Competency-Based Education Ignited: A Transformational Systemwide Approach for Leaders

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Richard DeLorenzo and Roxanne Morant. Richard is an internationally known leader in education and organization restructuring. He's best known for his uniquely comprehensive grassroots approach to reinventing school systems to meet the needs of all learners. He is the author of two books, including Delivering on the Promise, The Education Revolution, And he is the co-author with Roxanne Morant of the new book, Competency-Based Education Ignited, A Transformational System-Wide Approach for Leaders. And Roxy is Chief Education Officer of Education for Leadership in Alaska. She and Richard worked together at the Reinventing Schools Coalition, leading system change through leadership, curricular improvement, and professional development.

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And she has more than 35 years of experience as a teacher, principal, district administrator, and university instructor.

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Thank you.

[01:05] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:07] SPEAKER_02:

Richard and Roxy, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[01:10] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin.

[01:11] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Justin.

[01:12] SPEAKER_02:

I'm excited to talk about your new book that you've written together about competency-based education. First of all, what is competency-based education? Because it's probably a term that we've all heard, but I would guess most of us do not have the same level of clarity about what exactly that means that you bring to the table in this book. So take us into some of the basics of what competency-based education means.

[01:36] SPEAKER_01:

Well, like a lot of educational trends, this has gone through a lot of name changes. It used to be called standards-based mastery learning, and recently we've moved into competency-based education. But basically, Justin, what it is is that we know exactly what we want a student to know and be able to do, and it's very clear level by level, content by content. And as a kid learns, shows proficiency in that content material, they move on to the next level versus a traditional time-based system where everybody's moving at the same step, whether they're ready or not, or whether they're already ahead of that material. So just philosophically, it's a logically, it really honors the way students learn and it gives them the ownership of their journey, which is really powerful.

[02:28]

Roxy, any thoughts?

[02:30] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Richard. I agree that competency-based education allows students to not be bored in school and not to be frustrated. So they can move ahead at their own pace, find others that are also ready. But if they need the extra help, it's not embarrassing. It's that everybody is at different points at different time, and that's okay. It's how we learn together.

[02:50] SPEAKER_02:

One of the first things I wanted to ask about your approach to competency-based education is what that looks like at the class level. Because I hear from a lot of Silicon Valley types, people who are starting learning platforms and tutoring platforms and things like that. And when it comes to the idea of moving at your own pace, I find that a lot of people find that idea very compelling because maybe they experienced a lot of boredom in school. The people who tend to start such platforms tend to have been pretty bright students, you know, maybe spending a lot of time waiting around for the class to catch up and were eager to move on. But I find that often they haven't really thought about what they want school to look like beyond every kid sitting at a computer and working at their own pace. And it sounds a little bit grim to me in the way it's described by a lot of people who haven't really thought beyond the software side of it.

[03:38]

And I know you have tons of experience at the school and system level. What does it look like at the classroom level to have students move through a competency-based system?

[03:49] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, in a classroom, a competency-based education system, great examples is with John Bergman. He just wrote Mastery Learning, and we have a class that we sponsor with him to help classroom teachers see how do you set up your classroom so that students can move around as they're ready and not be stuck in a seat in one place until somebody comes to help them. So a competency-based ed classroom allows for different experiences at the same time going on around the school. In the classroom, it can look chaotic, but it can also look very traditional. It just depends on what's going on, what the themes are, how the students are able to show that they already know or that they've learned it or they've mastered something. So peer, you have self-assessment, peer assessment.

[04:35]

Finally, you have teacher. The best part about doing this in today's world is we have the technology finally that will support this. So as a classroom teacher, I can tell you 20 years ago when we did this, it was pretty challenging because we had our own Excel spreadsheets. And even though we had a learning management system, it was not able to keep up with a mastery type of grading system. So we have that now. So the teachers are able to spend more quality time on the relationships with the students and really presenting them with lessons and experiences that are very much personalized for the students.

[05:14] SPEAKER_01:

And I just add to that, Justin, I know you do a lot of work on teacher effectiveness, is when we do a classroom walkthrough, so our classroom walkthroughs are entirely different. It's all about interviewing the students. And there's three questions that we ask students. We ask them what they're learning and why is it important. So we want the student to show us exactly what level they're at and how is that learning is going to be meaningful to them. The next question is, how do you know when you've learned it?

[05:40]

What's the evidence you have to present? And then what do you do after you're finished? And in a competency-based school, when I go into a really well-deployed one, it's remarkable because all the kids own their learning. They're exactly where they're going. When they get stuck, they know what they do. And again, the kind of the magic of this is you have to shift the culture of a classroom.

[06:01]

away from the teacher base to a student base and you have to build that culture with tools and processes that we utilize in our training. So teachers have the confidence to go in there and do step-by-step and we call it gradual release of control and to where the students take that ownership. So what goes up is their acceleration of their academic goes up, the discipline goes down, the motivation goes up, the engagement goes up. Those are all the things we measure in the metrics.

[06:29] SPEAKER_02:

I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about what that looks like in different grade levels and different subject areas, because certainly I can envision, you know, students in a writing class moving at their own pace, progressing through different kind of goalposts in their writing. And certainly, there's not any kind of need as a whole class to be working on exactly the same thing at the same time. It's a little bit harder to envision what that could look like, say, in a social studies classroom or an English language arts classroom. And I think our history as a profession is filled with maybe partially or unsuccessful examples of attempts. And some of those have stuck in our minds as a little bit grim. I'm thinking about mastery approaches that were tried in the 70s and 80s to teaching math, where the class is basically a file cabinet full of worksheets that students progress through at their own pace.

[07:24]

And I have a sense that you're talking about something that is a lot more compelling, a lot more exciting than that. So take us into a little bit more about what it can look like in different classrooms for students to move at their own pace, but again, as we said, not be at a computer all the time and actually have a great classroom experience.

[07:42] SPEAKER_01:

That's a great question, Justin. So my response to that is that, first of all, you have to agree on what the outcomes are and how we're going to measure those. That's critical. And unfortunately, in traditional systems, it's all over the place. You can go in the same third grade class in the same school, and you'll get different delivery systems and different outcomes. And so the first thing is you have to be really clear what we want students to know and be able to do.

[08:07]

And it has to be K-12, or what we like to say is K-20. I think it should be a seamless system. And then as you go back into it, if you go into a classroom, whether it's social studies, whatever, the very first thing you know is that students have tools and processes of how they manage their learning and their behavior. That's where you start with this. You build that culture. When it comes to the academics, there is an instructional delivery system that we believe in.

[08:35]

We believe it's good to recall facts and knowledge, but we want to go beyond that. We want to show the application of that knowledge and we want to do really cool real life projects with that knowledge. So in any kind of situation, as long as those are the parameters around the way the classroom operates, you'll again see deeper engagement, deeper commitment. And as Roxy mentioned earlier, some classrooms are very chaotic. But when you sit down with every student, you're just blown away at the engagement and the ownership of their learning. And that's what makes the difference.

[09:11]

So a concrete example of let's take a social study, a secondary social studies class is the first thing you would see when you go into classroom is this is our vision. This is a code of collaboration, which we, the teacher learns how to do that. And these are the outcomes we're working on. So there might be a set of 50 outcomes up there on the chart paper. And then students will self-assess themselves and place them where they need to be in that social studies. And then they can see where other students are that they can go to get help.

[09:40]

They can create their projects to meet those proficiency. So that's all in the training of the teachers of how to unpack learning. And again, there's, we usually use Marzano scales as a good example of the rigor. And so we wanted to at least get a level three, which is proficiency that students not only have the knowledge, but they can actually can apply it in some simple way. But also we want to go up to level four where you get into higher order thinking skills. And so that's kind of what the system looks like.

[10:09]

Maybe Roxy, you could give a kind of exact scenario that you had in your class recently.

[10:15] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Yeah. Because I taught social studies and I would team up with the language arts teacher and we had a tech lab in between us. So we all three doors and I would have kids at four different levels always. And I taught 150 kids a day. So just the managing of that.

[10:31]

It has to be transparent so that your learning management system, the students know what standards they're working on or what competencies they're trying to master. And I only allow them to do two or three at the most at one time, because if you're really going to master it, remember it five years, be able to apply it, it needs to go deep. But I would always present the students with, you know, some kind of inspiration about, oh, elections are coming up. And we would do a fun game about who would you vote for and why. And we would move around the classroom depending on our opinions and get the kids moving. So you get that generation.

[11:08]

kinesthetic learner. You've got the kids that are shy. It's okay to be part of the group. And, you know, so you're really looking at the learners and what their styles are. But as we talk about elections, you can go at every different level. So it doesn't have to be 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th.

[11:25]

It's more like, here's the concept and how deep we want to go and how much we're going to do on it depends on what your competency is that you're trying to master. So you can even be in the same group of somebody and do different levels. I got to say that sometimes the kids would come up with projects that were amazing. When digital media was just first coming out, we had a group of students that wanted to be local TV news broadcasters. So they decided once a month they would do voices of the students is what they called it. So they got a name, they got the logo, they got the whole marketing.

[12:01]

Then they did a theme like we had the Exxon Valdez oil spill. So they invited in the oil company along with some of our legislators and they interviewed them and they had call-ins from around the state from other kids. So you can imagine the level of language arts that they got and they were showing their teacher who collaborated with us. But what happens on competency-based ed is it becomes real. The kids see that what they are doing makes a difference and then they start getting passionate about it. So there's times when I felt like you just have to stand back and let them go because they're so bright and they're so passionate about what they were doing.

[12:41]

They're going to go way beyond what would be required in a traditional classroom.

[12:48] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. I'm hearing a lot of connections to project-based learning. and the kind of standards aligned, but very active and very self-directed work that students can do. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the role of standards, because it sounds like a big part of competency-based education is communicating the standards that students are working toward to them and giving them a sense of ownership around meeting those standards. Is that right?

[13:17] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's exactly right, Justin. So first of all, what we do in our shared vision process is we, with districts, as we come up, you know, what do we want our kids to know and be able to do? And in the Chugach district where this really went to scale is not only the basic skills, but kids wanted to have transition skills. They wanted...

[13:36]

After they leave school, what are they gonna do? They want a technology, they want personal social development skills. So we basically took all that information and we backward engineered what a graduate would do and then we'd have these different levels that we would build units and lessons around. So it is exactly that. And that's where I see a lot of places that say they're standards-based or competency-based. When I go in there, I can tell within a few minutes that they're not because it's completely scripted by the book or it's scripted by district office.

[14:11]

There's no ownership for the kids to know exactly where they're going. They can't navigate it. And so again, the power of a competency-based system is empowering the child to have ownership of their learning and to do the things that are meaningful for them to accelerate. And some of our metrics, we actually could show that our kids performed above their IQ when you placed them in their zone of proximal development. And that means when they're in that sweet spot, like in a video game, And the video gamers have this figured out, but schools do not. Schools are still doing one size fits all.

[14:48]

And that's why the book we wrote is so important. Even though we know we're ahead of our times, we're hoping that we can convince and help systems move in that direction.

[14:58] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Richard and Roxy, I know you've worked with entire school systems. You've worked directly with students, directly with teachers, directly with principals. Take us into some of the different perspectives that the different stakeholders have in considering a switch to competency-based education, or maybe for a district that has been making some moves in this direction. What are some of the different stakeholders need to grapple with? Because one of the things I've noticed when it comes to any kind of change is that senior leadership tends to buy in very quickly and even move on to something else before teachers have really had a chance to fully implement. So what do people need to be thinking about at the various levels to succeed as a whole system?

[15:42] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so that's a great question. Let me walk you through what usually happens, Justin, and that will give people a very clear image and kind of be able to place where they might be. So first of all, through the book or keynote speaking, people get excited about when we show them the results of what's possible. And what has to drive the change is the values and belief of that organization. They have to believe that all kids can learn. They learn differently at different rates.

[16:09]

They have to believe in those things and they have to realize that the current system does not recognize that. It's not intended to educate all kids to any kind of level of rigor. So that's the very first piece before we even go into an organization is that they have an alignment of values and beliefs around what's best for children. the second thing we do is we go into a system then a district will invite me in and i'll do a readiness survey and so that means basically there are some indicators in every system that if you have these things in a high level implementation place then you are you have the ability to move to that next level and a lot of places don't and so what we try to do is show here's the pieces you're missing here's the readiness things that you need to have in place and one of the things is trust communication relationships between board and administration between board and teachers administration and teachers those are all the elements we've learned over three decades of what it takes to go to this next level

[17:09]

then once there is a commitment and the readiness report we give back to them we bring everybody together i meet with every stakeholder group and walk them through what this looks like and explain to them and then what we do then is we go to the next level where we will open up training for k-12 teachers they need five days of training and then we play with it in the classroom we actually take these teachers And again, with any kind of change, Justin, as you know, there's three groups of people. They're the omnivores, the ones that are really excited, which is a small percentage. There's the people I call the Missouri people who just show me, you know, they sit on the fence because they want to see which way the administration is going to go, which way the union is going to go. And they have to be convinced that this is the right thing. And then we have the ones, a small percentage of the ones that no matter what you do, they're going to resist it.

[18:01]

And what we do is we take all three of those groups and we take them to the training. And then we go back into classrooms to provide feedback for them, to show them where they're at and how to get there. And it's transformational. And the reason we've been successful is we're really good at doing that. The problem is we can't scale it. That's our challenge right now.

[18:20]

So then once that happens, here's the critical part. Because the way we treat students, we want to treat teachers the same way. So one of the things that I put in the design of this is you have to have 80% commitment from all your staff to say that I'm committed to doing this. Not that I believe in it, but I'm going to change my behaviors. If we don't have 80%, we stop the training and we say, here are the pieces that you still need to do, and we'll come back and help you. Once we get 80% of a system, then we train everybody.

[18:50]

And then we change the curriculum, we change the assessments, we change the transcripts, we change the reporting. We invite stakeholder groups from unions to parents to businesses to be a part of the solution. And then once you do that, then it's the Rubicon. You cross that Rubicon and you shift over to this new system. And there's many ways people have tried it. They've done a gradual release where they've gone primary, elementary, middle school, high school.

[19:16]

Some systems do the whole system. K-12 and others will start with the high school and work down. So there's all kinds of ways that you can do that. But that is really the blueprint. And that's what the book does. The book kind of illustrates the roadmap of what it takes to do this.

[19:32]

And that's the hardest part is where do you begin this?

[19:36] SPEAKER_02:

Right, because that question of how do we build momentum? How do we make sure that we're starting with people who are bought in? And then how do we take it to scale and not allow resistance to kind of stop the train? I think those are really critical questions. And that's a brave question to say, do we have 80%? And if not, we're stopping.

[19:55] SPEAKER_01:

Well, in what we do, Justin, we actually have a scoring guide matrix we use to measure the ones that are committed and the ones that aren't committed, so we can identify exactly why they don't want to do it. If it's because they don't believe this is the right thing, and you have a lot of people in that area, there's no way you can make it happen. The other thing, the biggest factor, I think, when I try to flip system is the leadership. Because the leadership has to be confident. They have to drive it by their values and beliefs that this is what they know is the most important thing. And they're willing to be a learner.

[20:27]

And they have to sit through all the training just like we ask teachers to do. Otherwise, they don't know what they're leading. And we've made a lot of mistakes, Justin, in trying to help systems. We tried to flip the entire state of Maine at one point. And I was very visible in the state of Maine for several years working with the government and state department in many districts. However, the governor at that time made really bad decisions and he tried to mandate this, which you cannot mandate this.

[20:56]

It has to be a voluntary thing. That's why you have to empower the teachers to take ownership. It's the only way you can scale in an organic fashion. So yeah, it's complicated. It's what we call second order change. And you're on the cutting edge of innovation in a system that does not embrace innovation.

[21:15] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I want to talk about the teacher buy-in side. And Roxy, maybe you can speak a little bit to your personal experience as well as experience training others in this. Because certainly there is an intrinsic appeal and kind of a natural rationale for teachers to teach in a standards-based way and to focus heavily on helping all students master the standards. I mean, that just sounds right to me as a person with a degree in curriculum and instruction, like that's just, you know, what I'm here for is to help students master the standards. What was that process like for you, Roxy, as an educator and as a leader working with educators to help them make some of those shifts into not just having standards, not just planning and teaching with standards in mind, but actually taking a competency-based approach.

[22:01] SPEAKER_00:

I love your question, Justin. You're right on with some of the issues. But bringing in teachers, they have to be, like Rich said, learners themselves. A lot of teachers...

[22:13]

are very uncomfortable when they don't have total control of the classroom, of the curriculum, of the time, what the outcomes might be. So to be vulnerable and to tell your students, well, we're going to work on this together, like starting at the beginning of the year with your code of collaboration. What is our classroom going to look like, feel like, sound like? And allowing the students' voices to be heard and to be part of that decision, rather than here's the rules of my classroom. This is my space. So you're sharing it with your students.

[22:43]

And as new teachers come in, helping them to not only embrace it, but to support student learners in ways that are unique, that even project-based, a lot of teachers will say, here's the project we're going to do, rather than what are some of the issues we want to address? What is it we could do to make a difference with the skill set we just learned? How can we apply this in our own community and make a difference? It takes a lot more time to facilitate that than to just direct. So if I have to cover, you know, 10 standards this week, as a teacher, it's much easier to be a dictator rather than a facilitator. But that's why the training really helps.

[23:23]

So going through and finding ways that you can facilitate it in more efficient ways with better outcomes and that actually meet the needs of all your students, because as a teacher, you're not meeting the needs of all your students in a traditional classroom. And, you know, you say it's the best I can do. And so what you don't know, you can't help with. And that's where we'd like to help. I'm kind of surprised, actually, after, you know, 30 years of doing this, that it hasn't taken off more. Well, when Rich came back from Russia and said, let's write this book, we really hoped that we'd find people doing it, that we could get behind and just support them.

[24:01]

But it's not when you start looking at the evidence, we're not seeing a lot of true CBE implementation. But when we do have agencies like even yourself, you know, you've got the classroom observations and stuff. We are looking for people that we can partner with for software, for training, for things that support CBE. Because we recognize, like Rich said, we're not scalable. But as a team, as a collaborator with other partners, certainly we can do this.

[24:30] SPEAKER_01:

You know, Justin, just to add on to Roxy, you know, one of my big reflections, and this is why we engaged John Bergman to help us who does the flip classrooms. When I first did this and tried to create this foundation many years ago to scale this, and we did. We have districts up to 10,000 kids right now that have been doing this for 10 years that have good trend data. And that's what you want to see. The frustration for me is why don't we have districts of 50,000 or 100,000 doing this? Why doesn't the Department of Education cut loose and let us be innovative?

[25:04]

You have all these outside factors, Justin, that we have little control over as far as like the pandemic, the political divide, the whole accountability, the micromanagement of curriculum. Those factors all have to be duly noted and be strategically dealt with. Again, I was in Russia where we had transformed. They have 76,000 schools in their K-12 system. When I left, we were at 22,000 schools in 60 regions. But it's a whole different cultural effect.

[25:36]

But I learned so much. And that's why I wrote this book is I said, okay, this is what we need to do. We need to come back and help these schools and systems where they're at. So Justin, the work that you're doing is really kind of this preliminary baseline, good teaching practices that we want schools to be able to do. And then when they get there, we want to take them to this next level. That's the thing I never did in the past because I just didn't have the manpower to do that.

[26:04]

And again, as Roxy said, we were just disappointed that we don't see more of this innovation happening in our systems. I mean, just having a viable curriculum, it doesn't exist. As you know, Justin, it's all over the place. So again, this is our attempt to find those leaders. So there's 16,000 districts in America right now. If we could change 10% of them, we would get to that tipping point.

[26:33]

And again, we're hoping the book becomes our calling card and hopefully in our lifetime, we'll see this happen.

[26:40] SPEAKER_02:

I'm excited about the potential for students to take more ownership of their learning, for students to take more ownership of their mastery and their progression. terms of the skills that they learn because ultimately everybody becomes an adult right we all reach that point where we're not in school anymore some of us it takes 25 years before we're not in school anymore but eventually you know at some point we are in charge of our learning there's no one hovering over us saying here's what you're going to do today You know, as adults, we have to live in a world where we control the pacing and we control how we spend our time and we control what we learn. And we're responsible for all of that. Talk to us a little bit about that real world application, not just after graduation, but of course, before graduation as well. How does what we're talking about here prepare students for taking that ownership of their own lives?

[27:31] SPEAKER_00:

I have to jump in here because our graduates are so proud. You build up this community and they're so proud of being part of it. They come back again and again and again and say, look what we've done. So they've created videos that kids that went to MIT and Columbia and Ivy League schools and said they were so much more prepared. And then as they get out into life, they can say, here's why I'm able to do this, because we learned all this.

[28:00] SPEAKER_01:

You know, Justin, when I was at Chugach, one of the goals was a school life transition. And so we actually strategically prepared what that looked like. Remember, our school district covered 22,000 square miles in remote villages. So we actually would bring them into a central area in the urban setting. and expose them to corporations, expose them to different entrepreneurial opportunities, expose them to the universities. When we started this in Chugach, we had one college graduate in 25 years.

[28:32]

Think about that. And 90% of our kids could not read at grade level. I mean, it's horrible. And now when I look at the data, the data is horrible right now. Our kids are not competing. The rigor isn't there.

[28:45]

The system isn't there. but they have exhausted all the possibilities of this current system. That's why you need a different paradigm shift. So one of the things that we did that would be kind of visionary is we actually would prepare kids for that life after high school. So they would already be enrolled in universities. We'd already get them certifications and different job skills.

[29:10]

We would do a performance diploma and we actually would pay for the kids for the next four years for whatever goals they wanted to go into. And we attract them for 10 years out. And that's what Roxy was referring to. There was a district in Oregon that wanted to do this really badly. And they had really polarization in their districts. So one of the things I told them to do is you should go see what it looks like.

[29:34]

So they came up to Alaska, they went to Roxy School, and what they asked for is we want to meet the graduates of this program. And a couple of the administrators there went out and put a notice out and A large number of graduates came back to tell their story and that's what convinced that district to do it is they saw that years later these guys felt so much better prepared for life after school. So it's a powerful journey and it's a powerful vision and I just hope that we get more people that would want to go on it.

[30:08] SPEAKER_02:

The book is Competency-Based Education Ignited, a Transformational System-Wide Approach for Leaders. Richard DeLorenzo and Roxy Morant, if people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online?

[30:22] SPEAKER_00:

www.cpeignited.org.

[30:25] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Justin. Thank you.

[30:30] Announcer:

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