Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Just before Christmas blogger Audrey Watters posted an essay titled “What is Competency Based Education” that defined that term as follows:

Rather than moving students together through materials for a fixed duration of a class, CBE enables students to move at their own pace through the curriculum. They are assessed along the way, and if they can demonstrate “competency” on a particular skill, they can move forward to the next. This is seen as an alternative to traditional models where students receive a grade — and credit — at the end of the course, but that grade can range from A to D, meaning that students have attained very different levels of understanding of the course materials.

I’ve used a set of questions she posed at the end of that article to write a series on the topic of CBE, which is the instructional backbone for what I call “Network Schools”. This post is part of that series.

What support systems — people and technology — need to be in place for schools to successfully move to CBE? What other frameworks need to be in place to promote a “progressive” CBE?

CBE schools may not require additional staff… but… CBE schools WILL require the re-deployment of existing staff at all levels. As noted in earlier posts, in CBE schools students will not be assigned to “classes” in age-based “grades”. Instead of having a sequence of “grade-level” teachers or content area teachers, CBE students will be assigned to an academic advisor-coach who would follow their progress through the mastery of fundamental competencies (i.e. what is currently expected of students leaving eighth grade). While this kind of extended advisor-coach relationship is uncommon in public education, it is typical in Waldorf Schools where an age cohort of students is instructed by a single teacher through eighth grade. In such an arrangement student progress more anecdotal and not wholly determined by test results and, most importantly, the student and parent have a sustained relationship with an individual who gets to know a student well. This requires a different skill set than the factory school teacher: it values nurturance and developmental psychology over knowledge of a specific skill and test construction and administration.

In order to provide the kind of asynchronous learning described in earlier posts, CBE schools would require broadband access in all student and teacher residences and would require an airtight student information systems that ensure confidentiality between the student and academic advisor-coach and/or between the academic advisor-coach and parent. Many teachers and parents are rightfully concerned about the sharing of data with for-profit enterprises, yet the pushback against the mandated data management systems in the health area has been minimal. The CBE data management system described above, where the information is not shared with for-profit enterprises, is analogous to the way a pediatrician or other health professional stores and shares information with parents, patients (e.g. children) and other health professionals. If we can entrust health information with medical personnel of all educational backgrounds, we should be open to doing the same when it comes to educators and related service providers. An essay I wrote several years ago, A Homeland Security Bill for Education, describes how interagency communication might facilitate learning for students who are part of the social service web. In the intervening years since the publication of that article the capability of data sharing has increased but the interagency firewalls remain in place.