New Hampshire Is Contemplating A New Schooling Model. Why The Odds Are Not In Their Favor
For Forbes. Call it proficiency based education or competency based learning or mastery learning, here it comes again.
The state of New Hampshire is contemplating a shift to competency based learning. As reported by Amanda Gokee for the Boston Glode, the shift is facing pushback from many educators.
The pushback is not surprising. It has only been five years since Maine gave up their own statewide CBL initiative (implemented there under the name proficiency-based learning).
Competency based learning offers some solutions to long-standing education issues, yet proponents have so far failed to solve some of the unique problems it raises.
Why competency based learning?
Public education has always measured out education in terms of time spent in a classroom (known both as Carnegie Units and seat time). The problem with this is obvious; if a student masters material in one month, why keep them sitting there for nine? If Pat and San take wildly different amounts of time to master the material, does it make sense to keep them in class the same amount of time?
In our education system, time in school is the constant, and learning is the variable. Why not, some critics suggest, flip that so that learning is the constant and time is the variable?
Competency based education, known by a variety of names, is based on that flipped model. Proficiency based, competency based, and way back in 1968, learning for mastery. Once a student demonstrates mastery of a particular skill or piece of knowledge, that student can move on. In place of traditional grades, student reports show a long list of specific competencies that they have (or have not yet) achieved.
Some versions even allow students to demonstrate mastery based purely on experience outside the four walls of the classroom. The most extreme versions envision a ledger of competencies stored on blockchain, a digital resume linked to the individual for life.
Much about CBL makes sense. And yet, there are some aspects with which all CBL systems struggle—not always successfully.
Defining mastery
There are two issues here. One is defining mastery itself. If the desired competency is sinking a basket from the foul line, what do we need to see to declare mastery. Sinking five shots out of five? Three out of five? Five successful baskets no matter how many tries it takes? Set the standard too low and you may be certifying mastery that isn’t really there. Set the bar too high and you begin to limit the number of students who can ever hope to succeed.
Assessing mastery of more complex tasks is more problematic. If the standard is to drive down the court past defenders to shoot a layup, do we assess that skill in its entirety, or break it down into components? Does mastery of the components guarantee mastery of the whole piece? How exactly do we determine that a student has mastered writing an insightful paper about a work of classic literature?