Competency Based Learning in Western North Carolina
The smile on Ian’s face was was something I’ll never forget. Not just because it was something I rarely saw from Ian, but because it was a true expression of pride in a task he had previously assumed he could never do. You see, “Ian” (not his real name) had a rough home life. I could tell there were days when he would come to class having not slept or eaten much since I had last seen him. He also hated school, barely scraping by or being passed along in a system that had all but told him that he was a failure — an attitude he had long internalized with a self-fulfilling prophecy of “Mr. Owens, I suck at this stuff.” And yet only 10 minutes after wiring up the combination series and parallel circuit I had asked him to do — one that used the battery from his own car — he was explaining to a small group of his physics classmates how to predict and validate the current and voltage for each of the circult’s five resistors. What had changed?
What had changed with Ian was primarily driven by what had changed with me and my approach to teaching math and science in my small school in Western North Carolina. I had always taken a constructivist approach in my classes, focusing on inquiry and problem-based learning, albeit in an environment that one could argue had many characteristics of traditional teaching and learning: standard pacing, one-size-fits-all instruction, canned labs, and lots of PowerPoint lectures to ensure that I “covered” all the standards. The problem was that these methods were in reality for me and were really not meeting the students where they were. As much as I wanted to try and convince myself that I was a using student-centered methods, the fact was I was only exacerbating what students like Ian had been directly or indirectly told over the years: you are a failure.
Finally facing this hard reality is what caused me to fundamentally change my approach. Along with my peers at Tri-County Early College, we embarked on a more student-centered approach that focused on three primary areas: investing in an advisory system that allowed teachers the time to really get to know each student and give students time to work on social-emotional development; a comprehensive project-based learning approach that allowed students to work on activities they truly cared about and blurred the lines between what happened in school and what happened in our community; and a competency-based education (CBE) model that allowed true personalized learning and growth to thrive. I could write in detail about each of these game-changing and interdependent approaches, but the one I want to highlight is the latter.
Rather than automatically assuming that each student had already mastered the skills needed to succeed in my class from day one, I finally recognized that they were all different and all coming to my class with unique skills and knowledge. This meant that instead of taking a traditional approach of simply adding a generic amount of new knowledge as I had done in the past, my role shifted to find the strengths and weaknesses for each student and then develop a customized growth path for each one — a path that promised that as long as you could show that you are growing in your individual depth of knowledge, I would constantly adapt my instruction, questioning, collaborative grouping, and what other tools and time needed to help meet your specific goals for success. This was the core element of the school’s CBE culture and was a significant departure from the easier path of teaching to the middle and “differentiating” for the extremes — an approach that was producing good overall results, but was leaving too many “Ians” behind. You fail the test, you continue to struggle, and you finally give up.
Our CBE approach changed all that. It included leveraging an already robust project-based learning (PBL) framework so that students could learn and apply curricular requirements to real-world projects they cared about, as well as working with mentors from the local community and — with the help of technology — other experts from around the world. It included teachers collaborating to develop a “just-in-time” assessment model, where students could take advantage of individualized scaffolding and feedback to demonstrate mastery of learning targets when they were ready, thus de-emphasizing the traditional testing approach that assumed you either got it or you didn’t. It included adding flexibility to this assessment model to allow multiple pathways to demonstrate mastery, including redos as needed and authentic assessments per the projects students were working on. Perhaps most significantly, we moved away from traditional A-F grading, which included providing only an indication of mastery per academic and life-skill competencies aligned to college and career ready standards. In short, instead of arbitrary grades for homework, participation, extra credit, etc., the focus was exclusively on formative feedback, targeted support, and growth.
Is this approach easy? Not a chance! The 5+ years I used a CBE approach in my classroom was probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to manage in my professional career. This high expectation, high support approach was messy, unconventional, and rather hard to predict. It was also a beautiful thing to witness and was infinitely more rewarding than the traditional, scripted, passive learning approach that I had used before — one that left far too many students behind, especially students already on the margins. So when you see a students like Ian regain confidence in his ability to do complex academic work and rekindle the joy and agency for his learning, and do so with a smile, it makes it all worth it.
If you are interested in learning more about CBE and potentially experimenting with it in your own context, then I would encourage you to sign-up for Competency-Based Education: The Why, What, and How, an online MOOC offered by the MIT Teaching Systems Lab via the EdX platform. Whether you choose to adapt aspects of a CBE model to your own school or simply make a more informed decision why it is not something you should do at this time, you will have a much better understanding of the ideas, inspiration, strategies, and challenges behind competency-based education, as well as examples of how it is being applied in schools across the U.S.
Ben Owens spent 20 years as an engineer before becoming a physics and math teacher in rural Appalachia. He was the 2016 North Carolina Science Technology & Mathematics Center’s 9–16 Outstanding Educator, a 2014 Hope Street Group National Teacher Fellow, and served on the Teacher Advisory Council for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He now works as a freelance education consultant for Open Way PBL, LLC and is the co-author of “Open UP, Education! How Open Way Learning Can Transform Schools.”
