Standards and Competencies

As educational systems increasingly focus on what is best for students and how educators can support students in their pursuit of learning, Competency Based Education has risen to the forefront of practices and philosophies that actually work. Competency Based Education includes a shift from thinking about what a teacher has taught, to what a student has learned and can demonstrate. Traditional educational systems may include behavior, attendance, and effort when calculating a student’s grade. Competency Based Education removes these factors from the academic grade, focusing solely on the content standards that a student is expected to learn. This separation will allow more transparency for teachers, students, and parents to best understand where a student is thriving and areas that are more challenging and need more focus and support.

What is a Competency:

At its most basic level, a competency is a learning standard that a student must demonstrate the ability to achieve. Competencies include knowledge, skills, and abilities that a student is charged with mastering through the learning process. A competency is achieved when a student demonstrates, through performance and over a period of time with multiple attempts, that they can use the knowledge, skills, and abilities learned. All competencies are measured against the Rubric Indicators. In a true competency based system, a student’s demonstration of competency could occur any time, any place, in multiple ways, and are not bound by a school year or a specific assessment.

Credit : Christopher Motika