1. Motivation: You can’t make a student learn. To maximize student learning, you must motivate the student to learn. Psychologist David McClelland (1987) identified three powerful motivators in his Three Needs Theory: the need for achievement, the need for affiliation, and the need for power. Instruction is more or less motivating to the extent that it addresses all three needs. PCBE addresses the need for achievement through a competency-based approach to learning that emphasizes real-world accomplishments. Student progress is based on mastery rather than time, so every student feels a sense of pride and accomplishment, and students learn by doing authentic projects that impact their world. PCBE addresses the need for affiliation through collaborative learning in a supportive environment. It also fulfills the need for power through self-directed learning with agency, voice, choice, and development of grit (Dweck, 2016).
2. Scaffolding: Motivation alone cannot maximize learning. Students also need personalized support that empowers them—scaffolding. This scaffolding may entail adjusting the difficulty or complexity of each project, coaching the student during performance on the project, or tutoring the student in new knowledge, skill, or understanding just before it’s needed in the project (Reigeluth, Myers, & Lee, 2017).
3. Supportive learning environment: Finally, a caring, supportive learning environment is essential to maximize student learning. It’s been said that if a student doesn’t think that you care, the student doesn’t care what you think. This requires building relationships that endure over more than just one year and includes relationships among students as well as relationships between students and the teacher. Caring means that the teacher knows about personal difficulties each student faces and helps the student deal with them. Trauma-informed teaching, a growing school movement that places students’ social and emotional needs at the center of the schooling experience, is an example of this.
Systems Thinking for the Vision
Transforming what students learn and how they learn it requires systems thinking. Educational reforms have often focused on changing one part of a school system at a time: open classrooms, personalized learning, self-directed learning, project-based learning, collaborative learning, computers in the classroom, site-based management, and the list goes on. Each of these is good. The problem is that most of these individual changes are incompatible with the other parts of the school system, thereby reducing their potential benefits and endangering their sustainability. For example, we know an elementary school in the Midwest that decided to move to competency-based learning and placed students in math classes according to their skill rather than their age. But the school still used teacher-centered, large-group instruction. As a result, all students in the class moved on to a new topic at about the same time. So, the competency-based approach had become a form of large-scale tracking, and poor test results killed the effort.
To successfully maximize student learning, we must pay attention to which other parts of the school system must change to support any important shift we want to make. As Marzano and colleagues (2017) put it in A Handbook for Personalized Competency-Based Education, “For a PCBE system to be effective, it must be designed so that each piece works in concert with the other pieces” (p. 10). This is the essence of truly systemic change, or paradigm change (Reigeluth & Karnopp, 2013). A paradigm is a completely different pattern and structure for a system. It is more comprehensive than a model—there can be many models within a single paradigm. In educational systems, the one-room schoolhouse is one paradigm (for the agrarian age), the current teacher-centered factory model of education is another (for the industrial age), and the personalized competency-based paradigm is a third (for the information or digital age).
Only paradigmatic change can help teachers maximize student learning and prepare students for the future. Paradigm change is not new to education. The one-room schoolhouse, or agrarian-age paradigm, was different from the industrial-age paradigm that predominates today (Reigeluth & Karnopp, 2013). We call these Education 1.0 and Education 2.0. The personalized competency-based paradigm, or post-industrial paradigm, is Education 3.0.
What Are the Actions?
It will not be easy to implement the vision for personalized competency-based education that your team develops. Many aspects of your school or district will need to be changed at once, because the success of each change depends on the other changes. Fortunately, much has been learned about how to succeed at paradigm change. For example, the actions (transformation process) must include many stakeholders and give them ownership over the process to reduce resistance to the changes. The process must operate by building consensus, rather than by majority rule. Finally, the process must recognize that changes in mindsets and other kinds of learning are the most important outcomes of the effort.
Transforming to PCBE is a difficult and treacherous process. The guidance we offer in this book will help your team succeed in this essential undertaking for the future of our children. We offer guidance about the transformation process for a whole school district and for individual schools. But we caution that it is not wise to try to transform an individual school within a school district, because it will become incompatible with the rest of the district, which will then automatically try to change it back. Many successful pilot schools have been unsustainable as a result.
What Are the Criticisms of PCBE?
As described in the preceding sections, personalized competency-based education has a laudable and needed goal: all students achieving mastery of whatever they are attempting to learn. Yet some people are critical of it (Herold, 2017b). Why? At the root of the criticisms is a lack of conceptual clarity. PCBE is many different things to different people. There are many ways to do PCBE, and many of them don’t work well.
Personalized learning alone is a one-legged stool. So is competency-based education alone. There are four parts of competency-based education—competency-based approaches to (1) student progress, (2) student assessment, (3) learning targets, and (4) grading and student records—but they are not always used together. To work effectively, all four parts of competency-based education should be used together, along with personalized, collaborative, project-based, and self-directed learning—all supported with appropriate technological tools and teacher training. If you try to implement one of these at a time, your stool will fall over long before you can assemble all the legs.
Table I.1 shows some conceptualizations of PCBE that are destined to disappoint, along with remedies to those flawed conceptualizations.
Table I.1:Flawed Conceptualizations of PCBE and Corresponding Remedies
| Flawed Conceptualizations | Remedies |
| Students working alone on computers | Also using collaborative projects extensively |
| Competencies as small, separate objectives | Using more comprehensive objectives that are more meaningful and address higher, deeper, integrated, and sometimes unmeasurable kinds of learning |
| Assessment and remediation as separate events at the end of a considerable amount of instruction | Integrating assessment with the instruction, so the instruction provides whatever remediation may be needed |
| Using traditional bell-curve grading when evaluating mastery of competencies | Moving to records in the form of proficiency scales and lists of competencies mastered |
| Maintaining time-based student progress where competencies must be mastered within a specific timeframe | Changing to continuous (learning-based) student progress for each student |
| Assessing a whole set of competencies at once and passing a student if 60 or 70 percent of them are mastered |