Boston Day and Evening Academy

by Jesse Moyer on June 19, 2013

Last week, my colleague, Katherine Prince, and I had the opportunity to visit Boston Day and Evening Academy (BDEA).  BDEA is an alternative public charter school located on Roxbury, one of 21 official neighborhoods in Boston.  Serving over-aged and under-credentialed students, this is not your typical high school:

  • Boston Day and Evening Academy uses a competency-based education model
  • The school is open ten hours per day to meet the needs of their diverse student population
  • BDEA does not use a traditional grading system (A,B,C) or traditional grade groupings (9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th) to recognize achievement
  • An extraordinary amount of community partners contribute to BDEA’s success

We visited the school to learn more about their competency-education model but learned so much more.  To say I was impressed with our visit would be an understatement.  Inspired is more like it.  To learn more about our visit, you can check out CompetencyWorks’ blog or connect with on twitter.

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Designing for Trust

by Katherine Prince June 17, 2013

What could it mean for more nodes in the learning ecosystem – especially today’s K-12 schools – to revisit the fundamental assumption of scarcity and design for abundance? In effect, to design for learning to flow naturally across a vibrant learning ecosystem in concert with learners’ curiosities and passions?

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Supporting Open Learning

by Katherine Prince June 14, 2013

As a pioneer and leader in open and distance education, the Open University has long implemented a variety of learning agent roles designed for its model rather than for a traditional university structure. It’s so established in this space that my roles there involved transitioning its student feedback and tutor support systems from their original paper-based formats to the web.

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Student-Centered Learning in Our Midst

by Katherine Prince June 12, 2013

When I was presenting on KnowledgeWorks’ forecast on the future of learning at yesterday’s “The Future Is Now:  Ohio Best Practices SIG Conference” hosted by EDWorks and the Ohio Department of Education, David Estrop, Superintendent of Springfield City Schools,  shared that his district has started offering an à la carte menu of options that enable [...]

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All Politics Aside: Five Points of Agreement on ESEA Reauthorization

by Lillian Pace June 11, 2013

Democrats stood by their 1,000+ page bill which would largely stay the course on U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s waiver strategy. Republicans, on the other hand, made the case for a smaller federal presence in education. Despite these differences, there were some striking similarities among the two proposals which warrant some mention.

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Federal Innovation Competitions: A Catalyst for Competency Education

by Lillian Pace June 6, 2013

Given the strong demand from the field, it’s encouraging to see the federal government exploring policies to provide states and districts with the flexibility to implement competency education at scale.

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Competency as a Route to Personalized Learning

by Katherine Prince June 5, 2013

NAU’s experience highlights the complexity of designing for a new model of learning, all the way from the courses themselves to to learning agent roles to basic infrastructure. Is it worth navigating such complexity? KnowledgeWorks’ Forecast 3.0 suggests that it is. As today’s learning providers reevaluate their value propositions in the face of a wide array of digital and social innovations, they will need to differentiate their offerings to attract students. At KnowledgeWorks, we think that competency education is one pathway for shifting today’s institutions toward the kind of learner-centered provision that can help open the way toward a vibrant learning ecosystem.

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Learning to Accept (and love) Technology in the Classroom

by Jeanne Bernish June 3, 2013

CNN profiles the acceptance and use of technology in the classroom at Napa New Tech High School.

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Finding Another Way

by Katherine Prince May 29, 2013

Since 2007, WGU has used student and course mentors to support students in navigating the program and engaging with the curriculum designed by the program faculty. Every student has a student mentor who stays with the individual throughout his or her learning journey, providing coaching, direction, and practical advice via weekly academic progress conversations. Course mentors provide individual and group instructional support for specific sections of the WGU curriculum.

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Obama visit to Manor shows important link between education, economy

by Guest Post May 28, 2013

When President Barack Obama visited Manor New Technology High School near Austin, Texas, earlier this month, he saw the successful offspring of pedagogy, public policy, and free enterprise.

He saw students excited and engaged in their learning, teachers creatively developing real-world projects, and technology seamlessly incorporated in the classroom. Schools like Manor New Tech fuse student learning to the local workforce system to create relevance and linkages to economic drivers as well as alignment to institutions of higher education to provide college credit for students while they are still in high school.

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