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The Nuts and Bolts of Compet
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Perhaps the most powerful thing about this teach- er’s words was that she was speaking extem- poraneously, standing in for a close colleague, Kristine Kirkaldy, who was struggling with laryngitis. Kirkaldy and several colleagues had designed the professional development session, intentionally organizing it to place facilitation and leadership in the hands of teachers. Several teachers had volunteered to share a performance task they had created and piloted with their students. They were assigned tables and the rest of the faculty joined them in groups of five. At each table, teachers used a Validation Protocol created by Kirkaldy and her colleagues (adapted from the protocol devel- oped by the Center for Collaborative Education’s Quality Performance Assessment Project) to “tune” (give feedback and improve) the perfor- mance tasks. Already trained in Critical Friends and tuning protocols, the teachers had observed a fishbowl demonstration of the Validation Protocol
in the morning.
At each table, lively conversation ensued. As the day came to a close, there was a collective sense that it had created a powerful launching pad for Vergennes’s learning project. In the following weeks, funds were made available to any teach- ers who wanted to plan, pilot and validate perfor- mance-based projects over the course of the year. The response was enormously positive: 24 teach- ers—well over half the faculty-—created 36 new tasks, and a group of teachers formed a “Tuning/ Validating” committee to review each task, provid- ing feedback and ultimately determining whether the tasks could be considered true measures of competency according to the school’s performance- based graduation requirements. All of this work was undertaken at the teachers’ initiative, and under their own supervision, commitment, and sheer determination. Though the high school prin- cipal had to take a long-term medical leave in the middle of the winter, the work continued, gathering momentum as the year progressed.
While teacher leadership at Vergennes might be characterized as grassroots community activism, at other sites such leadership occurred within more institutionalized structures. Before Alison Hramiec became the Curriculum and Instruction Director at BDEA, faculty leadership was at an all-time low. Teachers worked hard in their class- rooms, committing their energy to meeting the needs of students, but were less invested in the overall school program. Hramiec and Headmaster Beatriz Zapater worked assiduously to create meaningful structures to elicit teacher concerns and suggestions. In the first year, they had a difficult time finding volunteers to join the newly revamped Instructional Leadership Team. This past year, the team had grown to 17 members. Though Hramiec acknowledged that this is a fairly unwieldy size, the level of active leadership is exactly what she and Zapater want to nurture. Indeed, compe- tency education seems to encourage—and thrive under—such leadership.
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As in the case of curriculum, to date the absence of appropriate off-the-shelf options has forced most of the schools to retrofit commercial school management products or design their own sys- tems. Although newer systems have started to emerge that are more friendly to mastery-based approaches and flexible enrollment scenarios, the pace of technology innovation far exceeds the pace of school district procurement cycles, and the intense demands of competency education program design can make it difficult for teachers to find time to learn new technologies. Casco Bay Principal Derek Pierce knew it would be unwise— and likely premature—to introduce a new learning management system to teachers consumed by their efforts to transform the school’s approach to assessment and grading. He and his teachers know they will need to deal with the systems chal- lenge sooner rather than later, and unfortunately they will likely need to reconfigure tools they design today to work with technology they adopt tomorrow.
Diploma Plus has made the largest investment in developing a customized system to support competency education. For the better part of eight years, Diploma Plus has worked with a web appli- cation developer to build its own diplomaplus.net (dp.net) learning management system. The project has been highly iterative. What started as a simple tool to manage teacher webpages has, after waves of feature requests from DP teachers and staff, evolved into a robust system that supports online course delivery and student performance track- ing. Within a few clicks, students can find their courses, work on assignments, submit work, and flag work for their online portfolio folders. They can also track their overall progress and performance. Interestingly, the evolution of DP.net has mirrored the pattern of competency education develop- ment overall: an initial focus on the development and articulation of the mastery system—tracking performance against learning targets—followed by feature requests designed to ‘unhook’ courses from time-related data requirements (start and end dates, semesters, etc.).