The Deeper Dig: What proficiency-based learning looks like

Today we’re in the principal’s office at Montpelier High School — and not because we’re in trouble. Principal Mike McRaith is talking about how the school abandoned the traditional rubric for evaluating students and adopted what’s called a proficiency-based learning system.

McRaith: You know, when I went to high school, I had no idea how Mr. Anderson was calculating our grade. And I was scared to ask, like, I don’t know how much quizzes count. I don’t know what stuff is weighted. If I bring in brownies, does that count for points? All that stuff’s gone.

Lola Duffort: Do you have extra credit?

McRaith: No, no. All that stuff is gone.

Hewitt: So in Montpelier, they have put together this — it’s a poster, it has a circle in the middle and it has these different learning targets, these different learning objectives around the outside of it. And these are things that the school has defined as characteristics that they want all of their students to be proficient in by the time that they graduate.

McRaith: This little map up here, the colored one that has MPS in the middle, you’ll see it all over our walls. And so those are our seven transferable skills.

Hewitt: These go beyond the traditional academic boundaries. It’s not necessarily specifically talking about like, you need to know this mathematical thing. This is about habits of learning. So how prepared you are when you show up for class, it’s about communication skills. They’re sort of seen as these building blocks of being a good learner.

Elizabeth Hewitt has been reporting on proficiency-based learning for The Hechinger Report, a national education news site, along with VTDigger education reporter Lola Duffort.

Hewitt: Montpellier has these transferable skills in place. They’re something that students are now assessed on under the statewide graduation requirements — proficiency-based graduation requirements standard — and all schools are supposed to have something similar in place now.

And in Montpelier, they just have this poster just kind of put up around the school, everywhere you go you see this image.

Hewitt: Right, yeah. Teachers and the school in general are really transparent with students about having made this big shift to a proficiency-based system. When we were in classrooms, we actually heard one teacher even address it, saying, Well, now that we’re in a proficiency system, we have less emphasis on vocabulary than we used to in the old system. In a more practical sense, the proficiency system manifests everyday, in that students come into a room and they’ll have their learning targets for the day, their objectives are written up on the board. And so they can say OK, this is what we’re shooting for.

What kinds of things? Like what would an example of a learning target be?

Hewitt: It’s what the class — what you’re trying to learn for the day, what you’re trying to accomplish in that class.

But like not something vocabulary, not something memorization-based, but something more abstract.

Hewitt: Right, yeah, it’s sort of the overall, moving towards this greater level of comprehension of what you’re taking away from a class.

Kevin Coen: I had become frustrated with sort of the meaninglessness of old grading. Like looking at a student at the end of a year, and mathematically, they were doing really poorly, but I’d seen so much growth in them. And I’m like, huh, so you’re averaging a 60. But at this point in quarter four, you’re getting an 85. But mathematically, you did so poorly to begin with. And so it came from frustration and really sitting in meetings with parents, telling them like, no, they’ve made so much progress. I know that doesn’t look like that on paper, but this is such an awesome kid, and they’ve done so much growing.

This is Kevin Coen, a teacher at Springfield High School who helped implement a proficiency-based system there.

Coen: So a crew of us started like looking into like, OK, what can we do differently? And that was about the time that the state said you’re going to do a proficiency-based grading thing, and we were like, OK, let’s take a look. It just sort of for me, it felt like a natural fit.

They’re all acknowledging that they’re in the midst of a transition. Where are Vermont schools in that transition right now?

Hewitt: All schools are supposed to be on target to have the class of 2020 graduate on a proficiency-based system. This is a move away from the older regime that many of us are familiar with of credits that are based on, you know, you show up to math class, you log your time in your seat in math, and that’s what you do.

You take some tests…

And that’s how you move forward. And under the proficiency system, they’re trying to say instead of logging that time, and emphasizing that, we want to make sure the students are mastering these key skills and are becoming proficient in these different areas before they move on.

So how does that manifest for an actual student in terms of their day-to-day learning, taking quizzes and tests and getting grades?

Hewitt: Well, this is where it looks really different school to school. By law in Vermont, graduation requirements are set locally, and so school districts and schools could really chart their own path on this. We’ve seen some schools have really embraced this model wholeheartedly. They’ve changed their grading systems. They’ve restructured themselves in really big ways. My understanding is that some schools have done that less so.

One of the things that’s a hallmark of this is that students have multiple pathways to achieve their proficiency. I was in a classroom in Springfield High School, where they have these innovation labs that are classes that combine different proficiencies from different academic subjects. One that I went to is called ‘Your Brain on School.’ These students are going to be doing things like surveying their classmates and doing some different experiments that count towards a statistics proficiency. And then they’re also working on a psychology proficiency as a part of that. And at the end of the class, they’re actually going to make some policy recommendations based on what they learned. When I was there, one of the students, she was working towards doing a survey on how alcohol and drug use impacts student experience at Springfield High School.

Another part of the proficiency system that many schools have adopted is being more flexible about timelines for completing work and giving students more opportunities to redo something. So if you aren’t doing well, in one summative assignment in an English class, that you can have multiple opportunities to go back and work with the teacher and retake that towards the eventual goal of being proficient, instead of well, tough luck. The class ended. That’s it, you’re done.

McRaith: This idea of, Ds get degrees. It’s gone. Right? It’s like, we need you to demonstrate proficiency or partial proficiency. The way we do it, our proficiency is a three, but if you average a 2.5 in one of our classes, you earn credit. You’re in proficiency. It says actually partial proficiency, but that’s still raising the bar.

If you wanted to make sort of a crude analogy with grades, it’s like, you used to be able to pass with a D minus, and now you need a C plus. That’s kind of what it is. And so one thing is that students rise to those expectations, for one piece of the puzzle. But there’s also this need to do better by more students. And I think the clarity of the learning targets and goals helps, right? So it’s not just like, I don’t know how this is connected to anything, and now we have this monster project that counts for 50% of the class, but I didn’t do it. That can’t happen in this system the way we’re set up.

This is a pretty massive shift for those of us who grew up with you know, a GPA that goes up to 4.0 or taking a test, and you know, you fail it and then it counts against your grade. This is pretty huge.

Hewitt: It can be. You know, some schools have definitely stayed closer to the older system. Not all schools have changed how they grade, for instance. Many are still using A through F. But some have decided to switch over to a new form of grading that is used often in proficiency models that is one through four, and three is considered proficient. If you’re converting that to the old system, you’re like, oh that’s a 75. So a 75 instead of 60 is suddenly passing. That has been one of the areas that there’s been the most friction with the communities: that the system is new, you know. People don’t necessarily understand it. I think in some places, they’re still figuring out issues with the calculation. There’s been some rocky starts in some places. It’s not easy for everybody to accept.

McRaith: I think the controversy comes when there’s poor implementation, or there’s concern around post-secondary issues. College. Is my baby going to get into Yale or whatever? And neither of those things are real concerns in my opinion.

I can understand why people are worried. I understand that the worry — of course you want what’s best for your children. But basically, at its foundation level, what proficiency is, is saying what students will learn and how they’re going to be assessed. That’s all it really is. And what’s the alternative? Yeah, we don’t really know what they’re going to learn and good luck trying to figure out how we assess them.

We’ll hear more about proficiency skeptics after the break.

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Back to Elizabeth.

Hewitt: I think a lot of people are really in favor of the overall objectives here. But there are some people that sort of aren’t sure about how it’s actually being realized.

McRaith: I think the controversial part of it comes when people are concerned that schools or districts are trying something really sort of out there, or that they’re going to sort of do something that’s a fad or a phase, and that their students are going to be the ones that are sort of experimented on, and then they’re not going to get into college and they’re not going to have the education that they had hoped.

I think that that is an incorrect narrative. The correct narrative, in my opinion, is that schools, for generations and decades, have been trying to identify what the learning targets are. And then communicate those in a way that the students, that the faculty, and the communities can understand. And then be fair about the assessment of those. I don’t think that there’s really much controversy in the actual principles of it. I think the controversy is when that’s not communicated well.

Hewitt: I think there’s a lot of optimism for what this new system can be. In several schools, in a couple schools I’ve been to, the transition was really teacher led. Teachers were really looking excited about this as a way to kind of re-energize and put the learning more on students. You tell the students what you want them to learn, and you give them the opportunity to work towards that.

Coen: We emphasize later learning. So there’s a pocket of kids who think that they can wait until the end of the semester and get things done. And to a certain extent, that’s true, but it’s still very difficult to do that. It’s not an easy thing to do. But there’s a lot more kids who I think feel like, oh, good, I screwed up at the beginning of the semester, because, you know, sometimes they’re busy with sports, or because we have a lot of kids who struggle with family situations that are rough. These pockets of time where they just aren’t good students, because they’re not into that thing right then. They’ve got these external forces that they can’t control. But then too, I think some of them have this sense of relief when they’re done, like, oh my god, I got through it in the end, and not because it was easy, necessarily, but because I wasn’t punished for this previous error.

Hewitt: When I’ve spoken with students, I’ve heard a bunch of different facets of it. Some of the students I’ve spoken to have been really enthusiastic about it and said that, you know, they they really like that directed learning, they really liked the transparency, they feel like those opportunities to redo assignments, that that gives them a chance to really understand the subject matter. It gives them a chance to revisit and get to know it even better than they maybe did the first time, even if they did OK the first time.

Other students that I spoke to did say that, you know, it’s been a bit rough for them, or just has taken some getting used to. One thing that I’ve heard from a couple different folks is that there might not be as much motivation. That opportunity to retake might mean that you don’t try as hard as you would have the first time. Or that because the grading system is different and they don’t really understand it, or that they’re still getting used to it, that you don’t have that gratification of seeing, OK, well my grade went up by three percentage points. When you’re on the one through four system and a three is proficient, that you don’t see the incremental improvement that that you did in the old system.

Eva Jessup: I think that proficiency in general was a really good idea. I think the implementation, maybe is part of the downfall in the system.

This is Eva Jessup, a junior and a student journalist at U32 High School who’s been reporting on the proficiency system there.

Jessup: Schools don’t have enough to go off of and didn’t have enough time to figure out the system before it really just went into place. And there was a little bit of a rush. Suddenly, I mean, it was described to us as we’re building the plane as we’re flying it, which sounds like it could work. And yes, there’s things that you just have to learn along the way that you can’t know ahead of time. But it’s also difficult when you’re a student and you’re trying to be graded and you’ve been graded one way all of middle school, and it’s suddenly switched. You just have to kind of figure it out, and teachers are figuring it out at the same time.

Andrew Crompton: If you raise the bar from like, a D, to essentially like a B plus A minus range grade, which is essentially what they’ve done.

Jessup: Without any heads up.

Crompton: Yeah, without any heads up. From that you have to know and expect that there are going to be more people that aren’t going to graduate.

Andrew Crompton, another U32 student journalist, is a senior.

Crompton: I don’t think it’s exactly fair to all of the students to then expect them to be proficient in all 41 standards. Because that’s something that they were clear in putting the boot down on. Like, yes, there’s no skating by, you can’t wish, like you can’t hope. We’re not going to give you twos and you’re still going to graduate. You have to be proficient.

Hewitt: They see it as positive in some ways, but that it’s been kind of hard to be a part of the first class that’s on this switch. The school held a meeting to sort of reinforce to make sure that everybody knew that now they have to achieve these 41 proficiencies in order to graduate, and according to the student journalists, that some of the students sort of realized that they might not be on track, and that they would have to go to summer school and sort of figure out how to get there.

Jessup: This summer school thing is definitely, again, like parents who maybe aren’t in the loop necessarily. It’s suddenly becoming like, OK, this is a system that’s kind of impacting us more than we thought it would. And I think on both parts, I know that teachers who are also parents are in big support of this change. And I also know parents who are just really frustrated with the fact that they weren’t given any heads up about this switch and how it could impact their kids. And I think people are also worried about ‘will this affect my college applications’ or ‘will this affect me later on,’ and I think that’s a little bit of like the scaring that kind of comes with this. That people are afraid of what’s gonna happen, and because it hasn’t really been done, they aren’t really sure.

Hewitt: At that school as well, they had some issues with grading in the first year that they had this in place. And so they ended up not including the freshman year grades in their overall GPAs. But that said, they were also, you know, optimistic that this could be a positive change and could ultimately be creating more opportunities.

Jessup: People who aren’t in the classrooms, they only see the outside implications that are negative. 90% of the time — you don’t see all of the good things that happened in the classroom, and you only hear when your kid suddenly has to come for all the month of July. That kind of makes you a little upset that this is like the resort school has to go to to get the kid to graduate.

It’s interesting, you know, when you talk about these reactions, you’re talking about optimism for the future, or skepticism about the future. It seems very experimental. Do we have any information about either how it’s affected outcomes for the students that have already experienced it? Either in Vermont or elsewhere that it’s been used?

Hewitt: This is a model that is being tried in several different states and schools around the country and has been for a long time. And there’s a lot of research into the theories behind it. In terms of outcomes, there are some studies that show some positive indicators for improving student experience in the classroom and improving their outcomes overall. I have not seen a lot in terms of hard data.

In Vermont, if you look at overall assessment, or looking at the school systems overall over the last decade, we have seen the high school graduation rate has increased. And a lot has happened in the last decade, including this switch to proficiency, which — again, the first class that will be on that, we don’t know them yet because they’re graduating next year. But there are some indicators, as the state has been like doing all of these overhauls, that the the graduation rate has been climbing.

Coen: I think it’s easy in education, there’s constant initiatives, it feels like we’re talked about a lot. And I feel like this is a good one. And just because people are complaining, I don’t think that means you back off of the initiative. I think it means like, OK, we’ve got to work harder to explain why this is good. And I think philosophically, there’s a lot of really profound and well-researched ideas that support why it’s a good thing. And if we come up with something better, sure, but I think going backwards is a big mistake.

Hewitt: Vermont is actually not the first state to make the decision to go towards a proficiency-based system. The state of Maine decided to put in a proficiency-based graduation requirement statewide before Vermont made that decision, but that was a pretty rocky rollout. And Maine legislators actually ended up pulling back on the mandate last summer, and so that requirement is no longer in place. Vermont is a different state than Maine, and there’s a lot of different factors in place. I mean, for one thing, it actually wasn’t Vermont legislators that required this shift, although it was a statewide standard that schools have to comply with. So it’s interesting, because it seems like at this point, it doesn’t seem like it’s exactly the same as the experience in Maine.

It seems very new. Right now, you’re taking a snapshot of it at the very beginning phase. Do you have any ideas of what we might see — if you loop back to those same schools four years from now, what it might look like?

Hewitt: I wouldn’t be able to predict. But I would say that, you know, the folks that I was in touch with acknowledge that they’re in there in the middle of the transition, right? That this is a longer term project than just a couple years. I think they’re kind of figuring it out.

It would be very interesting to see where they stand in a few years, and to see if they’re sticking with things exactly as they are or if they make changes down the line. Studies by the state and also by the Vermont Principals’ Association show that the vast majority of Vermont schools have embraced this change and are on track to have this in place. So even though there are some questions about it, there seems to be a broad movement in this direction. We’re not really seeing the broad level of resistance that we did in in a place like Maine.

Gotcha. Thanks, Elizabeth.

Hewitt: Thank you so much, Mike.