Personalizing learning with
Competencies And Outcomes

How might we use competencies and outcomes to give the students greater control over their own learning?

The dates and times of all synchronous "fast chat" opportunities are listed on the GOA Faculty calendar, which is on the Faculty Lounge home page. No need to sign up or RSVP in any official way. All are welcome! All Fast Chats are recorded and saved in the cloud, so that we can easily pull together some highlights at the end of the week. If you say something brilliant, we want to share that out! These same questions will be discussed asynchronously in the #-slowchat channel on the GOA Faculty Slack. Don't miss it!

Join Fast Chat!

Some Questions to get us started

How can we use our competencies and outcomes to help students reflect on their performance and set goals going forward?
Are there ways that we can allow (and indeed encourage) students to chart their own course through the curriculum based on the competencies they most need to master?
Can you personalize assessment in the course based on your students' competency goals?
How might you allow students to progress through the course as they master certain competencies as opposed to based on the calendar? Are there ways that automation can help with this?
What are one or two small things you could change in your next module so that your course design would be more competency-based and would allow for a more personalized learning experience?
When you think about the way that you facilitate your course, what are one or two things you could adjust so that the student experience would be more personalized and tied to competency development?

resources for further exploration

INSPIRATION

"Advancing Personalized Learning with a Purpose" by Julia Freeland Fisher, a thought leader and the Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute.
Competency-Based Learning or Personalized Learning. The US Government Department of Education's primer.
"Mastering the Skills, Not the Clock" by Preston Cooper a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
"Developing Our Understanding of Personalized Learning" by Barbara Curshan - Director of UPenn GSE's Education Design Studio
K-12 Blueprint's resources on Personalized and Adaptive Learning.

EXAMPLES

This page in the Resource Library for Blended and Online Teachers features some interesting competency-based forays that GOA teachers have made this year. Check it out!
A Peek Inside Summit's Personalized Learning Software from EdSurge News.
New Hampshire's Journey Toward Competency-Based Education from Education Next.
4 Examples of Personalized Learning in K-12 Education from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

RESEARCH

Patrick, Susan, and Chris Sturgis. "Maximizing Competency Education and Blended Learning." (n.d.): n. pag. Competencyworks.org. Competency Works, March 2015. Web. 1 February. 2017.
Norford, Jennifer S., and Robert J. Marzano. "Personalized Competency-Based Education." (n.d.): n. pag. Marzanoresearch.com. Marzano Research, September 2016. Web. 1 February. 2017
Bramante, Fred, and Rose Colby. Off the Clock: Moving Education from Time to Competency. Corwin. Thousand Oaks, California. 2012
Patrick, Susan, Kathryn Kennedy, and Allison Powell. "Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended, and Competency Education." (n.d.): n. pag. INACOL.org. International Association for K-12 Online Learning. October 2013. Web. 2 February. 2017
Horn, Michael B., and Heather Staker. Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. Jossey Bass. San Francisco. 2015. See the introduction, in particular.

Professional Learning Habits

What Professional Learning Habits are we building here? So glad you asked

GOA’s Professional Learning Habits inform all professional learning experiences at GOA, shaping how we design courses as well as how participants experience them. These habits ensure that professional learning at GOA is effective, meaningful, and research-based.

GOA’s Professional Learning Habits encourage participants to:

Grow a global network of colleagues and use it to solve problems and co-create.

Design learning experiences that are personalized (driven by data and need) and collaborative.

Reflect on, question, and take responsibility for one’s own professional practice.

Use technology to reimagine rather than reinforce current practices, habits, and interactions.