By: Meg Stentz
At the Competency Collaborative, we are always saying we have 75 schools who do competency 75 ways. And that’s partially true! Each school infuses their own values into their competency system, with some prioritizing shared language and others prioritizing specificity of learning. And it used to be that the trajectory for our schools was fairly similar…they’d develop outcomes, then rubrics, formalizing shared language around the way, and eventually they’d tackle grading and student reflection along the way. The pandemic shook that model up! We saw schools move immediately to competency-based grading. Because we have such strong models of what school wide outcomes look like, we saw schools adapt and adopt school wide competencies from the outset.
So in our 8th year of work, we asked our practitioners to reflect on their journeys so far. Here’s what they had to say about the shifts they made, the questions they had, and the sticking points along the way.
What about YOUR competency based journey? What shifts have you made? What questions do you have? What sticking points did you encounter?