The Case For Competency-Based Education | Getting Smart - 0 views
-
transformed schools that feature tasks and projects that challenge young people in authentic ways to build design, collaboration, and communication skills that prepare young people for navigating new and complex situations.
-
Quality preparation. Much of the corporate training world has shifted from participation to demonstrated skills in order to improve job readiness.
-
Equity. If gap-closing equity is a stated goal, then structures, schedules, and supports can be aimed at struggling learners that need more time and assistance to accelerate their learning
- ...4 more annotations...
What IS the difference between competencies and standards? | reDesign - 2 views
-
Competencies, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the application of skills, knowledge and dispositions rather than content knowledge.
-
Competency-based models approach content as the backdrop, while putting essential skills and dispositions front and center. In this way, content serves as the context for practicing and demonstrating “transferable” competencies that can be applied in different contexts.
-
In competency-based models, the entire system must change. Students advance upon mastery when they are ready, not when an arbitrary academic calendar suggests that they should be.
- ...15 more annotations...
Why I Don't Grade | Jesse Stommel - 2 views
-
grades are the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education.
-
Agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice are not possible in a hierarchical system that pits teachers against students and encourages competition by ranking students against one another.
-
Certainly, metacognition, and the ability to self-assess, must be developed, but I see it as one of the most important skills we can teach in any educational environment.
- ...9 more annotations...
Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 0 views
-
But what are they betting on? AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace. To that, however, AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student. The result, they fervently say, is a superior educational experience.
-
heir own weekly “playlists,” queues of individual and group activities tailored to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each kid.
-
This puts AltSchool at the intersection of two rapidly growing movements in education. Along one axis are the dozens of edtech startups building apps for schools; along the other are the dozens of progressive schools rallying around the increasingly popular concept of personalized education. The difference is: AltSchool is not just building apps or building schools. It’s doing both. In that way, AltSchools are more than just schools. They’re mini-research and development labs, where both teachers and engineers are diligently developing the formula for a 21st century education, all in hopes of applying that formula not only to other AltSchools, but to private, public, and charter schools across the country.
- ...6 more annotations...
The Art of Getting Opponents to "We" - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Significantly, participants all came to align behind a single vision statement — and now they are actively communicating and advancing that vision nationwide through their organizations and networks. They host meetings with educational networks, superintendents, principals, teachers and philanthropists, reach out to libraries, museums and after-school programs, and identify and connect pioneers in learner-centered education.
-
Convergence staff and facilitators work to create a “safe space,” maintaining a strict neutrality and ensuring that everyone feels heard, says Fersh. It’s important that participants “feel they’re not in a place that’s already cooked or leaning toward any solutions.”
-
Convergence staff members look continually for opportunities to forge connections among participants. They begin meetings with “connecting” questions — for example: “When did you know that education was of great importance to you?” — that are designed to reveal people’s values and experiences, rather than highlight their disagreements. The objective is not to sweep differences under the rug, but to build rapport that a group needs to grapple effectively with its differences.
- ...2 more annotations...
Designing Advisory Systems: Innovative Approaches From High Schools | Springpoint Schools - 0 views
Position and Power of Students in a Mastery-based System - Springpoint - 0 views
-
mastery-based system helps students know where they are on their journey toward graduation
-
formative approach
-
students are true partners in their own education, empowered to engage their learning facilitators in conversations about their learning targets and individual goals
- ...3 more annotations...
transforming_teaching_learning_and_assessment.pdf - 1 views
-
T o make space for learner voice and to promote learner agency, teachers must set up learning environments that stimulate active learner engagement with meaningful and progressively challenging tasks that stimulate their thinking and enable them to develop competence over time. Unlike subject content, competence cannot be transmitted to learners. Rather, competence is progressively developed by learners through appropriate facilitation.
-
Table 1. The Role of Learners in Competence-Based Curricula
-
A “growth mindset” (Dweck, 2006). essential for developing intrinsic motivation.
- ...15 more annotations...
Q: What's the Right Dosage of PBL? A: Not Once Per Year | Blog | Proje... - 2 views
-
Does adopting PBL mean we should use it all the time and teach everything via projects? If not, then how many projects should teachers do per semester or year?
-
Project Based Teaching Practices are actually just good teaching, period, and many of the practices can be used in the classroom when students are in between projects.
-
“Just make two high-quality projects per year for every student be the goal.” In a K-12 system, that means each student would experience 26 projects at a minimum—which sounds like a lot! But that’s only the start. Perhaps students in middle and high school, at first, would experience two projects per year in one subject area—if, say, only social studies teachers begin to use PBL. But assuming PBL spreads across the school, students would do projects in other subject areas, or do interdisciplinary projects, and eventually experience many more than 26 projects if they stayed in one K-12 PBL-infused system.
- ...7 more annotations...
How Can Schools Prioritize For The Best Ways Kids Learn? | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views
-
if the changes to education are all in the service of doing the same thing better, they may be missing the point.
-
the current context demands a radically different vision of learning.
-
examples of schools and districts that are asking themselves difficult questions to propel change. The successful ones are letting the answer to the question, “How do kids learn best?” drive everything they do in schools.
- ...3 more annotations...
Re-Building the K-12 Operating System | The Transforming Teaching Project - 0 views
The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education - Education Week - 0 views
-
data scientists would then search the waters for patterns in each student's engagement level, moods, use of classroom resources, social habits, language and vocabulary use, attention span, academic performance, and more.
-
would be fed to teachers, parents, and students via AltSchool's digital learning platform and mobile app, which are currently being tested
-
AltSchool's 50-plus engineers, data scientists, and developers are designing tools that could be available to other schools by the 2018-19 school year.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
Eventually, Ventilla envisions AltSchool technology facilitating an exponential increase in the amount of information collected on students in school, all in service of expanding the hands-on, project-based model of learning in place at the six private school campuses the company currently operates in Silicon Valley and New York City.
Six Fixes for Proficiency-Based Learning « Competency Works - 0 views
-
Proficiency-based learning, at its core, is about redesigning the learning and teaching system of America. Instead of basing learning on how much time a student spends, it bases learning on what students can demonstrate—exactly the same as every other system students will encounter in the world outside of school.
-
In addition, schools should continue to share information pertaining to course grades and start to share information regarding student attainment of specific standards, including course-crossing skills such as problem solving, creativity, and analysis. While we would recommend that the course grades continue to use A-F or 0-100 scales, shifting to a 1-4 scale on the standards probably provides better insight for everyone involved. In this way, parents, students, and educators will know how students are doing within the structures of a class and how students are doing in regard to specific standards. This both/and approach will provide more information that can then be used to promote better learning.
-
Keep cohorts of kids together as they progress through their learning. Teachers can vary the learning strategies for various cohorts of students, supporting some students to dig deeper into various standards while others realize initial achievement—and then bringing everyone back together again to start the next unit of learning. Further, as research on learning has demonstrated, learning is a social endeavor, not meant to be undertaken alone. A cohort model supports this research.
- ...3 more annotations...
Mastery Credits? Mastery Transcript? « Competency Works - 0 views
-
the reductionist approach that wraps a student into one number – the GPA – is deeply problematic
-
MTC wants to create a system of credits and transcripts that represents the whole child, or whole teenager in the case of high schools
-
Credentials needs to have systems in place to provide confidence that they really do represent demonstrated knowledge and skills.
- ...7 more annotations...
The Trailblazers - How Students Are Learning To Make Impact Design Better - Impact Desi... - 2 views
-
Impact Design Hub spoke with Sara Cornish and Josh Treuhaft, two graduates from the inaugural class of the School of Visual Arts’ Design for Social Innovation (DSI) program, a two-year, cross-disciplinary MFA program, which aims to teach students to address social challenges through systems-level design thinking and offers one of the first graduate degrees in this field.
-
Yeah, and I think there was an understanding that we were not only joining the program, but also helping to build it, which was really exciting. I remember that the interviews were so filled with anticipation. They told us, “This is going to be amazing. You’re going to be part of something that’s an absolute first. You’re going to help trailblaze the field.”
-
it was never explicitly about learning the way to design for social innovation. It was more about teaching a variety of different thought models, processes, and tools that you can use for various types of work relating to social impact. Ultimately, the program is about systems thinking and how things are connected to each other.
- ...2 more annotations...
Why A School's Master Schedule Is A Powerful Enabler of Change | MindShift | KQED News - 2 views
-
He and a team of teachers set out to try to reconfigure how this big high school could structurally put student relationships with teachers at the center, and value mastery of content above all else.
-
‘If we don’t match our minutes to our mission, [teachers are] not going to shift.’
-
biggest obstacles to instructional changes of the sort Smith and his team were trying to engineer was the school schedule itself.
- ...8 more annotations...