Competency Education Supports Both Traditional and CTE Learning
by Brian Stack • • 0 Comments
Amanda is a typical high school student who loves spending time with her friends, participating in a variety of clubs and activities, and doing well in school. Since a very young age, she has wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become an emergency room nurse. My school is preparing her for that demanding career with a competency-based model that has been designed to help her master a series of academic competencies, academic behaviors, and college and career-ready skills. Our competency-based model engages Amanda in her learning in ways that traditional high school models never could.Five years ago, the administrative team in my school district and I began suggesting that our school make the move to a competency-based grading and reporting system. We knew that was going to be a monumental shift for some of our elementary and secondary teachers, but that it wouldn’t be such a bold move for others. The career and technical education (CTE) teachers and administrators that work at our regional CTE center, for example, applauded our efforts to move the school district to the model that they had always used to define their work.
In the world of CTE, the idea of holding students accountable for their learning and assessing them on their mastery of course competencies is not a new concept. They have been doing this long before the rest of us in public education started calling it competency education. They had to because in most CTE programs, performance and the product are