CVSD Proficiency-Based Learning

The Champlain Valley School District (CVSD) has been focused on standards and Standards-Based Learning (also known as Proficiency-Based Learning) for quite some time. Components of Standards-Based Learning (SBL) are in place in all of our schools. Vermont's Act 77 (below) requires Proficiency Based Graduation Requirements and thus a standards driven learning and assessment model across the school system. It also requires Personalized Learning Plans. Act 77 confirms and solidifies our work already under way and brings Standards Based Learning and PLP's to the forefront across CVSD. To prepare school systems and provide common understanding about these areas, CVSD and twenty-two Vermont supervisory unions and school districts participated in a grant sponsored by the Agency of Education. Through the grant opportunity, educator teams are engaged in a series of monthly seminars with Great Schools Partnership. At the conclusion of our work, the CVSD team will have developed a 3-year implementation plan that will strengthen our K-12 work with Standards-Based Learning .

"Act 77 and the State Board of Education’s Education Quality Standards (EQS) state that Vermont public schools must provide students with flexible and personalized pathways for progressing through grade levels and to graduation. The notion of Proficiency-Based Learning is a key component of this, requiring that students advance based on demonstration of attainment of skills and knowledge, rather than based on time spent in a classroom.

Proficiency-Based Learning can take many forms, and is already a critically important part of many school and SU/District instructional models statewide. Classroom activities that give students opportunities to demonstrate what they know and can do, support student-specific assessments of proficiency. Methods of relaying progression in learning to students and their families, through proficiency-based grading models and report cards, for example, can create a deeper and more accurate sense of each student's strengths and areas of need. As educators in Vermont, our long-term goal is to identify elements of Proficiency-Based Learning models at work within and outside of the state, apply them to benefit all of Vermont’s students, and support the instructional and systemic shifts that this scale-up will require."

~ from the Vermont Agency of Education website