graduate or what they’ll call a shared vision. I think the tricky part is that system change is a process, and sometimes you’re defining CBE in your initial stages, and sometimes you’re coming to a system that’s been doing it for a lot longer, and they’re defining competency-based learning in a much deeper, further-along way. I think that can sometimes be challenging for folks.

But similar to Bill, I would say it’s about providing opportunities that are authentic and community-facing. They’re also about learning around performance, and there’s a high level of agency because the expectations are transparent and there is a collective kind of support around that, not just from teachers in that system, but also learners being able to know what we would have previously called, in a traditional model, the game of school. Knowing what that looks like, being interactive and a big part of that, and that it’s in service of what they need, particularly if you have a portrait of a learner or a portrait of a graduate. So I think the challenge is kind of ironic sometimes: you’re trying to define something that’s intentionally not static, because it’s always evolving to reflect the needs of the system, and it grows alongside them. So I love to think about it as in service of a vision of learning.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. That community vision piece is super important, and building something that meets that. So we have in service of vision, and we have clarity, evidence, and feedback. Okay, Michelle, you either get to build a new foundation or build on top of what’s already been set.

Michelle McCann: Well, I’d add on to the broader… I began my competency-based journey back in 2004 in Alaska, and what we would frame as a traditional system was that time was the constant and learning was the variable. You were gonna sit there, but the learning wasn’t guaranteed. The shift with competency-based education is you’ve turned that, right? So you’re progressing based on mastery, with a guaranteed and viable curriculum. We have an agreed-upon set of skills and knowledge base that we want all kids to have access to, but we’re not gonna push them forward if they’re not able to do it, and we’re not going to assume they can’t and keep them there. If a kid is ready to move, they can move. So it’s flexibility in a system that is designed to better meet the individualized needs of every student.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. I love that progression based on mastery. It’s kind of like a Jenga tower, and I’m gonna pull out a few pieces and see what happens if the definition falls. One of the challenges I see is that, often, competency-based education, CBE, feels like a catch-all for everything we think is good about teaching and learning, and I think that gets confusing. If you look at, say, FullScale’s definition, Rebecca and I, when we work with our larger networks, have added an eighth element to their seven, around real-world learning. But really, competency-based education is encompassing this large thing around personalized competency-based education, and I wonder sometimes about the definitions around specifically mastery competency… Sometimes I’ve started to talk about CBA, competency-based assessment, so we don’t get confused with the learning experiences that need to exist so that competency-based assessment is effective, so that mastery-based learning is effective. I do think that in the field, we’ve diluted CBE to this very, very broad thing, which makes it difficult for us to have very specific implementation steps.

Rebecca Midles: Let me ask you a question on that, Nate, based on your Jenga tower. When we’re thinking about that, I know we all interact with systems at different stages. Do you think competency-based learning would be better served if we describe it in a progression or phases of implementation, or should we continue to define it as the deepest level of implementation?

Nate McClennen: I think, like I would believe for everything, that there is a progression. There’s a set of steps that may not be the same for every system, but there’s a set of things one needs to think about. We’re gonna jump into that in a second, because the book itself articulates a set of chapters which cover a bunch of steps you need to consider.

Why Implementation Is So Hard

Nate McClennen: Before we jump into those steps, let’s reflect on this: in the book, we talk a bit about research. That first chapter really introduces the research on competency-based education, and the overview is pretty comprehensive. When I read it, and when we’ve looked at our own research, the surveys Rebecca and I have done, it seems that when it is implemented well, it is very good for student outcomes and really aligns with the science of learning. The problem is that it often is implemented with low fidelity, for all sorts of reasons, which we’ll get into. Would you all agree with that? Does the research base support that this is incredible, yet it’s very hard to get to a level of implementation that’s strong? Is that the issue here? What do you think?

Bill Zima: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that, Nate. I think that’s a massively embedded question.

Nate McClennen: That’s what we’re here for, asking hard questions.

Bill Zima: Well, yes, and. See how good I’m getting?

Nate McClennen: Very good. We appreciate that.

Bill Zima: It’s all what you’re saying, but there are so many pieces to it. I think sometimes what happens, and you’ve probably seen this too, and now I’m getting a little away from it but I’m gonna come back, is that you start working with a system and you build that overarching mindset and understanding of what this is, and then they hire a new leader, and it completely becomes derailed. All of a sudden all the teachers are like, “Wait a minute, what just happened?” I saw it happen in Maine, where we had so much momentum, and then all of a sudden it came off the track, ’cause it is hard to implement. I think there are a couple things.

One is a complete misunderstanding of what it is. We went around and described it, and listening to Michelle and Rebecca, I feel my definition agrees with where they’re at, right? But you can notice how different it was at the same time; we approach it with a different lens and different perspectives. So when you come at it from these different angles, and it is supported by research, the research may even be different. For example, John Hattie calls it one thing, Bob Marzano calls it another, but it’s the same thing. I know it’s the same thing because Bob and John talk to each other, and they call it the same thing. They just use different terminology in the establishment of their research. And when you start adding all that in, now you’re asking the adult learner to establish some new procedural knowledge to make this transition, and that’s where things can really go awry.

Quite honestly, the leaders are not always equipped with the ability to allow the time and space for those professional educators to develop procedural knowledge. I was just at a school where it was like, “Okay, next week we’re coming in and we’re gonna watch you using proficiency scales with kids in conferences.” And the teachers are like, “I haven’t even finished making my scale yet.” And it’s like, “Well, we want ’em used with kids. Go.” They haven’t even built the mental schema they’re gonna use. It’s massively well-intentioned, right? We wanna get it in the hands of kids, we wanna get it moving, but we also have to be intentional in how we help the adult learner learn through it as well.

Nate McClennen: Michelle, Rebecca, anything you wanna add to that?

Michelle McCann: I think he’s spot on. When you look at any implementation, what is the engine that drives implementation? It’s the individual classroom teacher, and we’re looking for collective efficacy, where we’re all on the same page, driving the ship in the same direction. That’s very difficult to get to. The background when we were thinking about this book was: how can we set course toward positive implementation? What factors are going to make it more likely to be successful? A lot of it is the behind-the-scenes stuff, right? It’s building capacity, it’s the communication, it’s the stakeholders, getting them to understand what’s happening, and then giving that slow roll of, “Try this, and then this,” and it’s very supported. Yes, it can look very different in every school or every district, but there are things we can do to support a more positive experience of implementation as well as a higher degree of success.

Nate McClennen: Rebecca?

Rebecca Midles: I would love to hear more about the sequence of the chapters, but I’m guessing there were either intentional choices or it just happened with synergy. You’ll tell us more. But what I’m hearing from both of you in your editor role is that there are efforts around readiness. You talked about capacity, but I also think sometimes we take for granted commitment, like, where are people on that spectrum? When I heard the story Bill gives, which is often heard, of a leader doing it to or for the system because they wanna see it happen for kids, it’s with best intentions, but they are not doing it with. I think all of those pieces you’ve surfaced in the chapters speak to that, particularly the conditions. A lot of those chapters are about enabling conditions, and I think that’s really helpful as you clarify that piece.

When I think about myself as a leader for competency-based learning, or what I’m doing as far as a learning model in service of our vision, I’m looking at all of those things. What is the capacity of the folks I have in my district? What are the commitment levels they have? What do I need to do around that, and how do I support it? What conditions are holding them up, and what conditions can I remove at the right time? That’s why I was seeing some sequential pieces in your system. Not necessarily that there’s a right time, but for that system, what makes sense as the most leverageable step. So I appreciated the way those chapters were put together. Of course, I love and respect so many of those authors and know them well, so I would love to hear a little more about that when you get a chance.

The Four Foundation Chapters: Capacity, Mindsets, Alignment, and Clarity

Nate McClennen: Rebecca, I think that’s a good call-out for us to dive into these first four chapters. After the introduction, the first four chapters: the first one’s on capacity, capacity for change. The second one’s on mindsets, that mindset work. At Getting Smart we sometimes call that commitment: are you actually believing in this work? Believe that you can do it, believe that others can do it, believe that it’s good for kids. And then chapters three and four are around alignment. Is it aligned strategically with the vision? Is it aligned with the community vision of the system? Is it aligned with your own strategic plan, your school board, et cetera? And then the fourth chapter is around clarity and communication: how does this all orient?

We all know, from being in schools for a long, long time, that we sometimes have this ping-pong approach to initiatives, where one thing goes and the next thing goes and the next. Competency-based can feel that way when a leader typically gets excited about it and brings it on, and then it’s put on the order of, “Oh, we’re gonna do a third-grade reading program,” or “We’re gonna do MTSS,” or “We’re gonna do competency-based education,” or “We’re gonna do this new PE program,” rather than an overarching philosophy. So I’d love for us to riff a little on these first four chapters: how do they interact, this idea of capacity, mindsets, alignment, and then clarity and communication, as a really important foundation before we get into the next step, which will be the technical side of this, or the procedural side, as Bill talked about. So, Bill, you wanna lead us off on this one, and then we’ll go back around in a circle?

Bill Zima: Sure. Yeah, so there was intentionality behind that structure. Even as we write about in chapter one, which I wrote with my friends Jonathan Vander Els and Brian Stack, there’s the critical importance of the leader recognizing, exactly as Rebecca just said, the capacity in the staff to be able to lift it. One of the misconceptions we sometimes have, and I’ve come to this aha lately as I continue to have milestone birthdays and it’s like, “Oh God, another one?”, is that when I’m working with staff now, teachers, a group of educators, principals, whoever they happen to be, I keep having to remind myself that not everybody is me, right? I was the type of educator who, before the principal was even done asking the question, I was already out the door, “Good. I’m in,” and I’m gone, right? I almost wanted to get out of there before they put any constraints on me. I just wanted to be able to figure it out.

I have really good friends and colleagues who are not that way. They want the pathway to be a little bit better defined. They’re not right or wrong. They’re not trying to resist, and that was one of the things we talked a lot about in our chapter, the idea that Dan and Chip Heath put out in Switch, that what looks like resistance is actually a lack of clarity, or exhaustion. Those ideas were really important to us. You can’t just write people off. I’ve certainly worked with leaders who have said, “Well, it’s because the teachers refuse to do this,” or “Teachers don’t wanna work hard.” And I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t work hard, so that’s not a true statement. So what else is there? And it’s that clarity, and some people don’t love the ambiguity. Me, I’m happy in ambiguity. I thrive in trying to piece the system together. It’s probably what led to me becoming a superintendent, because I like to put the puzzle pieces together. Not other people, like that.

So yes, there was that intentionality, starting with recognizing who you are, recognizing what your system’s capacity is, then moving into building mindsets, and then ensuring coherence. The coherent design, that’s exactly what you were talking about, Nate, with Bryk’s research on improvement science: we don’t build a coherent design. We just keep layering and layering and layering. “Do this. Now we’re doing science of learning. Now it’s gonna be a federal law that you have to do science of reading.” It’s like, what is science of reading? It’s just good cognitive practice, so do we need a law for that? Anyway, I digress.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, no, that’s good. Rebecca, what do you add on?

Rebecca Midles: He was playing off of… I think just being aware of how ready the system is, knowing the signals, which I think is what I hear Michelle and Bill often say: when you’re hearing this, it’s not necessarily pushback, it’s something we haven’t done in terms of conditions. Where do we need more clarity? Where do there need to be more opportunities to see it in action? Where can we invite more people to be part of the design? Where are they not getting their voices heard along the way? What was the misstep? Did we roll out an implementation before we’d actually tested it, broken it, and seen if it fit in our system? Those pieces are typically where we step in as ed leaders, and we can look at those signals to do a better job, and just be ready to position ourselves as learners in that way.

Nate McClennen: I often think of, when I was principal of the school, we were 100% competency-based with no letter grades, and really just a set of core competencies into which the standards were embedded, then turned into how proficient are you. Before we built out that infrastructure, we did a lot of self-reflection, saying, “All right, in high school, what grades did you get? What did it mean when you got a B or an A or a C?” Starting with some of these fundamental mindsets, what does it mean to be assessed? What does it mean to show success? I think that was really, really important for us. So Michelle, if you think about these first four chapters, capacity, mindsets, alignment, clarity and communication, what strikes you as really important here?

Michelle McCann: I think you’re priming the pump, right, for it to run smoothly. If you can get these factors in a really good, healthy way with your key team before any of the nuts and bolts happen… As Bill was saying, some people like to work in ambiguity, but I would say that’s a thin slice. I would say in reality Bill is in the, like, 2%, right? Most people have a fear response to change. It’s like, “Ooh, hold on. I need to…” There’s a hesitation. So those four areas are places you can push into to ease that, and to make sure there’s clarity, make sure everybody’s on the same page, make sure the visioning aligns with what we believe and want. Because the hope is that when you go into this massive amount of change, there is willingness and want for that. As a leader, it would be very hard to force that on a whole population in a school. So you would hope there’s some call for, “We need some change here. Something’s not quite right. We’re seeing some things that aren’t working.” As you develop into those four areas, I think your chances of smoothing the implementation, and of getting a higher percentage of people who are willing to try, willing to start some things, will increase exponentially.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I love that. And Rebecca just put it in the chat, the idea, referenced in chapter four, of a theory of action or a theory of change, whatever you wanna call it. When that is co-designed, it’s clear what the challenge is, it’s clear what the vision is if that challenge were addressed, and then you back into your outcomes, your outputs, and then those activities. And those activities, when you’re starting to address challenges, almost always deal with some of the criteria or definitions around CBE, even if you don’t use the word competency-based at first. It’s about, can it be more personalized? Can we make sure every student reaches proficiency? Are the outcomes clear? Are the learning experiences engaging? So I like that idea of clarity and communication.

The Technical Side: Design Principles and Proficiency Scales

Nate McClennen: Okay. We could talk for hours on just this foundation work, but we’re gonna pivot now to the technical side, because if you’re a listener, you’re probably saying, “Okay, I can set this foundation. I can get everybody primed: capacity, mindsets, alignment, clarity, and communication. But then what does the work look like?” My preamble for this is that in the universe of education right now, we’ve got portraits of graduates that have competency progressions. We have standards that all public schools have to adhere to. We have progressions around standards that existed for ELA and math during the Common Core era. So we have all this overlapping language, and then, of course, proficiency scales, which you all at Marzano have been elevating and amplifying for years. So we have all this stuff going into the melting pot of the technical side of implementation. Rebecca, maybe start us off: on the technical side, what’s the most important first set of steps? What do you do first if you say, “I’m gonna implement CBE”? Outside of the human side, I’ve got that, but the technical side, what has to happen first, or third?

Rebecca Midles: I mean, it would have to be, why are you implementing CBE?

Nate McClennen: Got that.

Rebecca Midles: Yeah. Right. Okay, that’s in place, and then I think in service of that why, you would have some shared agreements, or what we call design principles. Sometimes people will call them the pillars of the learning model. What are the things you agree to be true about teaching and learning that change in assessment? Having those is vitally important. We have some great ones to look at, as you mentioned, at Aurora, now FullScale, those design principles they have when they define CBE. Those are at a pretty large grain size, though. They’re meant to encompass a lot of different systems and a lot of different levels of implementation. So you could even start with those and say, “In service of this, what does that mean to us? To what degree are we gonna implement that, and where do we start?” There are lots of ways to talk about the most leverageable place to begin.

Some people don’t think it’s great to start with assessment practices, but I do tend to go there, because I think it orients you around what you’re focusing your learning on, what strategies are already in place that you’re doing well, and where the gaps are that you need to bring in. If you are doing programs of implementation, in what ways are they serving that work, how do they align, and what needs to be changed? I think it helps you do the cleanup, essentially, because we are gonna ask folks to do work, and it doesn’t need to feel like more work. So what are the places where we can remove some of those barriers? What are the things we can fold into a new way of doing it? And if you don’t have teachers and students at the forefront of that discussion, you’ll wish you had. So be really intentional about bringing folks in along the way to help build that, and be ready to receive that feedback, and to determine the pace of implementation based on what you hear from people and what they need. That can be shoring up capacity. That could certainly be revisiting commitment. Is this a vision that was shared out, or is this truly a shared vision? All of those things will come up after you get clarity around what’s important for learning and what we would call defining important learning experiences.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. So design principles: what do we believe about teaching and learning, and assessment is included in that, and learning experiences. Michelle, you all are very well-versed in proficiency scales, and that’s the language and the ocean you swim in. What’s the first technical step here, outside of the human work? Again, we’ve got that out of the way, but it’s ongoing. Technically, what is the first step?

Michelle McCann: If you are implementing scales, what’s nice about that is you can have a ready-made set, and then it’s just a matter of prioritizing, or maybe doing a little bit of revising and refining. So it’s something you can just acquire and then have clarity around the use of. In terms of the implementation of that itself into competency-based education, because it’s a learning progression, you have different entry points. And when we think about why teachers are so exhausted, why they’re feeling sometimes very defeated, it’s that they’re not able to meet the varied needs of the kids in front of them. With the scales, as a teacher, it feels like, “Oh, there are entry points for all of my kids into this, right? If they can’t do this, I’ve got some other things I can be working on that are real building blocks towards proficiency.” So it’s really an empowering tool. Once teachers have exposure to it, it generally makes sense to them. They’re like, “Oh, okay, I see where I can use this and how it might be helpful to my students and to me as a teacher.”

But to Rebecca’s point, and she just spoke so eloquently about it, having certain things in place can aid in all of this, because if you’re putting all the work back on the people who are also doing the implementation, it’s just difficult. It adds more and more and more. As you mentioned, Nate, teachers have this feeling of, “Oh, we’ve done this and this and this,” and it just gets piled on, and it never gets culled. It’s never, “Oh, we’re gonna remove this so you can do your job better.” So with Rebecca mentioning that if we can have some assessments in place and some protocols in place that are built and delivered and supported, that gives a pathway to say, “We’re starting with the end in mind. We have this all ready for you.” Not that teachers shouldn’t be part of that process, but if you can have that before rollout, you can have your scales, you can have your assessments in place, your common assessments. What we ended up doing was building as the plane’s flying, building, building, building, which was really difficult as an implementer. I know Bill also had this experience, because he was also in the classroom. Rebecca had this experience. So I think that’s part of where we can help in that process behind the scenes. What do we need to do in year one to make sure there are resources and supports for clarity, but also the physicality of it? What tools and resources do we need? All of that can be very helpful.

Nate McClennen: Right. So common assessments, scales, the tools, so the resources are available and the teachers don’t have to build while they’re flying the plane, in addition to Rebecca’s talk about design principles and co-designing this overarching teaching and learning. Bill, are you a plus one on this, or do you feel we missed something?

Bill Zima: No, I’m definitely a “yes and,” but yes, a plus. I couldn’t agree more with the importance of the design principles, and I would even say there are really kind of six core design elements of education. You could be the most traditional, formal or the most informal, and you’re always gonna have a sense of learning objectives, you’re gonna have assessment, you’re gonna have feedback, you’re gonna have the more knowledgeable other, or, in the case of schools, the adult. So you have these pieces, and when you think of design principles around those pieces, it helps bring focus to your design team doing that work. Now we can start thinking through those practices of learning outcomes, assessment, instruction, seeing where there is overlap and support, and finding those areas so that we have a coherent structure. And I believe, and Nate, you said this earlier, and I know Rebecca and Michelle agreed, that there is a sequence, a way you can approach this to see a pathway forward that can help guide you. But it’s not “stop here, stop here, stop here.” It’s not like a stairstep where you go ding, ding, ding, ding. I wish it was, but it’s not.

But having these design principles across those elements, you can start to see where the pieces go. For me, when I’m working with a school, I like to jump in right away with the why and how of the proficiency scale as Bob defines it. It’s really just a tool to help provide clarity in the content you wanna get across, whether it be science content, social-emotional learning, a profile of a graduate, or metacognitive skills, executive functioning. Whatever it is you wanna get across, you build out these ideas so kids have the learning progression. They can see, “I need to build some foundational knowledge, and then I need to acquire and consolidate and retrieve this foundational knowledge.” And it’s not just about academic knowledge, right? There are ways to help kids understand how to regulate, to do self-regulation and things like that.

What I really like about it, looking at my research that I love around hope, is that if a kid sees, “Oh my gosh, I have a strategy I’ve been using to actually help me do this,” they now feel more hopeful for their future. They have developed the capacity to control their life. That is the greatest gift you can give somebody. That’s all a proficiency scale is, and sometimes people try to turn it into a grading thing, and I know we said we were gonna talk about that later, but it’s not the end-all. That’s the start. That’s the basis. When people say, “We’re done with our scales, we’re competency-based,” it’s like, no, you’re not. You haven’t even started. You just built the foundation from which you can now start exploring how you can really help kids develop that sense of agency. So yes, I’m a plus, with everything that was said. Absolutely.

Nate McClennen: I think my two cents, and then Rebecca, I want you to add on, is that this idea of outcomes is really important for me. I find, especially at the secondary level, especially at the high school level, most educators are still at unit by unit, not at the outcome level. They can’t label what their priority outcomes are, their priority standards or priority competencies. They say they cover them because of the curriculum they use, but there’s this huge leap to saying, “Actually, what are the top 10 things you want students to get out of this class?”

When I visited Northern Cass, and I know you all work with Northern Cass, I was in an 11th grade chemistry class, and I asked the students, “What are you working on?” One student pulled up whatever platform they’re using and said, “Oh, we’re doing this learning experience right now, but that’s helping me cover these particular two outcomes. Once I finish those, I’m gonna go to these next two outcomes.” That statement is so rare, especially at the secondary level. If I can get people to go to the outcomes first, what are you trying to achieve, where is that coming from, and then go to the tools, the tools of a proficiency scale, a progression, whatever the case may be, to make sure it’s clear what it means to say you’re proficient in that. That would be my add-on. Rebecca, what else would you add on to this?

Rebecca Midles: We’re all rallying around the fact that agency is the promise we make as public educators to students when they enter our door, whatever age they come to us: that they’ll leave with agency. I think that’s what education is meant to do, right? It’s meant to empower us to do that. I would add that the design principles have to be used as a way to make sense of those pieces. So you’ve already got the work done in your proficiency skills, or whatever you wanna call your identified learning outcomes. I wanna be clear, that is a starting point, as you’re hearing Bill and Michelle lift up. But it doesn’t tell you how to do the design principles around interdisciplinary learning. That’s what the system’s gotta do. Now that you’ve got all these pieces, how do you pull them in with your design system: the whole child piece, the interdisciplinary learning, the authentic, community-facing work, interacting with community members?

Those are the pieces that I think make that vision come alive, and that’s why I love CBE in service of a vision. A system is ready for parts of it as it goes, but it keeps growing and evolving. What I’ve always loved about CBE as a model is that it evolves with you, and that’s pretty unique. You don’t have to abandon something and then try something new as you grow out of it. It just gets deeper and evolves. And I love that you’ve surfaced that this is a starting point, and I think what I’m also hearing is that you also have those other commitments about what we believe to be true about learning, which is our learning model.

Bill Zima: Yeah. Can I just add, Nate?

Nate McClennen: Yep.

Bill Zima: Rebecca and everybody, I agree completely. As you just said, Rebecca, you wouldn’t write a design principle saying, “We will have proficiency skills,” right? That’s not a design principle. The design principle is that you want the outcomes to be clear to kids so they can own their learning, and then they develop that sense of agency as they progress through the learning and build the internal capacity to control their lives. That’s what people have to watch for. As leaders, don’t get hung up on your practices. Think about the design principle and then the practices it serves. And your design principles, as Rebecca has said numerous times, and I just love it every time she says it, should be in service of the learning model that serves the community, what your community wants. So yeah, I love that. I just wanted to add that.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, no, coming back to design principles over and over, they are shared agreements. Shared agreements about teaching and learning, and if there’s a shared agreement that students know their outcomes and know how they could progress in outcomes, then perhaps a proficiency scale or a standards-based assessment system or mastery-based grading is the right tool you can use for that.

Will Letter Grades Ever Disappear?

Nate McClennen: Okay, we’re kind of coming to the end, but I’m gonna throw the large explosion into the mix: letter grades. Rebecca, you and I wrote about letter grades specifically, because I think sometimes, not necessarily at the elementary level, although some elementary schools still struggle with this, many elementary schools have gone to a mastery-based or at least a standards-based system where they list the standards and say whether a student is proficient. That may not mean they have proficiency scales or progressions, but at least they’re articulating what the student should know and be able to do. That gets translated and moved into a set of letter grades that are course-based. My question, not to unpack whether that’s bad or good, is: will that ever disappear? Are we ever gonna move away from a letter-grading system at the secondary level? It feels like a huge barrier, because I know we all translate out. We’ll say, “All right, if you’re eight out of 10 proficient on these eight standards, then you get a B,” or whatever the case may be, but that’s totally contrived. So will we ever universally, or the majority, drop it or not drop it? Is it impossible to change? Who’s brave enough to take that on? Who’s the first one?

Bill Zima: I’ll speak first. Let me answer it this way. I would say what my desire is and what my hunch is, right?

Nate McClennen: Okay, perfect.

Bill Zima: My desire would be that people would just see it as another way, so we could move away from it. My hunch is it’s so embedded in our culture, as far as letter grades, that it almost becomes a barrier to move. I’m not sure. Can I mention people that we know?

Nate McClennen: Go ahead.

Bill Zima: I remember sitting at the Holiday Inn by the Bay here in Portland, Maine, in a training, next to a superintendent from Alaska we all know, John Davis. We were sitting there listening to the talk about letter grades, and he leans over to me and says, “You know, Bill, if I had to do it all over again, if I had to change letter grades, I wouldn’t change it. I would leave them as they were.” And I’m like, “You’re a leader in this work, John. How dare you?” That’s not how I reacted, actually. I said, “John, why would that be?” And he said, “Letter grades equal money. Colleges, scholarships.” And then as I became a superintendent in rural Maine, where those scholarships meant my kids going to school or not, it meant those opportunities were being closed to the learners I was serving. I realized what that meant, and I wasn’t gonna go to the Rotary Club or the local Better Business Bureau and try to explain what a proficiency score means and why they should use that instead of their criteria of letter grades to determine which kids get those things.

So we actually wound up keeping both systems within our school, because it is such a barrier to overcome something so ingrained. The people I worked with and I came to the realization that we didn’t need to change letter grades to get the benefit out of using clarity tools to define and get those outcomes and build authentic, meaningful learning opportunities for kids, that we could even personalize, and maintain our competency-based practice internally, with what I call the internal stakeholders, while having our external stakeholders receive something a little different that they could more easily interpret. So we could keep the good practices and everything we needed, while also recognizing that the external may have needed something else. And I just want to reiterate that if a parent came and said, “I want to see the internal report,” they of course could. We would never not allow parents to know everything they needed to know about their kids. That’s not why we did it. It’s just that sometimes they just wanna know: is my kid okay, and do they have friends? That’s it. They don’t need a 15-page report. They just wanna know those two things.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. We often talk about signals at Getting Smart, the signaling side of things, and sometimes the signal is the page-two transcript, right? If something’s needed with letter grades to translate into a scholarship, or an advanced placement so you’re in college for not as long, or even getting discounted car insurance rates. I know in Wyoming, where I’m at, you get discounted car insurance rates with a certain level of grades. And trying to explain competency-based education to an insurer is never gonna work. So that signaling, and translating for the outside world even if you have an internal system that’s good for learning, is really important. So okay, Rebecca, are they gonna disappear or not disappear?

Rebecca Midles: What I lift from what we’re all sharing is that we never want the translation and the conversation around grades to impact students negatively. We do not wanna have any doors closed or any barriers shut because of that translation not being clear, which I would refer to as conditions, and that there are entities outside of a school system or our local regional community that are still receiving that as their most common tool. I think that’s less and less. I’m gonna be a little more hopeful here, and I think we’re all hopeful, but I think it’s less and less. I think AI is making it more possible for us to do things that don’t cause burnout from a spreadsheet, and to extract ways to show what kids can do in a way that seemed very difficult before. It was more burnout if you were a larger system at scale doing this work. And I do think there are pretty strong efforts around the 50-point scale, at least trying to reduce some of that so you don’t have 60 points dedicated to failure.

We know all of these things. I do think it’s really important to be transparent that, for example, I often reference Lindsay Unified School District. They had gone to a 4.0 scale. Some people will call that a college scale, because it lands better with families. But they had gone to a 4.0 long before they did competency-based learning, so that was not a hill they had to climb. They already had people saying, “Yeah, we want the scoring to reflect what colleges look for.” Colleges look for the GPA, which is a four-point scale. That makes sense. That was one less thing they had to do, and they substituted things like valedictorian with magna cum laude, and it didn’t have to be just one child. There are lots of ways to play within that system and still be true to your model, and I think that’s important.

My hopeful aspiration for the future is that what we know a resume and CV to look like now will have less and less impact if we can’t prove and verify what that is. There’s a pendulum swing. We’ve never given letter grades to get a job, other than getting into a transcript, getting into college, or getting some kind of access to something. When I apply for a job, I don’t give you my college transcript or a letter grade about how I do on these things. You actually list what I would refer to as competencies on a resume. We’ll now have to verify that, and so I think the real-world view of that is not letter grades. It is about what you can do and what you can achieve. So I am gonna remain hopeful about that and recognize that it’s the system for adult-centric ease and behavior that has made grades stick around as long as they have, because we didn’t have better measures to extract that information before. We do now. So I would like to see that changed, but I do think what I’m hearing all of us say is that in the process, we have to make choices that best serve our kids where we are in the implementation. If we are not doing letter grades internally, we play it in the back, as Bill would say, so everybody has lots of opportunities. We are not having to play that game and communicate it internally. We’re saying to students, “This is what matters. This is a signal the outside world recognizes, and we’ll live with it, but this is what it means here.” As long as we can try to navigate that path, we’ll continue to do so and just hope for a better future.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. So the increasing ease of validating and verifying, and extracting, to use that word, to demonstrate what a student knows and is able to do is something I think will help move this forward, even while a translation layer still exists. All right, Michelle, we’re gonna finish up with you. What are your thoughts, given what Rebecca and Bill said, about this thing we call letter grades?

Michelle McCann: The problem wasn’t in grades themselves. It was the absolute lack of inter-rater reliability. A B here and a B there, even if Rebecca and I were teaching the same exact class, we’re in our rooms doing our own grading and scoring, and there was no consistency. If we’re going to say, “This is accurate to where a student is in relation to this skill or knowledge,” and we all share how we score and we all interpret it the same way, that’s really what we’re trying to do with competency-based education: get in alignment with that. So the hope is that no matter what, within even just a school, you have commonality of expectations.

But what Bill and I experienced in Maine was that when we met with all these universities, they said, “We much prefer a competency-based or standards-based report card.” They preferred it. They were speaking to parent groups and saying, “No, we deal with international students. We deal with homeschoolers. We see the craziest report cards. We would rather see the list of skills and knowledge and where students are in relation to that.” So that was never a barrier. To Bill’s point, it was more the local organizations who needed a way to prove, “We wanna know how much smarter your kid is than this other kid,” and rate students. Those systems are still in place, but to Rebecca’s point, there are districts that have solved for that. So I think if it’s important, what ends up happening is you back-end that. You don’t even change the report card. That’s not a first step. It sends people into a total tailspin. There’s so much emotion around it. You do everything leading up to it, and your whole stakeholder group will be like, “Well, why doesn’t our report card look more like this?” They push for the change, is what we’ve seen. When you take that scaffolding approach to implementation, they’ll say, “Wouldn’t we want to see it this way?” So there was much less pushback if it wasn’t forced in a way early on that would set off all these alarm bells. That’s just my thought on it.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. I really think that’s an important point, that it should be the logical outcome rather than the first step, right? The logical outcome after you do all this work is, why on earth would we have grades anymore? Because I have a much better way of seeing what I can do, or my son can do, or my daughter can do, for higher ed, for high school, for employers, whatever the case may be.

One Sentence of Advice

Nate McClennen: All right. We’ve gotta wrap here. This has been an awesome conversation. Let’s each have one sentence, it can be a fragment or a full sentence, but not more than one, that says what advice you would give a superintendent, principal, group, board, et cetera, when they say, “I am thinking about moving, I wanna move our system toward competency-based education.” What would that one sentence be? Knowing that you’d have a lot more to say, but let’s wrap with that. Bill, go ahead.

Bill Zima: I’ll just go, ’cause I wanna get it out of the way. I would say: Why? What’s your purpose?

Nate McClennen: Great. Michelle?

Michelle McCann: Ask them to picture the output, which is that student leaving us. What do we want for them? Is CBE gonna help us get there?

Nate McClennen: Awesome. Rebecca?

Rebecca Midles: I’ll pull Tom Vander Ark into this one. He always said, “What problem are you trying to solve?” And I would always follow that up with, “What is the vision that you wanna see as students leave your system? What’s the promise you’re gonna make?”

Nate McClennen: Okay. I’ll add in, which is really Rebecca’s forte: what do you believe about teaching and learning? All right, listeners, four questions you’re left with. Most importantly, go out and take a look at this book, Competency-Based Practices. It covers a lot of what we just talked about and so much more, and it should give you a lot to think about as you go through your own journey to implementing CBE.

Bill Zima: I just wanted to thank everybody, my fellow editors, Bob Marzano and Julia Simms, as well as all the authors on the book. It was such an honor to read and co-author with all of those people I have known and been in this work with for quite some time. It was absolutely amazing. We couldn’t get everybody, but we certainly got a lot of great people who are really dedicated to this work and have spent decades doing it. So again, shout out to them, because they’re the ones who made the book possible.

Nate McClennen: Rebecca, Michelle, Bill, thank you so much for your time. This is an awesome conversation. I know we could talk for a lot longer, but thanks all, and have a great rest of your day.

Rebecca Midles: Thank you.

Michelle McCann: Thank you.

Bill Zima: Thanks, Nate.

Who are the guests?

Bill Zima is the Director of Implementation for Marzano Academies, where he partners with schools and communities to bring personalized competency-based education to life. A former superintendent in rural Maine, he has worked on competency-based implementation at the classroom, school, and district levels. He is one of the four editors of Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation.

Michelle McCann is a Professional Development Associate and author with Marzano Resources, where she has worked since 2014. She began working with districts to implement competency-based education in 2004 in Alaska, and she is one of the four editors of Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation.

Resources

Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation (book): https://www.amazon.com/Competency-Based-Practices-Successful-Implementation-competency-based/dp/1965768024

Marzano Resources (book listing): https://www.marzanoresources.com/books-videos.html

Marzano Resources, Personalized Competency-Based Education: https://www.marzanoresources.com/personalized-competency-based-education-1.html

FullScale (formerly the Aurora Institute): https://www.fullscalelearning.org/