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In response to recent developments and initiatives from the Utah State Board of Education, teachers and administrators have found themselves contemplating whether their gradebooks truly reflect their students’ understanding of class material. Does an A show true mastery of a topic? Does an F really indicate failure to understand?
Throughout the state, many educators have concluded that in order to thoroughly ensure student understanding, a more personalized, competency-based approach to learning is necessary. NS district administrators are currently in the process of applying for a grant that would allow them to explore the potential of the Personalized Competency-Based Learning (PCBL) framework promoted by the state.
Closely tied to what the state refers to as Competency-Based Education (CBE), the PCBL framework aims to move away from seat-time as a criteria for student success and instead focus on the student’s skills and ability to use their knowledge outside the classroom setting. Under these guidelines, methods of assessment wouldn’t strictly adhere to quizzes, exams, and essays.
“If I was teaching science and I was trying to help my students understand and interpret data sets with some sort of chart or graph,” said Instructional Technology Coach Dax Higgins, “what I would want to do is just make sure I can give them any set of data…but the data will still lead them to a conclusion or be able to make a prediction. That’s the skill. It doesn’t matter what the actual content is, as long as they’re acquiring the skill that is that competency.”
Administrators hope that a competency-based approach to teaching will help ensure that the data that teachers input into gradebooks and report to parents more accurately and completely reflects a student’s mastery of the material.
“What we want to do is maybe move away from things in a gradebook that don’t reflect what a student knows, and has learned, and understands,” said Superintendent Nan Ault. “It’s all a journey towards a better understanding of how we determine what students know and how that might be recorded.”
Examples of this concept in action would include limiting the points given to a student for arbitrary accomplishments, such as contributing to a school-promoted food drive or turning in disclosure documents, and instead focusing on accurately indicating a student’s proficiency in an area of learning.
In addition to a more accurate representation of educational data, administrators want to see students taking accountability for their own learning, and believe that the PCBL approach is a way to encourage this.
“To improve student learning is always the main goal of education,” Higgins said. “But we want to improve student learning by helping [students] be a little more accountable for their process and for their learning plan.”
With an increase of student involvement will likely come a change in the role of teachers. Because of this, student-teacher relationships/interactions may start to align with an unfamiliar dynamic.
“They basically will have to be that facilitator that as a kid asks the questions, they are able to help them work through those without just giving them information and having them spit it back,” Higgins said.
Although the PCBL framework relies on increased student accountability, it is likely that teachers will also have to exercise increased involvement in the learning of individual students to successfully integrate the personalized aspect of PCBL.
“We want to be equally attentive to a student who needs more attention, or more time, or a different way of learning than we do a student that is way accelerated–let them move forward and do their thing,” Ault said. “That’s the personalized part of this conversation.”
In meetings that began in the fall of 2020, a team of administrators, board members and principals from around the district have discussed these ways in which PCBL strategies might benefit education in the district. Currently, their focus is on applying for a state grant that would support them in carrying on this discussion.
“We are applying for a grant, which will allow us to plan,” Ault said. “It’s not an implementation grant. It’s allowing our teachers and our administrators to have a conversation about, now that we have these essential standards, how do we then determine what is competency?”
As a competitive grant, the exact monetary value that may be given to the district is currently unknown. However, administrators are prepared to continue this conversation regardless of whether they receive funding from the state or not.
“The grant is just financial support so we can carry on the conversation,” Ault said. “We’re going to carry it on no matter what. So whether we get the grant or not, this is going to be part of our investigation because to tell you the truth, we’re in the profession of education, and education does change. It evolves, it develops. And we’re learners too.”
Components of PCBL are already being exercised in elementary schools throughout the district, and have been for years now. But when it comes to secondary schools with larger class sizes, administrators are faced with the challenge of maintaining these strategies on a much larger scale. With time and planning, they hope to incorporate aspects of PCBL into what teachers are already practicing in their classrooms on a regular basis.
“It really is based on these concepts that these teachers already know: feedback and practice,” Ault said. “And then giving kids a chance to be a part of that conversation. And having different strategies that they can actually pull from might be really what’s best for my teachers.”
However, some teachers worry that these changes in educational methods and strategies could be counterproductive.
“It depends on how the district chooses to implement it,” said English teacher and counselor Ben Cox. “If they were to go full-scale with the PCBL stuff and with the standards-based grading, there are a lot of components of that that I find highly unfavorable. I think that sometimes these types of changes, if not done carefully and correctly, can actually do more to hurt students than help them.”
Teachers like Cox fear that taking an extreme implementation route towards personalization could devalue the teacher’s role and ability to instruct students.
“What I fear is that when you try to individualize so drastically, you can end up actually creating more of a problem, to the point where the teacher becomes a glorified tutor,” Cox said.
As administrators discuss these potential changes, they see the importance of respecting the role of teachers and the responsibilities that they already carry.
“These teachers work incredibly hard,” Ault said. “So we’re not trying to make this more complicated, we’re trying not to add anything to their plate. What we’re trying to do is really better define what they already do and certainly make ourselves more efficient, certainly bring students into the conversation and really just continue what we’ve already been working on, which is these essential standards and helping kids understand what learning is.”
