Seminole County Public Schools – Defining Learning Objectives with Partners

We are designing a competency-based high school elective that will launch at the start of the 17-18 school year followed by a competency-based education (CBE) high school program that will launch for the 18-19 school year. We have spent time this past year collecting student, school, and community input and we are now moving into the design phase. To this end, we are beginning work on defining competencies and developing frameworks. The competencies for the elective will be based on our ePathways Skills for Future Ready Graduates (see artifacts folder). The subject-area graduation competencies will be grounded in Florida and national standards. We are currently modeling our CBE development process after the models and protocols developed by Great Schools Partnership. We are using Maine’s content-area standards as a foundation to build from, and we are using the frameworks from The National Center for Innovation in Education and Maine’s Guiding Principles as exemplars for skill-based models (see artifacts folder). Our scales for assessment will be based on the Dreyfus model.

Dr. Griffin believes that our graduates need a diploma that means something by providing students with authentic learning experiences with an emphasis on student choice and personalized pathways. Our ePathways department was established to provide students with a broad understanding of careers and enough exploration of specific interests to have a clear plan for their future. As part of our CBE program, we are developing graduation competencies aligned to our ePathways Skills for Future Ready Graduates (see link below). These include problem solving, engaged citizenship, collaboration, and perseverance. According to the model developed by the Great Schools Partnership, these will be our cross-cutting proficiencies.

Developing our graduation learning objectives will help us 1) successfully launch a pilot CBE program beginning next school year; and 2) define our organizational priorities for what graduates truly need to know and be able to do. These learning objectives will allow us to effectively build out the plays in curriculum and instruction, support, and staffing.

1. Excitement from teachers and curriculum specialists.
2. Use of protocols from Great Schools Partnership helping us to quickly get people started on effective design.

We will need to devote some of our already overworked teachers who develop curriculum in each subject area to this task as well. We cannot divert resources away from existing schools if it will affect teaching and learning negatively. Teachers participating in our pilot program may work additional hours to help build the framework.

Expertise needed: we would need teachers and district personnel for content-area expertise as well as business and community partners for knowing what skills they want from students. Doing this work from scratch would be terrible, so examples and protocols from national organizations and districts that have already developed models helps tremendously. This is because this type of learning is such an enormous change, we are concerned about providing expert coaching and professional development for the teachers implementing this model for the first time.

Time investment: twice-per-month, a CBE team of district curriculum staff and teachers will meet to move through a series of tightly-defined protocols to develop the curriculum. We are starting with high school then working backwards. Difficult to have teachers participate because of the need to schedule after school hours, which is why we are meeting in the evenings two times per month.

Systems to support CBE: we need to find a grading, assessment, and tracking system that was designed to this style of learning. Currently, we are looking into LiFT.

• ePathways Future Ready Skills Model
• Sample framework of essential skills and dispositions

Please contact Walt Griffin (walt_griffin@scps.k12.fl.us), Anna-Marie Cote (anna-marie_cote@scps.k12.fl.us), Tim Harper (tim_harper@scps.k12.fl.us), Derek Jensen (Derek_jensen@scps.k12.fl.us)