How the Skills are Integrated into Classes

Context

One of the challenges of adopting competency-based education is that the language used by educators is not consistent between systems. For instance, in some schools, "competency" refers to a schoolwide skill, while in others, it refers to a course-specific skill. Course competencies, objectives, outcomes, and targets get muddled. We had to define the language we would use for each level of the educational planning structure.

Another challenge of competency-based education is describing the integration of the schoolwide skills into individual courses. In a traditional school, a course is comprised of the academic standards it is tasked with covering. However, in a competency-based school, a course is comprised of academic standards and the transferable skills learned with those standards.

The picture below demonstrates the language we have chosen to use.

Why This Terminology?

We had never previously landed on any terminology we would use as a school. Different teachers used different terms. Other educators, including those doing work in the realm of competency-based learning, use different terms from each other. Our various systems we use (Schoology, Synergy, Mastery Learning Record, etc.) also use different terms. By adopting consistent terminology, we can at least remove confusion when we talk internally. We will continue to see these terms used variably by those outside our school.

Future-Ready Skills

These are transferable skills. They can be used in many situations within different contexts. We chose to refer to them as "future-ready" partly because it is easily understood by our community and partly because in 2024, Washington State launched its FutureReady "initiative aimed at updating Washington State high school graduation requirements to better prepare students for the future."

Some competency-based schools use "competency" to refer to their schoolwide learning goals and some use "competency" to refer to the broad learning goals of individual classes. We had to make a choice. In most ways, both represent the transferable skills we want students to learn. Since the schoolwide skills are also integrated within the course skills, we chose to let "competencies" live in courses.

Competencies

Competencies are the core units of competency-based education. The term is the most commonly recognized way of describing transferable skills among schools that focus on such skills. Some may find that the word "competency" brings to mind shades of meaning that include "just good enough." Such connotations are not intended to be included in our use of the term.

Performance Indicators

We were tempted to phrase these as learning objectives (like "Design Thinking"), but making these into Performance Indicators (like "Use Design Thinking to solve a human-centered problem") allowed us to omit a hierarchical level of structure. If we had gone with objectives, we would still need to have written indicators to build out the corresponding rubrics. This language should make the transition from "you're learning this" to "you're being assessed on this" far more natural and intuitive for learners.