Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend a webinar hosted by CompetencyWorks about what states are doing to advance the practice of competency education. Presenters included Susan Patrick, President and CEO of iNACOL; Jason Glass, Director of the Iowa Department of Education; and Don Siviski, Superintendent of Instruction at the Maine Department of Education.
The webinar, which was based on CompetencyWorks’ latest briefing paper, Necessary for Success: Building Mastery of World-Class Skills – A State Policymakers Guide to Competency Education, provided a great conversation about what Iowa and Maine are doing to implement competency education in their districts. As I wrote in my last post, Understanding Competency Education, Maine has been working to advance mastery education in their state for quite some time. Like most states interested in competency-based learning, the conversation in Maine began with questions about student-centered learning and eventually shifted to learning being the constant and everything else being a variable.
Unlike Maine, the competency conversation is rather new in Iowa. Last year, the Iowa Senate established a task force to examine competency education and what it might look like in the state. The task force released a preliminary report in January of this year and will release further recommendations to the Iowa Legislature in November 2013. The task force’s preliminary recommendations include:
- Developing common language and vision for competency education;
- Conducting a review of current policies, administrative rules, and education and para-educational practices that may block optimal implementation of competency education;
- Establishing a research partnership with an institution of higher education to monitor and evaluate the work and to share findings.
I’ll end this post with one of my biggest take-aways, a reading list provided by Don Siviski, for those making the shift, or thinking about making the shift, to competency education.
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