As a sixteen-year-old teenager in New Hampshire, Brian, along with his father, spent every day backing in and out of driveways while Brian delivered newspapers in the neighborhood. Brian’s father would take him to shopping malls after hours to practice parking. He eventually brought Brian to a point where he could drive on quiet streets in town as he started to learn the rules of the road.
Then, Brian started a formal driver education program. Like many programs, it consisted of both classroom instruction and actual driving on the road with an instructor. To this day, Brian doesn’t remember a single thing about the instruction he received in those thirty classroom hours, but he does know that the class culminated with him memorizing a lot of arbitrary facts and figures so that he would pass the written driving exam, an exam which would contain twenty-five multiple-choice questions based on information in the State of New Hampshire Driver’s Manual. This test never caused anxiety for Brian because he already knew how to “play that game of school” from other experiences. He was very good at cramming for multiple-choice tests, knowing what sorts of random facts and figures his teachers would likely quiz him on. The driver education manual made it easy; the real driving test would just be a subset of the one hundred–question practice test in the back of the book.
What did scare Brian as a young teen and soon-to-be driver was not the written test, but rather the time he would have to spend in a car with an instructor, and, even more so, the actual driving test with someone from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Brian knew his skills, or lack thereof, would be on full display during the driving instruction sessions and test. He had to perform. Knowing that one false move with a car could spell disaster, there was little, if any, room for error.
As Brian reflects back on his driver education experience, a few things stand out to him that are rarely seen in our schools, such as the following.
▶ In driver education, all students are working toward the same explicit and measurable learning goal of being able to safely and effectively drive a car in any condition or setting.
▶ To a certain extent, driver education allows students to move at their own pace. Students progress from skill to skill when they are ready through their driving practice. There is no set maximum amount of time students should spend learning a particular driving skill, and students are encouraged to practice with family members on their own time to become secure with their skills.
▶ Driver education can adapt to individual student needs. Those who need more practice with a skill like parking or highway driving can get differentiated support either from their driving instructor or others (in Brian’s case, his father).
▶ The true test of whether or not a student has mastered driver education is performance based; the student must drive a car while an outsider evaluates his or her performance against a specific set of driving standards.
▶ Driver education is not the final step toward mastery of the road; it is just the beginning. The longer you drive a car, the better you get at driving. Driver education serves as an initial base to help students apply their new driving skills and develop better habits and dispositions for a lifetime of effective driving.
Driver education is an excellent way to introduce the topic of competency-based learning for two reasons: (1) it is an education program that many Americans experience at one point in their lifetime, and (2) driver education has many of the hallmarks and characteristics of a competency-based learning model. The concept of competency-based learning is often interpreted differently from school to school and, in some cases, from state to state. This chapter provides the reader with a framework and a foundation for the rest of the book by outlining a five-part definition for competency-based learning.
A Definition of Competency-Based Learning
In a system of competency-based learning, a student’s ability to transfer knowledge and apply skills across content areas organizes his or her learning.
Competency-based learning has become a common term in education reform. The model is born from the notion that seat time and Carnegie units (credit hours) cannot confine elementary schools, secondary schools, and institutions of higher education when organizing how students will progress through learning. In a system of competency-based learning, a student’s ability to transfer knowledge and apply skills across content areas organizes his or her learning. Transfer means that students are able to take what they have learned (the skills and content within a course) and apply this skill and knowledge across other disciplines to solve unfamiliar problems. Students refine their skills based on the feedback they receive through formative assessment (assessment for learning) and, when they are ready, demonstrate their understanding through summative assessment (assessment of learning; Stiggins, 2005). Competency-based learning meets each learner where he or she is and allows the student to progress at his or her own speed along a developmental continuum. Chris Sturgis (2015) provides a clear and concise five-part working definition of competency-based learning:
› Students advance upon demonstrated mastery;
› Competencies include explicit, measurable, and transferable learning objectives that empower students;
› Assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students;
› Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs; and
› Learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include application and creation of knowledge, along with the development of important skills and dispositions. (p. 8)
Organizations like the International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL; www.inacol.org/about) use Sturgis’s (2015) definition as a basis for much of their policy advocacy and learning systems transformation work. In the pages that follow, we expand on this definition and provide context for school leaders.
Students Advance Upon Demonstrated Mastery
Fred Bramante and Rose Colby (2012) write extensively about how educators should imagine a school without clocks, and think about what it would look like to move the standard measure of learning from seat time to mastery of learning objectives. Secondary schools and colleges have used time as the standard measure of learning since the American industrialist and steel mogul Andrew Carnegie first proposed the idea in the early 1900s. The Carnegie unit was introduced as a way to award academic credit based on the amount of time students spent in direct contact with a teacher or professor. The standard Carnegie unit has long since been defined as 120 hours of contact time with an instructor, an amount roughly equivalent to one hour of instruction a day, five days a week, for twenty-four weeks or 7,200 minutes of instructional time over the course of an academic year. At the time of its inception, the Carnegie unit helped bring a level of standardization that the American education system had never seen. It provided for the education model what the dollar first provided for our financial system: a common language and a common unit of measure that could be quantified, assessed, and traded (Silva, White, & Toch, 2015).
Education reformers like Bramante and Colby have challenged Carnegie’s industrialist model for measuring learning. They believe there are more effective ways to measure student learning, but it hasn’t been until the mid-2000s to present that these reformers had the opportunity to challenge the model at a systemic level through policy changes at the state level in states such as New Hampshire that have been early adopters of the model. Bramante and Colby (2012) write:
That opportunity to reimagine public education is before us today. At no other time in public education have we been so challenged by the constraints of the economy, the public outcry for changes in financing personnel and resources, and the demand for accountability through testing.