Competency-Based Education
Piedmont City Schools Re-Imagines the Future for Rural Students
Piedmont City School District is not a big city story but instead proves that all of our kids deserve better conditions for learning and to be fully prepared to enter this 21st century world, regardless if they live in the city or in a “harder to reach” rural area.
A Look Inside Standards-Based Grading at Starr Detroit Academy
By: Jeremy Vidito. Standards-based grading was one of numerous strategies we implemented from Day 1. And it became evident quite early in our first year that we had some challenges to overcome if we were going to successfully implement standards-based grading.
Testing: Why We Need More of It. Lots More.
Let’s give testing back the power to enrich and improve learning. And if the role if high-stakes testing is to ensure equity, let’s focus on making the tests equitable. Or are we too addicted to a simplistic view of tests, to causation/correlation fallacies, and to outdated metaphors of school to make abundant access to tests available to all students, parents, and teachers?
How the Feds Could Contribute to Competency Education
iNACOL released a paper--A K-12 Federal Policy Framework for Competency Education--the most comprehensive look at the federal role in supporting the shift to competency-based education.
A Personal Journey to Help Reinvent Schools
It was clear that instruction needs to focus more on learning by doing, collaboration, and competency-based student progress. This represents a fundamental, systemic transformation …
Competency Education: The Solution to Retention
As we turn the corner in designing new learning systems, the notion of considering retention can now be safely set aside. In a competency based learning system, no child is retained. It is as simple as that. Why?
Closing the Motivation Gap
The fact that the best professors in the world are making their courses freely available is an important milestone in learning opportunity, but MOOCs are largely serving the college educated seeking additional education.
Consortium Points the Way on Proficiency-Based Learning
"David is a great resource for our region," said Nick Donohoe of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, NESSC's primary benefactor. "He has a forward-thinking view of where learning needs to go, related to policies and assessment in particular," and he's particularly good at "summarizing 'edu-ese' for state legislators and local school leaders."
Optimizing Personalized, Blended, Competency-based Schools
Wouldn’t teachers start to have those “what if” moments at lunch or walking in from the parking lot about how they could combine different elements of the different strands of innovation. Wouldn’t students start to bring ideas between classrooms about how their project-based learning could really benefit from having access to some of the resources on-line or how they might be able to create more deeper learning projects if once a week there was a three-hour open period to work on projects so they could get o they could get 4′s not just 3′s for “grades”?
Education 3.0: Helping All Children Reach their Potential
The alternative is to make achievement the constant, and allow each student the time she or he needs to learn. As described in the new book, Reinventing Schools: It’s Time to Break the Mold, this one change requires six massive changes throughout all aspects of an educational system.