To book Charles M. Reigeluth or Jennifer Karnopp for professional development, contact [email protected].
INTRODUCTION
Educators are well aware of several serious problems related to the United States educational systems.
1. Equity: The quality of education differs greatly, based largely on the socioeconomic status of the school community. The resulting lack of opportunity for poorer citizens is not only a grave social injustice, but it also deprives society of their immense talents, limits perspectives among people in positions of power, and exacerbates the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, which, if unchecked, is likely to cause serious social unrest.
2. Survival: The very existence of a public education system is under threat. Some people are so frustrated at the inability to improve their public education system that they believe the only solution is to privatize education through vouchers. This would have grave consequences for equity and would aggravate the growing problem of tribalism in the United States.
3. Ethics: Schools currently are at best neutral regarding ethical development of our youth, given the persistent bullying and cheating that occur in schools. Unethical practices of housing lenders were instrumental in causing the Great Recession that began in 2007, causing widespread suffering throughout the U.S. and the world. Unethical practices of drug manufacturers, distributors, and even doctors caused an opioid crisis that has killed more U.S. citizens than died in the Vietnam War and has had devastating effects on the lives of millions more people.
4. New needs: We are living in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, and that is bringing huge changes to all aspects of our lives. Hence, the kind of education that was needed in the industrial age—including the hidden curriculum of “sit down, be quiet, and do what you are told to do”—is no longer what’s needed. This not only results in student disengagement and under-preparedness for success in life, but it also places our whole society in peril.
5. A devaluing of teaching: Teaching has become a much less attractive job, resulting in shortages of teachers and high turnover rates, with inevitable consequences for the quality of education.
These problems cannot be addressed with piecemeal reforms in our education systems—they require fundamental changes. Business as usual doesn’t cut it anymore (New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2007). Teachers, administrators, and parents have the intuitive sense that the traditional approach to teaching isn’t meeting the needs of today’s students. But what will meet their needs and dramatically improve their schools, and how can you make it happen? The purpose of this book is to help teams of educators (teachers, administrators, staff, coaches, facilitators, and even board members), parents, and students to answer these questions. Personalized competency-based education and other aspects of the new paradigm of education that we call Education 3.0 are the most promising ways of effectively addressing the serious problems with U.S. education systems today. We offer proven ideas and methods both for a vision of personalized competency-based education (PCBE) and for the action (or process) for transforming your school or district to that vision.
This book is an extension of our previous book, Reinventing Schools: It’s Time to Break the Mold (Reigeluth & Karnopp, 2013), which introduced six core ideas essential to personalized competency-based education. Although you need not be familiar with that resource, it contains valuable insight into why PCBE is so badly needed, and provides guidance for state and federal governments to support the local transformation of school systems. This book elaborates on those six core ideas and provides detailed guidance for how to incorporate them into your own vision and change process. This book is also a companion to A Handbook for Personalized Competency-Based Education by Robert J. Marzano, Jennifer S. Norford, Michelle Finn, and Douglas Finn III (2017). It builds on what has been learned at the Lindsay Unified School District in California (see Beyond Reform: Systemic Shifts Toward Personalized Learning) and several other pioneering schools and districts around the United States.
Why Transform to Personalized Competency-Based Education?
There are many reasons why you should transform to personalized competency-based education. There are many ways PCBE can be done, some of which are not very effective. If done well, PCBE will:
• Improve student learning, retention, transfer, and motivation (Guskey & Gates, 1986; Haynes et al., 2016; Haystead, 2010; Means, Yoyama, Murphy, Bakia, & Jones, 2009; Pane, Steiner, Baird, Hamilton, & Pane, 2017)
• Improve what students learn, with a greater focus on what they need to be successful in life and what their families and communities need to be healthier (Collins, 2017; Lash & Belfiore, 2017; Pane et al., 2017; Reigeluth & Vogt, 2018)
• Provide more flexibility and options for both what and how students learn (Reigeluth & Karnopp, 2013; Thomas, Enloe, & Newell, 2005)
• Empower students to be more self-directed and intrinsically motivated in their learning (Thomas et al., 2005)
• Improve equity, not by closing achievement gaps in a one-size-fits-all curriculum, but by helping all children to reach their potential, given their individual talents and interests (Aslan & Reigeluth, 2015; Thomas et al., 2005)
• Lower the cost of education, especially by lowering administrative costs (Egol, 2003; Reigeluth, 2018)
• Reduce the bureaucracy, empowering teachers and empowering parents to play a larger role in their children’s education (Reigeluth, 2018)
• Improve the quality of life for educators, and consequently reduce the teacher shortage and improve teacher quality (Reigeluth, 2018).
So how can you do PCBE well? This is a matter of vision.
What Is the Vision?
In today’s fractured society, it is not easy for your school system to come up with a shared vision of education that will meet students’ needs as they face an uncertain and rapidly changing future. To tackle this task, it is important to think about changes in both what students learn and how they learn it.
What Students Learn
What students need to learn has been changing dramatically as we evolve deeper into the post-industrial age, partly because information is so readily available through the internet, partly because knowledge work is replacing manual labor as the predominant form of work, and partly because our society and its institutions and tools are becoming so much more complex.
We suggest that the major criterion for deciding what students learn should be its relevance to students’ current and future lives—what they need to learn to become happy, successful adults who contribute to their communities. Several influential educators (for example, Collins, 2017; Prensky, 2016) propose that the curriculum should focus on helping individual students find their passion, cultivate their individual talents to pursue that passion, and develop the skills necessary to achieve their goals, such as the ability to think critically, problem solve, and learn how to learn. This requires more than piecemeal changes to the curriculum—more than just adding some new courses. It requires a fundamental change, which we describe in chapter 3 (page 57).
How Students Learn
How students learn has also been changing dramatically in the post-industrial age, partly because learning sciences and instructional theory have greatly improved our understanding of how people learn and how best to help them learn, and partly because technological tools that can personalize learning have become more powerful. We suggest there are three keys to