Competency-Based Education
Evidence is Everybody’s Business What do leaders need to know and do? By Mary Anne Mather and Diana Nunnaley In the world of education, we experience shared rhetoric. One emerging family of education talk includes competency-based education, mastery learning, student-centered learning, personalized learning, performance assessment and data-informed decision-making. These related concepts trade on the belief that students and their needs should be the nucleus of teaching and learning. There is little doubt that studentcentered teaching and learning is accepted as desirable and necessary. In fact, individualized learning and differentiation have been part of our education reform discussions for decades. What excellent teacher wouldn’t tell us that it is all about the students? Yet, what does it take to achieve an effective system-wide culture of true student-centered learning? Speaking from long experience with using data to enact meaningful change, any successful effort of this type hinges on two important words: evidence and leadership. Data, Evidence and The Numbersto-People Imperative There are people who react negatively to the word “data” — and admittedly, in the abstract, numbers can seem cold, calculating, and sometimes lead to decisions that are punitive and unproductive. Yet data can serve as the gateway to knowing what students do and do not understand, what to do, and determining if what we do is working. Stakeholders can embrace, and even welcome data, if important safety regulations are accepted to guide data use. The purpose of data is always to inform improvement, never to punish. Additionally, if education data are broadly defined — beyond standardized and other summative tests — to include multiple measures of day-to-day assessments such as observations, 32
Spring 2016
SouthEast Education Network
performance tasks, and iterative formative classroom assessments, then we begin to move from numbers to the people represented in those numbers, especially if demographic data are part of the mix. That is when it really becomes “all about the students.” By triangulating the findings of these multiple measures, we start to focus on evidence to guide instruction and evaluate the impact of classroom strategies and programs. All instructional and program decisions are bolstered by knowing a hierarchy of information: • What evidence reveals student mastery or specific student misunderstandings? • What evidence indicates a shared professional understanding of student misunderstandings, their causes and promising solutions? • What evidence confirms implementation of identified solutions? • What evidence demonstrates overall impact of the solutions? With the rise of a competency-based education model, the importance of building an evidencefocused culture heightens, since competencybased learning by definition supports these basics: 1. Students advancing upon mastery, not age. 2. The pathway to competency is built with explicit and measurable learning objectives. 3. Assessment is primarily formative, and skills or concepts are assessed in multiple contexts to guarantee both deep understanding and application. (Early Learning Foundation: http:// earlylearningfoundation.com/competency-basedlearning/ Retrieved: 2.26.2016) In harmony with this thinking, CCSSO adds, “Planning for personalized learning calls for a data-driven framework to set goals, assess progress, and ensure students receive the academic and developmental support they need.”
(When Success Is the Only Option: Designing Competency-Based Pathways for Next Generation Learning, iNACOL 2010, p. 6.) Uncovering and understanding evidence is a must. Yet, adopting processes for effective data analysis based on collaborative inquiry often remains elusive to operationalize across entire organizations. An informed leader is key. The Role of Leadership If evidence is everybody’s business, then leaders must understand and provide the supports needed to build a culture of data literacy in their districts, schools, and classrooms in order to perfect meaningful use of evidence. Fortunately, research provides leaders a short list of overarching practices that can lead to the development of high performing institutions that effectively serve their constituents—students, teachers, and communities. The Institute of Education Sciences offers five recommendations for using student achievement data to support instructional decision-making: 1 Establish a clear vision for school wide data use. 2. Develop and maintain a district wide data system. 3. Make data part of an ongoing cycle of instructional improvement. 4. Provide supports that foster a data-driven culture within the school, including time for teams to meet to analyze data and develop plans. 5. Teach students to examine their own data and set learning goals. These recommendations are not effective, or even possible, on a one-teacher, one-classroom see EVIDENCE page 34
