What is Competency Education?

We are emerging from a year’s collaboration with Reaching Higher New Hampshire to create a set of videos about competency-based education, in which students must prove mastery of topics and skills before advancing to the next unit or grade level.  New Hampshire is a leader in the field, with 17 districts running in-depth pilots of competency education and all districts required to transition to the approach in coming years.

The output of this project includes the full 13-minute PACE: Unleashing Student and Teacher Potential, a short trailer version, and standalone pieces on Student Perspectives on Competency Education and How is PACE Calibrated?  We also created a flurry of 30-60 second social media clips drawn from the out-takes. 

“This whole archaic system of moving kids along because of how old they are, really goes away with this competency system,” says Justin Roy, Spaulding High School principal.  “Because it’s more about what they’re understanding and what they’re learning and what they are able to show that they can do.”

Ben Mathias, a ninth grade geometry student, likes the PACE assessments, “It’s different than having a letter grade because in most schools you take a test and then they find the percentage out of it. So you get a 70 on a test, that’s barely passing or whatever. But you only know 70% of the material and yet you are still being able to go on. But with competencies you actually have to show that you know the whole scope of the subject to actually be able to pass and move on to the next topic.”

Lots of Small Clips!

During more than 20 years producing media for non-profit organizations, we have focused primarily on documentary-style pieces designed to play at events, trainings, and increasingly over the web.  These pieces are generally 3-15 minutes long and tell a story with an emotional or narrative hook.

Recently we have also begun creating sets of very short (30-60 second) pieces for clients to disseminate over social media.  Reaching Higher New Hampshire, for example, commissioned us to generate several dozen small segments out of a body of interviews on competency-based education we had conducted with students, teachers, and school administrators.  Check RHNH out on Twitter or Facebook to see these clips in action.

Designing Assessments for Competency Education

How do you standardize administration and scoring of a project-based assessment?  Yesterday we heard some answers to this question at the annual PACE Conference at Sanborn Regional High School in New Hampshire.  Teachers from across the state come together to design assessments that can be used in competency-based education – an approach in which students must prove mastery of topics and skills before advancing to the next unit or the next grade level.

In the assessments teachers design, called Performance Assessments of Competency Education (PACE), students complete real-world tasks instead of standardized tests.  Teachers from multiple districts collaborate to write project instructions, create rubrics, and calibrate scoring.

It was great to see teachers’ enthusiasm both for their work and for the collegiality of the conference, which is hosted in part by the New Hampshire Learning Initiative.  They are already planning next year’s Competency-Based Learning Design Studio Conference.