Editor’s note: This commentary is by Madeline Raynolds, of Pomfret, who is a studying for certification as a high school principal and is a principal intern at Sharon Academy. She taught at Hanover High School and in international baccalaureate schools in Portugal, China and Brazil over the past 20 years.
In a time when our public discourse on so many issues is confusing, it is great to see focus on topics that do make sense, like education. Any time our schools are the subject of public attention, we all benefit. That’s why I appreciate a teacher (Curtis Hier: “The Proficiency Fad”) taking time to share his thoughts on Vermont’s Act 77 and the resulting proficiency-based learning initiative. Listening to teachers must be the way forward in school reform of any kind. Curtis Hier’s thinking about proficiency is probably shared by other teachers throughout the state and that gives those of us who have the task of preparing young people for the future an invitation to continue the conversation.
The new paradigm of schooling that proficiency-based education represents is in fact hard to understand. It is a profound shift in the way we educate young people and it will certainly take some time to leverage its full potential in practice. Hier’s commentary reveals many of the misconceptions about this educational approach. In fact, this “revolution” (term used by Richard Voorhees in “Competency-based Learning Models: A Necessary Future”) will challenge our underlying assumptions that have been conditioned through the traditional educational model.
This industrial educational prototype hasn’t really changed much since its founding with Horace Mann in the 1800s. While many of us have been calling for school reform, the commentary exposes the reality of how difficult this will be.
While there is so much to say about the new proficiency model and its implementation, I will briefly touch on two of its critical elements here: competency outcomes and student-centered learning. Contrary to what Hier said in his commentary, the goal of proficiency has nothing to do with report cards. This transition can in no way be summed up by saying it’s about converting letter grades to numbers. The difference is not in how we report but on what we report and the underlying purpose of education. The skills we are teaching in schools must have real life applications. In fact, our academic subjects do have real world applications; however, our schools have failed to make that connection. In more than 20 years of teaching, only a handful of my students have become English scholars, but everyone has learned skills about how to read and make sense of the world around them. The proficiency model forces teachers to see how the academic skills are transferable to other areas of students’ lives. We should have been doing that all along.
It’s not a fad to put students at the center of learning. The other major piece of proficiency is the advantage of student choice and the intrinsic student motivation this educational vision accesses. Not only will students get some kind of choice on assessments for how to demonstrate their knowledge (where that is possible), but schools will have to examine the menu of course offerings to expand learning opportunities beyond the traditional classroom. Community-based learning, online learning, travel learning, interdisciplinary learning and more will be pathways to competencies that schools should consider. Students who are encouraged to develop personal learning plans start to believe that education is not done to them, but that they can become partners in envisioning the kind of learning that works best for them. Done well, this increased ownership will improve student engagement and outcomes.
To be clear, this is an initiative that goes way beyond Vermont and Maine. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 15 states have passed laws that move their schools towards proficiency while in other states, like Vermont, Oregon, Rhode Island, Maine and New Hampshire, the move comes through state boards. This is not a fad. And while I am happy that Vermont students do so well on NEAP, I am not sure test taking is in the job description of our students’ future careers.
As Voorhes says, “(i)n organizational life, all innovations foster resistance.” And I will wholeheartedly agree with the commentator that once again teachers are asked to do more work. The transition to new ways of educating for the future should not be on the backs of teachers who already do a disproportional amount of public service. We should all be working together to support the intellectual, physical and emotional growth of the next generation. Schools must be community projects. Let’s focus on what matters.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Madeline Raynalds: Understanding proficiency.