One major difference between school today and schools of the past is that learning can happen anywhere and anytime. In fact, that is a major feature of learning now and for the future no matter what happens. It is also a major feature of work in general but especially for teachers. Blurring the lines between our work and personal lives …
One quality of a teacher now and for the future is that we must be extremely avid learners. Because the pace of change is so great, we must expect to constantly be learning new information, new technologies, new ideas, and new methods. This is a difficult shift. Teachers spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to plan lessons that will …
It is human nature to avoid change. We must be very motivated, both invested emotionally and with a solid reason, in order to make a change. The skills needed to meet the needs of learners graduating into the current global economy are substantially different than the skills that many teachers were introduced to in their educational programs. Even current educational …
The second misconception that caught my eye in the opinion piece entitled Proficiency-based Overreach by Curtis Hier (the same one I referenced in this previous post) from The Burlington Free Press is that students will no longer be motivated in a proficiency-based system because there won’t be traditional grading. The first assumption that is problematic in this argument is the …
I recently read an opinion piece in The Burlington Free Press that was fraught with misconceptions and inaccuracies about proficiency-based (competency-based) education. I think I’ll take them one at a time over several blog posts. In the first sentence of the opinion piece, Curtis Hier states “The Vermont Agency of Education is pushing a practice called proficiency-based grading (PBG)”; inaccuracy …
As we started this year, our leadership team acknowledged that doing something that nobody had ever done before could be pretty scary. We also acknowledged our strengths as we tried to start out in a proactive and positive note. Recognition In order to recognize the hard work that people had already done and the work they had ahead, we bought …
One of my colleagues asked a question that inspired this post. Based on what she is seeing as her own school makes the shift, her question was, “Is having a student take the same test over and over again until they pass it, really proficiency based learning”? In Vermont we use the term proficiency which is interchangeable with competency. Competency …
Change is always hard. It is human nature to do what’s comfortable. As teachers, we put a lot of energy into our work and once we find something that works, we aren’t likely to scrap it and do something else. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes we make in education. Instead of building on what is working, we …
Getting buy-in for radical school changes is a common complaint of school leaders. It is important to remember how you got to the point of believing a certain change was necessary. There was probably a learning process; you read books, heard podcasts, saw a compelling keynote speaker or heard something from a student that convinced you. Those experiences were all processed …