Which Pilot Do You Want Flying Your Plane?
Last week I had the opportunity to deliver the keynote to a
large group of school administrators from Oregon at their 2013 State
Proficiency Conference, sponsored jointly by the Confederation of Oregon School
Administrators (COSA) and the Business Education Compact (BEC) in Portland. I
began my talk by sharing with the group how I explained the idea of
competency-based grading to a woman, Kathy, whom I shared a plane ride with on
my way to Oregon. Kathy was very curious to learn more about competency-based grading.
She is a mother of three and lives in the Portland area. Her oldest just graduated
from high school and is now in the Air Force. She has another child in middle
school and her youngest is in elementary school. As a result, she is very
invested in educational reforms that promise to give her children a better
future.
To help her understand the competency-based system, I asked
her to hypothetically consider how the pilot school was organized that our
airline pilot attended. We both agreed that in order to be able to fly our
plane that day, he had to have been deemed “proficient” by his pilot school. We
can only assume that his school taught him everything he needed to know about
being a pilot. I offered her two hypothetical situations about the pilot school
and I asked her to then consider which school she thought was better.
School #1: The Traditional School
At school #1, the pilot completed a series of readings, homework,
and classwork assignments, participated in class discussions about those assignments,
and took quizzes and tests to demonstrate that he understood the material that
was presented in class. Some of his quizzes and tests were done on paper or the
computer and some were “performance-based” (meaning that likely he had to
actually fly a simulator or an actual plane with an instructor). His final
grade was obtained by weighting all of his assignments appropriately (quizzes
and tests counted more) and averaging everything together. Since his average
was above an 80%, he was deemed “proficient” and was awarded his pilot’s
license.
School #2: The Competency-Based School
At school #2, the pilot completed all of the same types of
readings, assignments and assessments just like in the traditional school. Some
of his quizzes and tests were done on paper and some were performance-based,
just like the traditional school. The difference in this school was that each
of the assessments he took were directly linked to competencies that looked
something like this:
·
Competency #1: The student will learn how to
successfully make a plane take-off.
·
Competency #2: The student will learn how to
successfully land a plane.
·
Competency #3: The student will learn how to
successfully fly a plane in the air.
The pilot was not considered “proficient” in pilot school
until he demonstrated proficiency in each competency. Once he did, he would be
deemed “proficient” and awarded his pilot’s license.
Which School Was Better?
Kathy had a hard time answering this question until I
offered her this critical hint: In the traditional school, it is possible to
fail an individual assessment provided the grades on other assessments and
assignments were high enough so that the final course average was still above
an 80%. Knowing this, what if the one test the pilot failed happened to be the one
on how to land a plane? Suddenly, it was clear to Kathy that a traditional
model is a flawed system because it allows students to be deemed proficient
when in reality there are gaps in their learning. This is the danger of
averaging grades without first connecting them to learning targets.
I shared this story with the Oregon administrators because I
often feel one of the biggest struggles school administrators have when
transforming their schools is finding effective ways to communicate with stakeholders,
particularly parents and students who sometimes don’t understand the
complexities that can often be associated with competency-based grading
practices. Keeping things simple can allow these stakeholders to become
advocates and supporters for the transformation process, which ultimately will
make or break whether or not a school reform initiative will succeed. I hope
that my message was well received.
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