Competency-Based Education
Leadership
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.
Ed Policy
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."
Personalized Learning
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”?
Uncategorized
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.
Personalized Learning
“Keep Your 3, I Want My A”: What’s Up With Standards-Based Grading?
Traditional grading systems are inconsistent, subjective, more about effort than outcomes, and not closely linked to the big goal of college and career readiness. Standards-based grading is an effort to provide more accurate feedback on what students know and can do; it allows students to progress based on demonstrated mastery.
Personalized Learning
Disrupting the Space-Time Continuum: Competency-based Learning Explained
Competency-based learning allows students to circumvent the accumulation of excessive and often-wasted credits simply for the sake of fulfilling (what many believe to be) an arbitrarily defined term of study along the aforementioned continuum.
Ed Policy
Shifting Superintendents Stuck in Compliance World
Kirtman's book, Leadership and Teams: The Missing Piece of the Educational Reform Puzzle , published this year by Pearson, reflects two years of research into workplace personalities. It outlines 7 leadership competencies that Michael Fullan and Robert Marzano both endorse.
Personalized Learning
10 Design Choices of Competency-Based Schools
The shift from time to learning changes everything. Most obviously it changes how students move through an education system and earn credentials. But it also changes how learning opportunities are structured and supported by educators.
Personalized Learning
4 Essential Attributes of Personalized Learning
The architectural shift competency-based environments where students progress based on demonstrated mastery isn’t really the goal, it’s just a better way to personalize learning.
Personalized Learning
Takeaways and New Questions from EAA School Visits
I encourage you to take the time to put a team together or even a cross-district or cross-state team to go visit Nolan Elementary, Phoenix Multicultural, Brenda Scott Academy for Theatre Arts, and Southeastern Technical High School sooner than later. Michigan and Detroit have a lot of volatile political dynamics (i.e things change), and I’d hate for people to miss the chance to see what can happen when you integrate personalized, mastery-based, and blended into a “student-centered” model of learning.