Education Week - November 4, 2020 - 17

proceeding "very gingerly" as students have seemed
reluctant to offer feedback as openly as they would in
a regular classroom setting.

Room for Improvement
Could more-flexible policies accelerate the move
toward competency-based learning, even past the
pandemic? The jury's still out.
"New Hampshire has had a good set of rules and
laws for more than a decade, and we've made some
progress, but not near the amount of progress that
we would have wanted to," said Frank Edelblut, the
state's education commissioner. He said he hasn't
heard recently from fellow state education leaders
who might be curious about emulating the state's
competency-based education approaches.
He has heard, however, from district leaders in his
state who believe they'll have an easier time moving their schools toward competency-based learning because more people have now seen the value of
offering flexible options and rethinking antiquated
traditions.
Without state policy changes, Patrick from the Aurora Institute worries schools will struggle to "move
to have deeper or personalized learning with rich
performance assessments that are authentic while
the state is still planning to impose accountability"
using traditional assessment-based metrics. Schools
in the Exeter district, for instance, expect students
to be self-directed and creative in their work, but the
students still receive traditional letter grades on report cards and transcripts.
Still, there's already plenty of evidence that competency-based practices are taking hold. Thorn said all
of Exeter's teachers are collaborating more this year
out of necessity and conducting more meetings with
students one on one, because the workload during
virtual learning is heftier than usual. Teachers have
no choice but to develop workarounds on the spot
when individual students' technical glitches get in
the way of their learning. And the education field as
a whole has been confronted with glaring technology
access gaps that reinforce the need for differentiated
teaching approaches.
All of these efforts represent a more personalized
alternative to the more traditional model based
around lectures, standardized tests, and all students
in a class moving through content at the same pace.
Hadwen has no illusions that her school, or education at large, will fully embrace competency-based
education overnight, even during the pandemic. But
she has seen teachers unknowingly putting competency-based practices into action, as when they spent
the first days of the school year explaining expectations and objectives to students, rather than diving
right into content.
The concept of "competency-based learning can be
really complex," Hadwen said. "I think being remote
has made [understanding of the concept] a little bit
more clear." n

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PERSONALIZED LEARNING | 17

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Education Week - November 4, 2020

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