Sydney Schaef, Managing Director of reDesign, discusses the Measuring PCBL Toolkit. This powerful resource is a one-stop shop to help educators refine their practices and measure their impact on the journey towards making learning more personal for students.
Access the Measuring PCBL Toolkit here and learn more about the Profile of the SC Graduate Competencies on our website!
Q: What is this toolkit and who specifically is it for?
Sydney: Let me start by thanking the Office of Personalized Learning for the opportunity to create this toolkit. It's designed for practitioners, so if you're an educator working with young people, if you're an educational leader who's working in a school or a system that's trying to make learning more personalized for young people and more outcome-driven or competency-based, this is for you!
This toolkit is for you if you care about these two things: quality implementation of personalized, competency-based learning and continuous learning and improvement. If you love figuring out how well things are working, and not only improving practice at the individual level, but improving the model that you're implementing to support personalized competency-based learning (PCBL), then this is for you!
Many folks’ ideas and contributions helped shape the toolkit. So I also want to give a special thank-you to Melissa Slater and Vicky Kim, two of my colleagues who I had the opportunity to work with on this toolkit. I know we’ve had a chance to build other toolkits to support the work in South Carolina. Honestly, this is maybe the one I'm most excited about. I'm hoping that it meets a need in the field that I've seen: how do we measure personalized competency-based learning? We’ve done our very best thinking and work to bring clarity around the actual practices that define personalized, competency-based learning, and then define what are the outcomes that we hope flow from those practices. So this toolkit is designed to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is what we think it is and here is a practitioner-friendly set of tools and resources for implementing and studying the work.”
Q: There are so many tools, rubrics, and methods that people use to measure their effectiveness. What makes this particular toolkit different?
Sydney: Such a great question. One of the lenses we bring to our design work when we're building a resource for educators is to think about clarity for users and user-friendliness. Is it something I can pick up and put into practice right away? How complicated is it? How much background knowledge do I need? Is it ready to go? Is it something I can use? That I think is one of the things that make this resource really different. It’s something that's very usable and it bridges theory and practice in a way that I think makes it something people can pick up and use right away.
First of all is this idea about making things clear. We define in this toolkit a concrete set of instructional practices that we believe are essential to personalized, competency-based learning. There are lots of different models out there for personalized learning and competency-based learning, but we based it on our experience, the research that we've engaged in, and our knowledge of evidence-based practices. We really believe it's important to say, “These are the things that, regardless of your model, have to be present if we really and truly are going to personalize learning for young people and ensure that it's helping learners develop competencies that will be with them for their whole lives.” If we're going to design resources for adult practitioners, we have to put a stake in the ground and be clear about what this actually looks like. So we're transparent about what our assumptions are in the toolkit. I think it’s important.
For example, in a personalized competency-based model, the importance of using explicit skill and strategy instruction as part of your inputs for supporting learning is a non-negotiable for us. Quality feedback is another non-negotiable. So we've defined what those inputs are. I think the clarity and concreteness of those instructional practices is part of what makes this toolkit unique.
The second thing that makes it unique is we don't just name those inputs for studying PCBL. We also want to make sure we have a shared understanding of what quality looks like. What does quality feedback look like? How can we define that in a research-informed way?
To answer those questions, we have a distilled set of indicators that help everybody get clear on what it means to have quality feedback. So you can use those if you're the one providing feedback, or if you're coaching somebody who is providing feedback, or if you're at the school administrator or district level who is trying to bring clarity for a community of people around what quality feedback looks like. These indicators in the toolkit are called interventions. So if you're implementing this practice, what does a quality intervention look like? We define those in really clear, observable language.
Another thing that's really useful and distinctive about this toolkit is a definition of what are the outcomes we expect to see if these interventions are implemented. So if we take the idea of seeing growth in student competency, how do you measure that? We've got the tools built into this. Another category is thinking about the learner experience. If we implement these practices, what will shift about the learner experience? We’ve defined those, provided a few key categories for those, and then specific indicators for what that would look like. For example, if you want to know how supporting learners in an inquiry impacts their sense of agency in the classroom, we've got a way that you can study that in the classroom. Or if you’re asking, “If I do more explicit instruction, how does that support growth in these literacy skills or self-regulated learning skills?”, we've got the tools to support that.
In the spirit of making the toolkit accessible and actionable, we even went so far as to develop a set of questions that you can use if you're doing the data collection. So you don't have to create your own surveys, focus group prompts, or whatever it is that you're going to use for data collection. We've created a set of questions that are connected to these different outcomes. It gives you a great place to start: a road map and the tools to support you.
We give you the roadmap and there's a lot there you can choose from and where you want to focus. You don't have to do all the things. If you want to focus on quality feedback or supporting the skills involved in student-led inquiry, you can go right there and dig into the quality indicators and possible outcomes. So it allows for flexibility for those that are using the toolkit as well. Figure out where you want to start and you can just jump in from there.
Q: Highlighting a specific portion of the toolkit, Key Shifts in Thinking In a PCBL System, can you talk us through what those shifts might be for educators in this work?
Sydney: Absolutely. I'll start by saying at reDesign we are big believers in the idea that before you try to change something you really understand it. You take the time to pause and think about how this is put together. What are the underlying assumptions or beliefs and what makes this work well or not? So what we like to do with folks we partner up with is really step back and look at the education system through that lens. It's been working a certain way for a long time. Why is that and what are the ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that hold this current system together? In order for us to understand something, it really starts with awareness.
This particular section, Key Shifts in Thinking in a PCBL System, defines what the current dominant paradigm or thinking is in the education system and then what we think the shift in mindset needs to be in order for us to be able to implement a personalized learning system. It’s important to note that the description of what we think we're moving from was our best thinking about education at some point in time. For example, let’s look at readiness for learning being determined by age. At one point in time, it made sense to most of us that we would group kids by their age and we would advance them in our education system based on time. We would use the calendar year to move them from one grade to the next. Now we know that learning is not a function of time and that there are a lot of things that impact learning. In an effective education system that's focused on learning and growth, learners would advance based on their readiness. They wouldn't be pushed forward to learn something new or different that they weren't ready for. Their learning would be supported and they would advance when they were ready.
Another example of our best thinking a long time ago was that you can map out a linear progression and then kids will move evenly through that progression of learning. We now know that learning is absolutely nonlinear and it happens in fits and starts. Progress is uneven, so it doesn't make sense to penalize kids for where they are at one moment in time, knowing that a big leap in growth might be right around the corner.
Another former idea about learning is that intelligence is fixed. Now we know that intelligence is not fixed and that we can learn and grow our entire lives. Having that mindset is essential to an equitable learning system and one that can really personalize. If you're convinced that a learner is not able to grasp this concept or be successful or be able to achieve at high levels or be successful in a “gifted and talented” course or “honors” course, there's no way we can have an equitable learning system. So we included this in the toolkit because it felt like we would be remiss if we weren’t clear, transparent, and honest about the beliefs that we feel underlie the old system and the beliefs and research base that are essential to having awareness around and an understanding of a personalized competency-based learning system.
Want to hear more from Sydney about the toolkit? Listen to the rest of the conversation in our podcast episode here.
