Fulton County Schools – Building the Components of a Competency-based Framework
How does your organization define competency-based education?
We leverage the iNACOL and CompetencyWorks working definition:
Students advance upon mastery.
Competencies include explicit, measurable, transferable learning objectives that empower students.
Assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students.
Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.
Learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include application and creation of knowledge along with the development of important skills and dispositions.
Competency-based education (CBE) is phase two of Fulton’s implementation of Personalized Learning Environments. We have identified 160 teachers across the district to serve as Learning Architects. These teachers have prioritized the standards and developed vertically aligned learning targets for the 13 courses leading to graduation in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies.
Beliefs
The Fulton County Board of Education supports our mission statement, which states that each child should be given the opportunity to reach their full potential. To that end, our current continuous achievement framework for advancement allows each child to progress in language arts and math at their appropriate instructional pace and depth, expanding and compacting the curriculum as appropriate. Teachers and students need clarity on the critical learning targets to ensure that each student can move at their appropriate pace while ensuring that gaps in learning do not occur.
Rationale
Fulton began piloting a standards-based report card in 25 schools in 2007. The standards-based reporting did not fully transition to the implementation of standards-based grading in all schools for several reasons. A primary reason is that the district did not spend the time vertically aligning prioritized standards and developing clear learning targets.
Considerations
How to best leverage technology to do this work. In Fulton, the Learning and Teaching Department collaborated with the Information Technology Department to build a tool. This tool is something that Learning Architects collaborated on, and from doing so, built the components of our competency-based framework. This tool was built so that the prioritized standards and learning targets can be easily uploaded into future learning and assessment management systems.
This
toolkit was created through a partnership with Digital Promise and Education Elements.
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