Earlier this week, on July 16, 2013, I had the distinct privilege of being on Capitol Hill to participate on a panel moderated by iNACOL’s Susan Patrick at a Congressional Caucus on competency based blended learning. We met in the “Gold Room” at the Rayburn House Office Building where the House Committee on Education and the Workforce convenes. Yes, I have to admit it was pretty exciting.
The event was well attended by members of the House & Senate and their staffs (about 120 people approximately, more than double the number originally expected). The intent behind the panel was to hopefully influence lawmakers as they eventually consider reauthorizing our Federal Education Policy that is the No Child Left Behind Act, that the design principles behind competency based education (meeting students where they are academically as opposed to their age or grade level and enabling them to progress at their own pace based on mastery of competencies and not arbitrary fixed amounts of seat time (i.e. school days)) is a superior way to educate children and that we finally have the technology to do this efficiently and effectively.
In my remarks, I had the privilege of talking about Matchbook Learning’s contribution to this emerging field as we work in bottom 5% schools to implement these design principles. I tried to make 3 points.
1. Blended Learning is powerful.
Our first school turnaround in Detroit was with a bottom 5% school that is part of the Detroit Public School District and so it is NOT in a competency based system (i.e. students and the school is locked into seat time constraints and students are still required to take their end of grade level tests to determine progression). Over a 2 year period, we saw the percentage of students proficient or above in Reading/ELA more than DOUBLE (22% to 46%) and QUINTUPLE in Math (2.9% to 15.2%) over a 2 year period. Even more exciting, our rising 3rd graders (those students that have really only known blended learning for their young school careers) are entering 3rd grade at 67% proficient in Reading and 35% Proficient in Math. Clearly this is not a bottom 5% school anymore and its trajectory is completely transformed.
While there’s obvious pride in these results, there’s a pause to that pride. What happens in a non-competency based system to those students that are still not proficient – the other half of these statistics? Well, we hope that the 3rd grade teacher can go back and cover some of the 2nd grade material that some of these students missed, and that the 4th grade teacher can do the same with the 3rd and 2nd grade materials all the while covering all of the 4th grade in the 4th grade, etc.. And the problem compounds year by year.
2. Competency Based + Blended Learning is both powerful and effective.
Thankfully our future schools in Detroit will be competency based blended schools because we have partnered with the Education Achievement Authority (“EAA”), Michigan’s new Recovery School District that takes over bottom 5% schools converting them to competency based blended schools. We have completed our first school year with the EAA’s Brenda Scott, a K-8 bottom 5% school, and the early results are astonishing. One year ago before the EAA started, out of 832 students at Brenda Scott, only 7 were proficient in either Reading or Math on the State Examination (that is less than 1%!). Fast-forward to the end of the school year and 71% of the students in English Language Arts and 63% in Math are already making more than 1+ years of growth in a year. This represents the 5th highest gain across the entire city of Detroit (all schools). These statistics represent students like Deona who was Brenda Scott’s highest point gainer in Reading/ELA at 879 points.
We asked the testing company to help us interpret her results. They scratched their heads and said they had never seen a score like that. We pressed them further and they said that normally a performing student her age/grade level (i.e. grade 8) would have say a 158 point gain which would represent a year’s worth of growth in a single year. Deona crushed that.
Prior to this year, Deona would have likely been reading at say a 2nd grade level. However, for her to be reading at that level but socializing with peers at say an 8th grade level indicates that she is remarkable – remarkably intelligent. In a traditional school, they would’ve started Deona at an 8th grade reading level and worked through the entire year on an 8th grade English language arts curriculum without likely much success. By being able to go backwards in a competency based system to fill in those earlier gaps in her schooling, not only does she close the gap with her peers, but she begins to accelerate beyond them creating a new gap for them to catch up with her. Deona now attends a school (Brenda Scott of the EAA) where technology is leveraged to meet her where she needs to be met so that her remarkable intrinsic potential and intelligence that lay previously dormant in school is now uncorked.
But there are thousands perhaps millions of Deona’s out there in our nation, trapped inside chronically failing traditional schools that force these students to fit their requirements (age/grade/fixed allotment of time) instead of the schools adapting to fit to the requirements of the students. How do we unleash the potential of every Deona out there?
3. Converting from Non-Competency, Non-Blended to Competency Based Blended Schools: 5 dimensions to the turnaround process
There are five key dimensions to the successful school turnaround process:
i. Assessments: we need to start assessing students literally from the first day of school to determine their starting point, and then frequently update this assessment with future adaptive assessments – low-stakes and high frequency in nature – to update a student’s learning path and profile.
ii. Content: we must align content with assessments and thankfully the marketplace is emerging with new and better content every day that is aligned to Common Core and State Standards and is increasingly more data rich and project rich.
iii. School Design: we must look at the assets and resources within a school building (i.e. calendar and schedule, roles, etc.) and redesign them for a competency based blended learning environment. For example, if students are matched according to competency, should teachers be similarly matched?
iv. Classroom Design: our students do not sit in rows but rather move through various work stations in small groups, progressing based not on time but on their mastery of various competencies that are attached to each station.
v. Teacher Recruitment & Development: what kinds of teachers are we trying to recruit and develop for this new model of education? Competency based and blended learning models do not hide bad teaching. In fact, they put a premium on good teaching and in particular 3 attributes: grit (because it is a hard shift for teachers to make from the old way to this new way where there are multiple pathways for students to progress and demonstrate mastery), innovation (because this is new and we’re relying on data not tradition to determine what works for which students) and transparency (we are capturing a massive amount of data on each of their students and this will lead to some candid and frank conversations).
With these teacher attributes in hand, we develop our teachers not with one or two formal observations and PD sessions a year, but with frequent bi-weekly one-on-one coaching sessions that attempt to converge their student data with their instructional practices as the continual topic of an ongoing, scaffolding dialogue that persists throughout the school year.
We finally have the model (competency-based), the technology (blended learning) and the means (5 dimensions of our turnaround process) by which we can ensure that every Deona out there reaches her full potential so she becomes the rule and not the exception. Perhaps when the No Child Left Behind Act is reauthorized it will incorporate these elements and be more aptly titled the “Every Child Races Ahead” Act. That would be a more fitting title for our Nation’s Federal Education Policy.
