In our Building 21 Allentown school, we use our Competency Framework to create competency-based portfolio credits that are earned upon completion of a portfolio, not based on seat time. The first step in breaking down course-based structures requires you to rethink how and when students earn credits. The content of the learning experience becomes the context through which students demonstrate their progress and growth on the competencies therefore, content-based courses no longer need to be your organizing structure. Organizing teaching and learning around progression-based competencies allows you to mix students across grades, because students can be working on the same competencies, but at different levels. In my last blog post, I wrote about how competency-based education (CBE) is the structure you need to replace traditional course-based, grade-based, age-based, and time-based structures. How do you believe teaching and learning should be organized to maximize your resources and improve learning outcomes for students, and how can you redesign the master schedule to support those goals? The design of your master schedule should be guided by your goals and priorities for teaching and learning. What and who drives the design of your master schedule? So how do we get started rethinking the master schedule? Of course, let’s start by asking ourselves, “Why?” Why is our daily schedule made up of seven or eight 42-minute periods? Why do we assign our students their courses based on grade levels? Why do we silo content in individual courses or by grade? We also need to acknowledge that the current systems being used for scheduling are built to support these traditional structures and might be a barrier, so we need to be open to using additional systems or tools to achieve our desired schedules. There are many assumptions we make about what can and cannot be done with scheduling, so we need to start by challenging those assumptions. We often think of time and schedules as fixed, but what happens when we shift our mindsets so that learning becomes the constant and time becomes the variable? Scheduling is an essential tool that, when used effectively, can break down traditional structures and improve learning outcomes for students. Time is one of the most valuable resources in our schools.
#Eduspire flextime manager series
Links to other posts in this series by Sandra Moumoutjis are at the end of this article. Create Enabling Conditions for Competency-Based Education.Base Learning on Mastery, Not Seat Time.Modernize and Diversify the Educator-Leader Workforce.Redesign Accountability Systems for Continuous Improvement.Create Space to Pilot Systems of Assessments.Leverage Career and Technical Education.
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