The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 249

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 249 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to take a close look at an approach to school called competency-based learning.

I was giving a presentation recently on differentiation, specifically about tiered assignments, a strategy that offers different tiers or levels of challenge, and students only work at the level that matches their current readiness. I’ve always been a fan of this strategy, but during that session, someone asked a question that I couldn’t answer: How do we grade these fairly? If one student is working at a very challenging level, and another is working at a much more basic level, and they both do well on the assignment, should they get the same grade? 

That question sent me down a rabbit hole. I posted on several different social media platforms about it, got a few answers that kind of sort of addressed it, and while I have some idea of how people handle this kind of thing equitably, I never quite got a satisfactory answer. The question itself highlighted the limitations of traditional grading, a system that has been shown to be problematic by so many people in education circles but still remains as the most common way schools manage and assess student learning.

Despite not getting that original question answered, the search did lead me to something called competency-based learning. Although I was vaguely familiar with it — I believed it was in the same ballpark as standards-based learning and mastery learning, which we’ve seen in the Modern Classrooms approach — I had never looked closely at it. So I’m doing that now. I invited three people onto the podcast who have a lot of experience and success with this approach:

Together, we explored how competency-based learning works, why it’s an incredibly impactful approach to learning, and how it plays out in both progressive and traditional schools. We also look at the resources and support the Mastery Transcript Consortium provides to teachers in this work. My goal here is to inspire all teachers — regardless of your setting — to think about how this kind of teaching might be possible in your classroom.

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Zearn for sponsoring this episode. Elementary and middle school teachers, what if you could give students more opportunities to learn and practice the same math concepts they’re learning with you? That’s exactly what you’ll get with Zearn Math. Zearn is a free online math learning program with content for every concept of K-8 math. Every day, kids in tens of thousands of classrooms across the U.S. log in to Zearn to complete guided, interactive lessons based on leading math pedagogy. Students learn and solve problems with on-screen teachers, who use visuals to make challenging grade-level math concepts intuitive. If kids get stuck, Zearn lessons adapt in real time to help them work through challenges and stay on track. Zearn is a nonprofit, which means every detail of their program has been designed, developed, and tested with a single goal in mind: helping every student succeed in grade-level math. Sign up for a free account today at Zearn.org.

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Now here’s my interview with Susie Bell, Beth Blankenship, and Heather Messer about competency-based teaching.

GONZALEZ: Let’s take turns meeting everybody who’s here. Susie, let’s start with you. Tell us who you are in the education world in regards to this topic.

BELL: I’m Susie Bell, and I am the executive director of programs, and I oversee the programming for the membership side of Mastery Transcript Consortium and the programming and implementation side for the Skills for the Future pilot, which is the partnership between ETS and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

GONZALEZ: Got it. Okay. Heather?

MESSER: Hi, Heather Messer. I am a teacher and an adviser at Clark Street Community School.

GONZALEZ: This is, what state are we in?

MESSER: This is in Middleton, Wisconsin.

GONZALEZ: And what’s the subject area again?

MESSER: I am a science teacher by training.

GONZALEZ: Science, okay. And is that what you’re teaching currently?

MESSER: I teach in an interdisciplinary school so yes, I generally teach science, but you will also find me teaching a lot of math and a lot of ELA-related things.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: Some health connections, a lot of local studies, social studies options. About the only thing that I don’t teach directly is PE and personal finance.

GONZALEZ: Okay, okay. Beth.

BLANKENSHIP: Hi. So I’m an English teacher at James Madison High School. At James Madison, I help coordinate a wings program, which is a 9th- to 12th-grade kind of portfolio program for students. And then students present their learning at the end of the year. They reflect on their growth. In addition to that, I help coordinate the Mastery Transcript learner records for students, and students then can choose Mastery Transcript learner records, instead of an in-school kind of portfolio. So I help coordinate both of those things and help students reflect on their learning. But my usual day job is an English teacher of AP language and AP seminar.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And James Madison, is that in Virginia?

BLANKENSHIP: It is, sorry. It’s in Vienna, Virginia.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And is it a public school?

BLANKENSHIP: It is.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BLANKENSHIP: It’s a comprehensive public school, pretty typical. Big, public high school of Fairfax County.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And I’m asking all these detailed questions because I want to make sure everybody listening doesn’t immediately hear certain things and go, “Oh, well that wouldn’t count for me because of the kind of school that I’m in.” And Heather, your school sounds like it’s a little bit more of a, not alternative, but a more progressively styled school?

MESSER: Sure. We are a public charter school.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: And our focus really is, you know, place-based instruction, personalized instruction. Our goal is to, you know, democratically engage our kids in making choices about how they move through school and to help them become better critical thinkers so that they’re ready for whatever’s coming next.

GONZALEZ: Got it.

MESSER: Can I add one thing?

GONZALEZ: Yes, absolutely.

MESSER: I just think it is really interesting, to brag a tiny bit, sorry. I worked in a main high school for the first five years of my education in Iowa, and what I saw there was a lot of grade-chasing, and a lot of energy spent on grade-chasing. And so then I moved to Middleton — my husband had a job switch — and I worked at the alternative school up here, and what I saw was that the main high school was connected to the alternative high school here. And the main high school required students to go there first and fail there first, to earn failing grades before they were eligible to apply to the alternative school. And so grades certainly were not a motivator for the kids that we were seeing in that space. And what those kids taught me, and the educators I was working with at the time, was that we needed a different model, something more centered around competencies, something centered around personal growth and really thinking about your own passions and thinking about growth over time. And that led to, with a lot of hard work, the growth of Clark Street Community School.

GONZALEZ: Okay. That’s an interesting story. Wow. Let me explain to you why I brought all of us together and where this even generated. This happened a couple of weeks ago. I’m actually working right now on my own online course to teach people how to plan lessons. And so, and it’s going to be real basic foundational stuff. And so one of the things that I’ve got in this course is teaching people how to differentiate. And so I was working on a tiered assignment that had three different levels of challenge in it, and I was actually presenting it to a group, and they said, how do you grade that then? If one group chooses the lowest level, the easiest level that has a simpler task, and another group chooses the highest level, which is a more complex task, how do you grade them fairly? And I said, I don’t know, and they said, why would the kids choose the harder level? And I again said I don’t know. I said I think a lot of this has always been presented to me as theoretical. And I’ve probably pulled it off once or twice with my own students, but I don’t really know the answer. And that sent me on a chase, which is kind of stupid because it’s not the first time I’ve ever asked myself that question, but I guess because I had to answer it for somebody else, I thought, you know, and what kept coming up as I was searching for answers was people saying, competency-based learning models. And then that led me to Mastery Transcript Consortium who has, as far as I’m understanding, has sort of really formalized and kind of made this a structural thing. So what I would like to do here is kind of, if we can, set aside the Mastery Transcript stuff for a little bit and just focus at first on teaching the people listening what exactly is competency-based learning, what does it look like, does it address that problem that I just brought up, and if anybody wanted to implement it in their own classroom regardless of their teaching settings, sort of what would that look like at a beginner level. Then in the second half of our conversation, I would love to talk about Mastery Transcript Consortium and what you all do and, you know, if people really want to dive into this, what would that look like? So which of you would like to go first in terms of just giving a real beginner’s explanation of what competency-based teaching looks like?

MESSER: I can try my hand at it, and we’ll see how it goes. I think about how it plays out in my classroom.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MESSER: And so I don’t think about it as competency-based learning. I think about it as everyday teaching. And so we’re really trying to engage students in learning, and so that requires us to think about how are kids intrinsically motivated. Engagement is really about internal motivation rather than doing it because of grades or because parents want you to or teachers expect you to, that sort of thing. And so we’re trying to make sure that we have opportunities for kids to dig into, you know, timely and relevant and really engaging things. I’m always trying to figure out, what’s the news telling me? What are the things that are doing in the local and the regional and global markets, that sort of thing to bring it into my classroom. So when I think about our school, bigger for a second, students graduate with portfolios showing their competency in reading, writing, numeracy, research, and effective communication. They earn a set of numbers, excuse me, a set number of standards in traditional areas like the math and the social studies, English, all of those areas that we would have in any traditional school. And students become familiar with those rubrics because they use them. Within the classrooms, the teachers create them and regularly update them with students and within professional development areas. The rubrics are used to assess the larger process outcomes called the artifacts that they make, that students make, across our program. Students are expected to practice with those rubrics by creating artifacts, and there’s a set number that they create every year. And then they curate a personal portfolio of their work that illustrates their readiness for graduation. And all of those artifacts are at this proficient standard or exemplary standard, which is an even higher standard that they can push themselves towards. Students share their progress with their parents and their advisers during spring and fall student conferences. So there’s a time when students are reflecting on their progress within the school and a time when they’re sharing that with their advisers and their parents on a regular basis. And I think that leads into our use of the mastery transcript, which maybe we’re going to talk about later.

GONZALEZ: Okay. I’m going to try to reflect back to you what I, what I just picked up from that. Instead of, so if we’ve got a traditional school model where you just have assignment, assignment, assignment, grade, grade, grade.

MESSER: Yep.

GONZALEZ: Maybe that teacher allows for redo’s and revise your grade or whatever, but it’s still very grade driven. Now those grades could also be based on a rubric. I know that as an English teacher myself, that was, most of my biggest assignments had rubrics with them. But you’re saying that with competency-based teaching, it’s, everything kind of comes from a rubric.

MESSER: Everything comes from a rubric and is looked at in progression over time. So if you’re not able to process learning at a super high level, you’re entry level right now, okay, so we want you to be looking at headings, we want you to be looking at what is the topic sentence, what is the main thing that you’re getting away from this. Maybe if you’re a more skilled student, we’re asking you to make connections in the regional area to the content and what you’re learning. So we’re looking at a progression of skills over time as opposed to did you get the right answer in a multiple-choice piece, you know, three times.

GONZALEZ: Like I’m sort of picturing it but I’m, because Susie just put a comment here in our chat saying that the rubric is school-wide versus task-specific.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah, yeah.

GONZALEZ: So what is the rubric, if it’s school-wide for any subject area?

MESSER: Yeah, so that may, in my case, and I’m sorry, I don’t mean to dominate Susie and Beth.

BLANKENSHIP: No, go for it.

MESSER: What that means for me is that our English-trained, our math-trained, our social studies-trained, our PE-trained people, all of them are assessing reading artifacts. All of them are assessing writing artifacts, research artifacts, effective comm, all of them with the same rubric across our building. So students see that progression of skills in lots of different content connections.

GONZALEZ: So the rubric identifies a whole collection of skills then.

MESSER: Mhmm.

BLANKENSHIP: Yes.

GONZALEZ: This is not just skills for one subject area.

BLANKENSHIP: Right.

GONZALEZ: It’s skills that could transfer from discipline to discipline.

MESSER: Sure. These are your core skills, yep.

BELL: That’s right.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: What we might call durable or transferable skills.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

BELL: So instead of it just being in science or in mathematics, it might be communication, collaboration, critical thinking, leadership, digital literacy, things that don’t necessarily have a subject. But the means by which students actually attain and master those competencies, those skills, is through the content.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So if I am a math teacher, and I just listened to everything that you just listed, I’m thinking, okay, where is algebra two? Right?

BELL: So it’s not that it goes away. You’re still assessing for the content, knowledge, and skill, but there is a broader set of skills that you’re typically also assessing for and those are, those are identified typically by your school community as what’s involved in your vision of the graduate or your portrait of a graduate. Something that is taking shape all across the country. Schools are adopting something called a portrait of a graduate or a vision of a graduate. Sometimes the adoption is where it stops. And we don’t actually operationalize what it looks like for students to build those skills because we’re not necessarily, explicitly including them in learning, in the learning goals of the day-to-day classroom, and we’re not assessing how students are developing those.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Let’s take this, let me take this back down to the classroom level. Let’s assume I am a teacher, and I would like to, and I’m in a traditional school that has report card grades and everything like that. And I want to start doing more competency-based teaching in my classroom. And let’s say I’m a history teacher. This example was actually a history class where students had to analyze, they were talking about how to solve problems as a citizen and different approaches that we can take. And so one level of this task had them just doing it at a very local level, and then they could sort of branch out if they wanted to go more advanced. If I’m trying to assess students on state standards for history in my state, how do I do that at a competency-based level? I’ve got my standards listed out already. So what would that look like if I’m only doing it in my classroom?

BLANKENSHIP: So.

GONZALEZ: This is Beth. This is kind of the situation that you’re sort of in, right?

BLANKENSHIP: I was going to say —

GONZALEZ: You’re in a school that hasn’t gone all the way through to the Mastery Transcript Consortium. So okay.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah. I actually prepared an example of a skill, I mean it’s an English skill, it’s communication, but I could change it up to be a history example. So step one, I’ll just answer your question directly instead of trying to go into the example I created.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: So step one is that you need to identify the essential or the transferable skill that is embedded within, you know, that that standard is working toward. So it sounds to me like that skill is analysis. And analysis is, of course, a cross-curricular or interdisciplinary skill. So the number one thing that teachers need to do together is identify those interdisciplinary portrait of a graduate, durable skills. And so I would identify with my teachers that the standard at its, kind of, they call it a power standard, at its power standard level would be analysis. And I know that throughout the course of a year, I am going to be supporting students in their ability to analyze multiple different times of history. And, of course, part of that analysis will take on making connections, right, considering cause and effect. But at its core, I know, and the other teachers know, that analysis is the outcome, the skill that the students will develop regardless of whatever unit we are in. So that’s thing one, and then as Heather was saying, then we develop a rubric together. What does it mean in this particular course to attain mastery, or whatever you call it, because there are different levels or exemplary or proficient, in analysis in this course. And teachers agree on that, and then share that rubric with their students, and it’s the same rubric. So a very simple level is a teacher — at the beginning of the year, we might be analyzing, what was the history example that you had? What was the unit?

GONZALEZ: Well this, this was really the students being able to demonstrate that they understand how to participate in a democracy as citizens so that they — ironic time to be talking about this, I know. But they understand how to protest, write to their legislators.

BLANKENSHIP: Right.

GONZALEZ: Vote, you know. Participate in all the ways that citizens get, and so in a way they’re supposed to be demonstrating that actual knowledge. This is not necessarily that larger transferable skill. So that’s where I’m getting stuck too because there’s a lot of science and social studies content that’s just, do they know the stuff? And I wonder how that transfers with competency-based stuff.

BLANKENSHIP: So I guess, though, the first step would be to analyze what does it mean to participate in a democracy? What is a democracy? What is participatory democracy? Might be then your very first kind of question and analytical task, right, and then they can read a variety of texts, and they can talk about it and what have you. And then they’ll, you know, it sounds like, Heather, right, for instance, your students would have a specific product, artifact that they would have that would demonstrate that they understand, the student understands all or many of the ways in which a human in a society is part of a democratic society participates in a democratic society. So it’s kind of scaffolding that skill as you go through the year and then you can change it. But the first, as a teacher team, we would figure out, well, this is their first kind of product and their first expression, demonstration, artifact of their growing knowledge of participatory democracies. And then next, right.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: And helping them kind of along the way, keep going with it. Or problem-solving, yes.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Because when I took a quick look at the list of skills, it was a lot of skills that you were talking about before the problem-solving, the collaboration.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: And that’s the piece that I started to wonder is, where is the, where is the knowledge piece of that? And there has been a movement in education in the last few years that we may be over-emphasizing skills and under-emphasizing just a common body of knowledge. And where is the rubric for that? And where is the assessment for that? Is that part of — I feel like I’m getting us kind of in the weeds of all this because what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to imagine a teacher who is in a very traditional setup right now teaching a knowledge base, and saying to them, this is this is a better way of doing it.

BELL: Yes. Right.

GONZALEZ: So I’m trying to get that part of it clear to them.

BLANKENSHIP: You can still demand knowledge, expressions and ways in which students express and show their knowledge. I mean, they, as a teacher, yeah.

BELL: It’s the use of the knowledge, right?

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

BELL: So I think that’s where we get hung up is that we have all these standards that we’re responsible for, and there’s no question, those are still very important.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: But if we stop at those standards and we’ll use the knowledge and skills that we’ve developed to actually create more understanding —

GONZALEZ: Yes.

BELL: — more opportunities for pathways of learning, then we’re, we’ve created a ceiling that’s not going to get us to participating in a participatory democracy, right?

GONZALEZ: Right, right. Yep.

BELL: So it’s understand, it’s being able to utilize — I had a conversation earlier this morning when the gentleman from COGx, who we’ve partnered with on occasion, and he said the same thing. You have to, you can’t critically think from nothing. You can’t think critically about nothing. You have to have a knowledge base. So the goal in our competency-based model is to ensure that students have efficient and — well, sufficient — background knowledge so that they can start to incorporate the different skills that they need in order to demonstrate that higher level and deeper level of learning. Because if I just know something for the sake of knowing it, then I’m good to maybe go on Jeopardy! but I’m not necessarily good to participate in our world.

GONZALEZ: Right. Okay. So let’s, let’s say that I’m teaching in a school that requires me to do grades, okay, and so I have created a rubric that really describes what competency, or mastery would look like for this particular task that we’re doing. Would that be — I mean, I know what you’re saying is that there’s a more general rubric that kind of covers a lot of things over the course of the year, but my students are still going to want to know, what do I have to do for this assignment, right? So at some point they need a description of what today’s task is or this month’s task or whatever it is. And then what if they don’t do all of those things? If I’ve got Student A and Student B and Student C and let’s call them by those names because that’s maybe the level in traditional school that they would have reached. Do we just give them those grades?

MESSER: I think then you get back to what am I assessing? What is the piece that is most important for me to be assessing as a student, as a classroom teacher? When I think about the way I set things up in my classroom, I am a core science teacher in my head because that’s where I was when I was trained as a science teacher almost 30 years ago. And I want kids to understand, how does Earth function as a series of spheres? How do those spheres interact with each other, and how are humans affecting the balance within those spheres? When I think about, I have a specific class called Global Zoo. And really what we look at is how are humans, and I’m impacting the rest of the Earth? And so I teach kids about ecosystems. We talk about interactions. We talk about how the different spheres interact. How does the atmosphere interfere with the biosphere and the hydrosphere and that sort of thing? And that’s the science content piece. And then I’m looking at specific assignments that are engaging with. Can you draw me the interactions of the spheres? Can you explain where a human is an agent in an event that happens between the different interactions? And I assess that, and I say, okay, what level of detail can you give me to show your understanding? That’s a content interaction. And then the piece that I’m looking at for competency is, okay, can you show me how you’re using that core information to understand research, and then you’re communicating the information that you have, you learned through your research and through your connections with live content experts that I require you to have. Can you generate a good question that gets you to the next piece of your learning? Can you create a presentation that you share out with other people? Can you participate in a roundtable discussion and explain your point of view? And can you rebut somebody else’s point of view in contrast to your own? Or can you add it and make something that’s more complicated?

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: And so I have both of those things that are happening in my classroom. I’m looking for the content measures to see, did you, you hit this content standard, and can you do those cross-cutting skills that are the competencies for me in my classroom?

GONZALEZ: Okay, so how do you, let’s stick with that example because that’s got knowledge and skills, and I’ve, okay. How do you differentiate or is that even a thing in a competency-based classroom?

MESSER: I have to differentiate.

GONZALEZ: Okay, can you describe that?

MESSER: We have to differentiate.

GONZALEZ: Yes.

MESSER: And so I have 9th through 12th graders walking in my classroom. We have combined classrooms. So first of all, I don’t have a single grade level, okay? Also, we have many kids that come in with an IEP or a 504 that needs to be supported. You know, that’s, that’s a fairly common thing in the world that I live in. And so I ask kids to do a Google Form. It’s one of the very first things that we do. It says, what is your comfort level with this task? For example, you know, developing a question on your own that’s a research question or reaching out to a content expert via an email. What is your connection with annotated bibliographies? Are you comfortable setting one up? Can you find a good source that’s credible or biased? Or do you know about bias? So I am asking kids to tell me their background, and I use that information to create mini lessons while they’re working on something else. I will create this mini lesson and explain, okay, so this is how we actually reach out to somebody. This is a template of an email that you can use. Here is something that if you don’t understand the Earth system interactions, here’s a little video that you can use. And let’s have a conversation about it to make sure that you are understanding afterwards. So I do a lot of interaction like that. I also ask kids to give peer feedback all the time to each other. In this particular class, to back up, we do the content information. We talk about pseudoscience. We talk about habits of science. And we talk about how can you develop good research questions. And then they give feedback on their questions to each other. We try to find sources, and we talk about credibility and bias. Then they have to talk about, well, do your sources look like they’re credible? How do you know? How do you know an expert’s an expert, right? If they are always point, you know, giving information as a human being, then they’re always biased. How do you know if it’s okay to use that information? And what do you do with the level of bias that’s in it? They talk to each other. Once they develop —

GONZALEZ: So that’s sort of filling in a lot of gaps through the mini lessons, through the peer feedback.

MESSER: Mhmm.

GONZALEZ: And ideally, that would take all this unevenness, and it would level everybody up to a similar level, but we know that that doesn’t happen necessarily. So what happens to the kids who are here, and I’m holding — to people can only hear that — I’ve got one hand way up high, and those who only reach up to about maybe the equivalent of like a 70 percent in terms of — what does that end up looking like on the paperwork or on their grade? Or do they just work twice as long on everything to get, you know. This big question about if we offer different assignments to different students based on their readiness, but then does that mean some kids just don’t do as much work and they all still get A’s? Is that, you know, what does it end up looking like?

MESSER: I think I’m going to ask somebody else to jump in here because I live in a competency-based world because I want to look for growth.

GONZALEZ: Right.

MESSER: I want to look for growth in whatever skill is in front of me. And I want to say, okay, Jenn, this is what you need to move forward, and that’s different than what Beth needs to move forward, and that’s different than Susie needs to move forward. But the goal is that everybody moves forward.

GONZALEZ: Keeps moving, yeah. And so in terms of your, Heather, your record-keeping, because you’re in a school that is doing competency-based learning across the board, your record keeping is simply showing everyone’s progress and where they are. It’s not, there’s no “you’re doing better than other people.” It’s just, everybody has a different profile basically.

MESSER: Right. Exactly. My goal is to say, okay, are you at an emerging level, a developing level, a proficient level, or an exemplary level for when I have to report out to you, to your peers, to your parents, right? So we can say, what’s the next level?

GONZALEZ: And this body of skills that — yes, okay. However, in a school like where Beth is —

BLANKENSHIP: Right.

GONZALEZ: You still have to produce some sort of letter grade or percentage or something. And so how does that work for you?

BLANKENSHIP: So one thing that we have is a rolling gradebook. I believe strongly that you can’t do competency-based education and mastery education without a rolling gradebook, which ostensibly is as the student improves in their demonstration and ability to complete the tasks and apply the skills in a novel context that they, their grade, let’s say from the beginning of the year on the same skill gets replaced. And if we go back to that analysis skill, right, at the beginning of the year, they may be at a C level, which in Mastery Transcript language would be at an emerging level.

GONZALEZ: Right.

BLANKENSHIP: It’s just a letter instead of a word.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: And then when it’s done well, and this is my experience for my students, that then usually by the middle of the year with feedback and support, that then they may move up to an approaching mastery, which is a B level.

GONZALEZ: Yep.

BLANKENSHIP: And then, right, the goal is for everybody at the end of the year, that is our goal to all be at a “mastery” level, which would be an A for that grade level, for that skill. And, you know, many to most of my students do get there in all of the skills. And I feel very confident in those letter grades.

GONZALEZ: And so you go back to September and their grade actually changes from the beginning of the year on the records? You go back and change the, yes?

BLANKENSHIP: Yes, in the gradebook, and it doesn’t change just at the end. So this first time we have an assessment on a skill, that analytical skill, it might be a C. The next time there is an assessment on the skill, if they earned a B, I go back right then, and I change the previous to a B.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BLANKENSHIP: And then the next time I might change that B, once they earn, let’s say, the A or the B plus or what have you, then that second letter grade gets changed to a B plus. And at the end of the year, I have my professional right to look at a student and look at the body of evidence. If there is a portfolio, there are artifacts, there is a body of evidence, and I can make a decision. However, I am not the most important person here. As Heather said, the student reflecting on their growth over the course of the year, and they have the autonomy, the agency and the ability — if I’ve done my job right — to reflect on their growth, and they can say, my artifact at the beginning of the year showed developing, and then this shows emerging, and then this shows mastery. And it’s a defense of learning when it’s done well or defense of mastery. And so it doesn’t really matter what almost I think at the end of the year, is my belief. What matters is what they are able to articulate about their growth over time. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we really need in society is —

GONZALEZ: Yes.

BLANKENSHIP: — an honest accounting of what we know and what we can do with what we know. And perhaps our democracy would be a little better if we had more of this happening.

MESSER: Hear, hear.

GONZALEZ: So I’m going to ask a question just because I think this would probably be a better question for later, but I’m afraid I’m going to forget it. And I think this is probably where a lot of people’s heads are starting to go as they listen to this.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: And this is a cynical, cynical question.

BLANKENSHIP: Of course.

GONZALEZ: But what is stopping kids? And I’m assuming the answer has something to do with the culture you create in your schools. But what is stopping kids from being like, oh, cool, I can phone it in for a while, then do a little more work, show some growth, and then just say, oh, I think I grew plenty, give me an A. Because that’s, again, people who are trying to game the system and also who see kids as trying to only game the system are going to assume that this is, you know, fantastic for kids who just want to sort of like skate through school and not actually do anything.

MESSER: You want to talk, Susie?

BELL: No, no, no. I want, I want you to talk.

MESSER: I think that the classroom atmosphere is 100 percent important to what you’re saying here. I also think that teachers know their students. And so if you come in and you’re phoning it in, I’m going to call you on that. We have classes that vary greatly in size. We do some team teaching here too. So sometimes I have 20, sometimes I have 40 in a class. And my job is to be going around and connecting with the kids in that class consistently.

GONZALEZ: Yep.

MESSER: And so if you are phoning it in, I’m going to call you on that every single day. And you’re not going to have the body of knowledge at the end or, excuse me, body of work at the end of the year for me to reflect back on that’s going to say, “Yeah, I think that you’ve earned that A.” I’m going to know that you should be working at a higher level very early on if you’re just phoning it in. Or we’re going to be having conversations with your support people to say, hey, what’s going on? I’m hearing conversations that are more sophisticated than the work that I’m seeing. So the support to engage the kid in an authentic way is going to kick in earlier. That’s my hope, at least, for that student.

GONZALEZ: Right.

BELL: If I can just add to that, because, you know, I was a, I was a school leader in a public school district back in 2013, 2014, when we started to really shift to competency-based education. That’s how I landed at Mastery Transcript Consortium. And one of the things we did initially, even though we didn’t change fully the grading system, we pulled out what you typically include in a traditional grade. We started to analyze, like, what goes into a grade? When you start to put behaviors into a grade, participation, all of those things, and then you start to pull them out, when you pull them out, you don’t get rid of them. You still keep them. And we charted habits of work as a separate entity to the, to the academic grade.

GONZALEZ: Okay. I was going to ask about that, yeah.

BELL: So the idea was you can’t phone it in, because we’re going to find that you’re phoning it in because you’re kind of falling on all these habits of work.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: Usually, a student that’s not making progress academically means they’re not putting the effort in, they’re not getting the homework done, they’re not getting the classwork done. Those are things that you could easily start to separate. When you, when you put the two together, that’s when the phone it in becomes, you know, a symptom of a larger problem. When you can separate them and really reflect on, yes, your academics is suffering because of this, or your academics is suffering because we need to, like, backfill some background knowledge that you just don’t have, because you have been phoning it in for so long.

GONZALEZ: Right, right.

BELL: Right? So those are the, I think that’s a critical piece of that too. And it’s the culture, but that’s a, that’s a quick way to change the culture. It’s to start removing those behavioral aspects of what you constitute and how you come up with a grade and actually reflecting on them differently in different spaces and calling them out, quite frankly, that these are the behaviors that are impacting your ability to grow.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

MESSER: That’s a strong point, Susie.

BLANKENSHIP: And I would say having, you know, graded in a very traditional model in a traditional high school, and now between competency-based education in a traditional high school, kids phoned it in back then, and they game the system in that system.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: And this system, I would say, is harder to game. Because the rubber hits the road. Do you have the skill? Can you apply it? And if you are doing this correctly, then the student is being asked to apply the skill in a novel circumstance, right? In a performance task.

MESSER: Yep.

BLANKENSHIP: And if they don’t have the skill, they don’t have the skill. And it also keeps me honest as a teacher, right? I can’t phone it in. I can’t give a multiple-choice test and say my students are succeeding.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: I, you know, my students, I need to demonstrate that my students can actually perform in these performance tasks without me standing over them. But kids can game the system no matter what, but I find that it’s much easier for them to game this traditional system than the CBE system.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. That’s a good, that’s a really good point that they, if they were going to be gaming it before, they would have been able to, yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: This probably would be a good time, because I did ask you both to come with an example of sort of, like, maybe the equivalent of an instructional unit, just so that we can see what does this actually look like in practice. So Heather, why don’t we start with you since you’re in a school that is already sort of fully doing competency-based education?

MESSER: Sure. I started to go in a little bit to my example already when I talked about that Global Zoo seminar.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MESSER: This umbrella question that I ask kids to think about is how are humans impacting the earth from an environmental biology point of view?

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: Students learn about, you know, what does it mean when we talk about environmental biology? What are the spheres? How do the interactions happen within the sphere? How are humans impacting that? How do different species impact things? So there’s some science pieces that are built into there. We also talk about what are the habits of scientists, you know, and particularly research scientists? And what is pseudoscience? This is something that I’ve learned that I have to bring into my classrooms recently because we’ve sort of lost our definition of science, and it’s pretty darn important that we get it back. And so we do some strong contrasting for that. And then we talk about what are good quality sources when we’re doing research. We think about credibility and bias. The larger performance task here that I’m looking for kids to be able to do is to participate in a roundtable discussion at the end of this that shows that they’re critical thinkers and they’re capable of developing and answering solid research questions and sharing that information.

GONZALEZ: Okay, so, and from what you all have said earlier too, it sounds like almost all competency-based instruction is built around performance assessments and not —

MESSER: For sure.

GONZALEZ: — and not a paper and pencil test where they’re just demonstrating straight up knowledge, but some kind of a performance assessment.

MESSER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: So for this unit of instruction, the final performance assessment is participation in a discussion.

MESSER: Yep.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: So students are participating in three rounds of research building up to that. They identify a personally relevant sub-question related to that bigger question of how are humans impacting the earth. They find strong sources and learn from them. They have to include at least one live content experts to learn from. And then they create presentations for each round where they share out their learning. And so what we find is that it’s pretty lovely to watch the kids, because they get so excited to hear each other’s presentations round after round, and they learn from each other. And at first, they’re really hesitant to ask questions because they’re high schoolers, and they don’t want to embarrass each other by asking a question that you know somebody can’t answer.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MESSER: So I model how do you say “I don’t know” or “I don’t have the information to answer that question yet.” And by the second round, they’re much more comfortable. They’re ready to answer questions from their peers, and they’re asked, they’re ready to ask tougher questions as an audience. They share their curiosity and what they’ve learned is that it’s okay to not know something, and it’s okay to ask a question you don’t have an answer to because we’re, you know, a comfortable communal learning space, and we’re responsible to each other as a learning community. Kids give feedback to each other regarding content and the ability to answer questions and the use of sources within the presentation.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm.

MESSER: And so the audience is involved in all aspects of it, along with the learner presenting their knowledge. And that gives really valuable feedback for the presenter while still growing the students in the audience their ability to recognize strong research and to evaluate valid conclusions. Are conclusions valid or not? Are they built on the research sources or not? During that third round, or after that third round, students get ready for the summative assessment. With that, I’m getting ready for the roundtable, sorry. The roundtable, for me, I usually put six or eight kids around the central table. More than that’s kind of hard to track for me.

GONZALEZ: Okay. That answers the question, because I’m thinking, what if I only get to talk once or twice in the whole class?

MESSER: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: So it’s a smaller group, okay.

MESSER: Yeah. So that’s, that’s harder.

GONZALEZ: Do you record them?

MESSER: Yes, I usually do record them, and I do listen to them, and I’m always astounded by how awesome they are. I lightly structure the rounds of the conversations. The first round is an introduction where kids explain their research process. They talk about their question generation and what they did to answer it and who they connected with, and maybe a major takeaway that they want to make sure everybody hears. Second and third rounds are usually, let’s just talk with each other, introduce your question and talk about what you learned, and then somebody is going to riff off of that. And it’s sharing of information in a way that’s really organic and really lovely. And then the last round, we pause. We do a pausing round and a reflection, five minutes. Say, “get your last best thought together,” is what I call it. And I say, okay, you’re going to take five minutes. You’re going to think about what didn’t you get to share in this space or what you still think everybody needs to hear from your really important quotes that you generated on your note sheet getting ready for this. And so then they do that last round. And then the audience during this whole time is evaluating some of their ELA skills, like using questions or citing sources and actually using their source to track an argument, or inviting people within, into the conversation. So what I find is that they’re really respectful. They’re really curious. They’re gracious with each other. And they consider how their individual topic informs the overall conclusions of the class regarding that umbrella question. And I think every single time I think our adults could learn so much from listening to these kids.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm. It sounds so lovely. And it just sounds like —

MESSER: It really is.

GONZALEZ: — really what you would imagine a great school would be doing.

MESSER: It’s so beautiful.

GONZALEZ: How long from start to finish is this unit?

MESSER: This is a nine-week course. We do a seminar.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: And so I spend about three weeks doing that content front loading where I’m really teaching the science and the pseudoscience and the habits of a researcher and modeling that for them. And then there’s about three weeks of let’s find our research and let’s do those rounds of it.

GONZALEZ: Yep.

MESSER: Well, it’s a little longer than this one. It’s actually about four, four and a half weeks. Where they find those rounds of research and they present them for each other. And then in the last week or so, we do these final round tables.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And I love that everybody else is sitting around listening also.

MESSER: You have a job. You have to be engaged in all parts of this.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MESSER: And, you know, I just emphasize that the goal for all students is always growth. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in having to meet content deadlines or some sort of, you know, other artificial marker of end of the quarter that’s progress in our classroom. And I know that some of these kids, when we’re going into, you were talking about differentiation earlier, I know that some of them are not going to be able to find as many sources as I consider the bar. Or I know that they’re not all going to have the ability to process every one of these hard research papers that they choose, you know, as a live, as a source.

GONZALEZ: Right.

MESSER: So what I’m always looking for is what’s the next growth target for this kid in relation to the performance task? What is the next thing that they need to do to hit the next level? And I’m constantly moving around the classroom, checking in with every kid to try to make sure that they have that identified growth area and that they’re moving towards it. That’s what I see as my work in the classroom. The kids are working really hard as researchers, trying to move themselves forward. I’m pushing for the next level. And that, I think, is like the superpower of competency-based learning, because I’m focusing on the next growth target and pushing the kid for that while they do the work to get it.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. And it sounds like in terms of the paper load for a teacher, it’s way, way less, because you’re not constantly collecting handouts and worksheets and grading them and entering them in. You’re doing more like observation and conferencing. Yes? Beth is going, eh, not so much because you’re an English teacher.

MESSER: I’m going to say maybe.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: Because I take a lot of data related to what the kids are doing.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: And I try — because I’m balancing science content standards, you know, with their research skills of, okay, thinking about the question and thinking about this notes evaluation —

GONZALEZ: Right.

MESSER: — and thinking about the bibliography and thinking about, you know, blah, blah, blah.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: So I have a lot of, I would say, formative assessment that I’m doing a lot of, lot of, okay, at this point in time, where are you at? And they get that from their peers too.

GONZALEZ: Right. Are you taking notes? Are you writing this down somewhere?

MESSER: Yes. I’m taking notes. I have spreadsheets usually.

BLANKENSHIP: Yes.

MESSER: These are the 12 tasks that I’m looking for in research across this nine weeks. And did you meet this? Did you meet this? Did you meet this?

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: So there’s a lot of, okay, these four sorts of formative assessment led to my assessment of your research skill, analyzing notes, you know. So maybe three of them were developing. The last one’s proficient. I’m going to say you’re developing proficient. I’m going to mark you in between those two —

GONZALEZ: Right.

MESSER: — and here’s my notes why.

GONZALEZ: Do you guys do training? There’s so, I’ve got still, I’ve got 900 other questions, so I know, I can already see we’re at 47 minutes.

MESSER: We do. We do invite people to come visit us, and I would be happy to talk with you.

GONZALEZ: Because I’m trying now to, now I’ve got all these other questions of, like, what are you writing down and where are you doing it? And you’ve got the front loading of content. Are you keeping track somewhere of like, are you testing that knowledge somewhere to figure out if students are getting it? How are you determining that?

MESSER: That’s the work of a Clark Street teacher for me right there.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So you get to the end. What happened, let’s you, let’s say you’re at the end of these nine weeks, and here’s what I know as an English teacher. There are generally never surprises by the end of a performance assessment. I’ve usually seen a kid’s draft enough times to know whether they’re on track.

MESSER: Absolutely.

GONZALEZ: So if you’ve got somebody near the end who hasn’t quite hit the mastery of all of the things that you’re looking for, what happens after that nine weeks? Is it just, it just goes down on their transcript as, like, you’re not quite there yet, and that’s something you need to keep working on?

MESSER: For me, I would say that if it’s something like a roundtable, I can’t ask you to redo a roundtable. That live performance piece, I can’t ask you to redo.

GONZALEZ: Right. Yeah.

MESSER: But if we’re talking about the research piece, and sometimes maybe a live expert doesn’t get back to you before our deadline, and I’ll say, okay, you could still increase your knowledge, and you could still increase your research summary. That’s a step before they go into their roundtable. So you could improve your knowledge within that research summary. So let’s say that you still do that interview, and you still take those notes, and you update your annotated bibliography, and then you update your research summary. I’ll reassess your research artifact.

GONZALEZ: Okay, okay.

MESSER: And then you have moved from developing to proficient because you’ve taken that extra step.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MESSER: I’ll do that within the next quarter or two. We are on a quarter-based system.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MESSER: So I’m willing to do that. If you ask me next year, that’s a little harder.

GONZALEZ: Right, okay. So that’s sort of similar to that rolling gradebook that Beth was talking about where you can kind of go back and, okay.

BELL: Yes.

MESSER: Yes.

BLANKENSHIP: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: Let’s do Beth’s example. I’ll try not to ask quite as many questions.

BLANKENSHIP: Okay. It’s still, interestingly enough, going to be slightly similar to Heather’s example because, again, we are focusing on these interdisciplinary outcomes of skills, which would be research, analysis, writing, and presentation, and communication. So, you know, we’re reading Hamlet. And so in this example, all of those are some outcomes where students will develop their skill in, grow in their skills of presentation, research, writing, and analysis. And so analysis is clearly of the text, Hamlet. And so what we did with this Hamlet unit was students were making connections to psychological, to psychology, and considering putting forth a question before they even started reading, and just with background knowledge of the main characters, a question about, you know, what’s going on with Hamlet, what might be going on, quote-unquote. We start with a fairly basic question with Ophelia, what might be going on with Gertrude, and so that they have a character that they’re kind of going to track and look at their behaviors. And we do a little bit of what does it mean to psychoanalyze, we do psychoanalytical, what is psychoanalytical theory? So they’re learning a little bit about psychology, what does it mean to not diagnose, to diagnose, etc. And so I actually bring in a few psychologists and have psychologists talk to them. So then they, as they are reading the text and they’re analyzing and seeing what the characters are saying and doing both by reading Hamlet closely, but also watching the movie and comparing, they’re looking at actions, behaviors, things that the student or things that the characters are saying. So then they come together as a group, let’s say four kids looking closely at Ophelia, four students looking closely at Hamlet, four looking closely at Gertrude, four at Claudius or what have you, and that they then come up with a group question that is a little bit more analytical, a research question. For instance, is it possible that Hamlet is suffering from depression? So then they need to do some research on depression. And then as they keep reading and watching the text and watching the play, that they are capturing information. So if you want to ask about, are students understanding what’s happening in Hamlet, right?

GONZALEZ: Right.

BLANKENSHIP: Because that is “my standard” and that is content.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Right.

BLANKENSHIP: Yes. My students very much are getting the knowledge and understanding the plot of Hamlet, but they are doing it through looking closely at one character.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: And then additionally, they’re building their research skills because they’ll have to research whatever possible issue that they think. And so we have a list of them that the psychologists have given them of possibly, let’s say, a narcissistic disorder or depression, anxiety. So they do research on it, which of course, teenagers love to learn about psychology.

GONZALEZ: So interesting, yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: They loved that aspect.

MESSER: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: So they’re researching, they’re working collaboratively, so they’re also building collaboration skills with their partners. Then they bring their research together. The text is research, of course, as they analyze the text, and they analyze the play. And then at the end of it, they bring their, all of their notes from the text and all of their research that they’ve done, both on the disorder, as well as all their research from watching the play, reading the play, and they present their answer, quote-unquote, to the rest of the class. And they create a very formal presentation, they practice it, they get feedback on their presentation, and they also present. We invite in other teachers, other classes. The psychology class came in. So again, what’s the check for knowledge? I don’t have to be the check always of knowledge. The world is the check of knowledge. And so they can get feedback from, for instance, like Heather has subject matter experts.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: And actually, in this instance, we had three APA psychologists also watch their presentations and give them feedback on their research from APA psychologists. And that was, you know, we sent their presentations to them, and those APA psychologists also kind of kicked off and did, you know, like a project inciting event.

MESSER: That’s awesome.

GONZALEZ: That’s really cool. Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: So that would be my Hamlet example. And so, and this doesn’t happen at the end of the year of, like, oh, you finally made it.

GONZALEZ: Right.

BLANKENSHIP: No, this is like a December presentation.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BLANKENSHIP: They did fairly well. They did great in so many ways, but they still have room to grow, right? And this was a huge thing, and it took, what, 12 weeks or nine weeks.

GONZALEZ: Right.

BLANKENSHIP: But we got another 16 weeks to go, and we can still grow.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BLANKENSHIP: And so I think that’s the other thing. There is no ceiling, right, with mastery or competency-based education. And it’s constantly kind of, as Heather was saying, pushing and continuing to apply those skills, and then being proud of that growth, is what I see.

GONZALEZ: Right. So with certain students who just happen to really excel in certain competencies, they are going to be continued to push to grow and grow and grow. It’s not just like, well, I got the A and I’m good.

BLANKENSHIP: Yes, and I was going to say that earlier when Susie was chatting, that the other thing I see, especially in my district and school, it’s, you know, a high stress. Every kid is supposed to, quote-unquote, get an A. Every kid’s, quote-unquote, supposed to go to college. But what I love about competency-based education is that students can articulate, you know, I’m really great at this, and I love doing this, and this is where my skills are exceptionally strong. And then they can honestly express, you know, I really like analysis, however, I’m not as analytical in these ways, and it’s okay. They’re still proficient.

GONZALEZ: Right.

BLANKENSHIP: But some of the pressure and the stress to be perfect and to be excellent all the time is kind of taken off.

GONZALEZ: Yes.

BLANKENSHIP: So I think it also is a mental health and a social, emotional, wonderful thing about competency-based education that I’ve experienced.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, that’s a great point. And it also, we’re helping to shape their identities as, you know, I can be competent in a lot of things, but really excel in some of these areas that are really special to me and really make the most use of my gifts.

BLANKENSHIP: Mhmm.

BELL: Right.

GONZALEZ: At this point in the conversation, Beth and Heather had to go, so this last part is just me and Susie Bell, talking about the Mastery Transcript Consortium.

GONZALEZ: Why don’t we just start by explaining what exactly is the Mastery Transcript Consortium? What is that as an organization? What do you do?

BELL: Well, we exist to really bring competency-based learning and innovative learning models and student stories to life. That’s really what it boils down to.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: The two scenarios we heard, from Beth and Heather, really articulate why a traditional transcript or a traditional grading system does not capture what schools are actually doing to really transform learning and teaching.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: And so in order to understand the context of what, of how that’s shifting, and in order to understand what students are actually capable of, we, that courses and grades and GPA transcript doesn’t cut it anymore. Students are building skills that will last them a lifetime. They’re building the ability to navigate their lives in ways that — they’re empowered. They’re empowered to actually pursue their passions instead of just gaming the system, as we talked about.

GONZALEZ: Yes.

BELL: In ways that are really damaging to both their own mental health and certainly to their future goals, because then they have this sense of this is the way the world works. Well, this is not the way the world works.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: We want students who have skills to be able to contribute to a society that is much far advanced to where we are now. That’s our goal in life, right, is to create a world that’s better than what we have right now.

GONZALEZ: Right, yeah.

BELL: So we, our tools, our digital solutions as well as our support that we provide to schools, both in human resources and in thought leadership are really what the Mastery Transcript Consortium exists to support. We have a network of schools. That’s why we’re a consortium. And so we started about eight years ago with some schools who were really just frustrated with the way that traditional grading and transcription left kids with this feeling of, you know, just being untethered and just playing a game.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: And so, and we knew that in order to change the outward system that is expecting a traditional graded transcript, we needed to do it with others. We needed to band together a network that really could shift both the college admissions landscape and what they’re looking for as well as the employment landscape.

GONZALEZ: Yes. And that’s probably a question that comes up all the time with this is, fine, we can get rid of traditional grading, but what about colleges? So you actually have, what do you call them? Sending schools? And you’ve got a relationship with colleges now where they’re, like, they’re recognizing what this transcript. So the Mastery Transcript Consortium actually has a transcript. That’s where the “mastery transcript” comes from. You have formalized and created a standardized structure that goes across all of the schools in your consortium of this one transcript that evaluates and marks all of these skills. Yes? Does that sound about right?

BELL: Sort of.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: I’ll kind of do the quick version. But our mastery transcript is a standard format, but it’s a customizable interface.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: In other words, students can upload whatever, you know, artifacts they want to the competencies that the school determines.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: Mastery Transcript Consortium does not determine which competencies a school is measuring.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: It’s the school or the district or the state, in some cases, that actually have the competency frameworks that are typically called, I referenced it before, but portraits of a graduate or vision of a graduate or profile of a learner or portrait of a learner. All of those usually are made up of, say, six to eight larger skill areas that then have individual competencies listed underneath those that have descriptions and typically go one level deeper, they have rubrics that the school uses on a school wide basis to assess, you know, and verify how students are measuring those skills. So any piece of evidence that a student brings forward, the school would use those school-wide rubrics to make determinations as to where that falls on the progression.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So you have sort of a library of competencies that every school can just school from and then, is that —

BELL: They either, most of them come to us with them already defined.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: Or we have, because of the way that our system is set up, our platform allows for schools to publish their competency frameworks so that other schools can use them.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So this is part of the partnership between schools is that, okay.

BELL: That’s right. Having access to a quicker way to identify —

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: — what your skills can be. And I will say as a former superintendent, assistant superintendent who really supported this work in one of my districts, to take a year and a half to figure out, wordsmith a set of competencies —

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: — is a long time to kind of get your ducks in a row when really you can start with some other models in place and then kind of build from there.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Got it.

BELL: So yes, we support schools whether they have a portrait of a graduate that’s defined by their state or defined by their district or that they’ve, you know, grown organically in their community. And there are so many different ways that communities have approached that.

GONZALEZ: And this, I’ve heard this expression before in other conversations, and you’ve used it here. So for anybody that doesn’t understand, the portrait of a graduate, is that the defined profile of what you need to, like, would that be the equivalent of, here are the required courses to get a high school diploma in this traditional school?

BELL: Yes. Yes.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: The portrait of a graduate typically is the competency framework that that school has determined. So they’re the broader goals of, like, the education system for that community.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: And these have come about because again, while we’re really interested in making sure that students have the content knowledge necessary to be understanding of the world around them, they also have to use that content knowledge in —

GONZALEZ: Yes.

BELL: — new and novel ways and ways that actually expand what they’re capable of doing through the creation of things like durable skills that typically appear in a portrait of a graduate.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So your consortium, are there, if a teacher is interested in learning more about this, they can, I’m assuming they can go to your website.

BELL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Are there any schools that are sort of wide open in terms of transparency? Here’s how we do things. These are interest, where somebody could really almost peek behind the walls to see how they’re doing things?

BELL: Absolutely.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: If there’s anything that this work has taught me, it’s that there are so many people out there who want to share what they’re doing so that we can create these types of environments like the one that Heather was describing and the one, and the experience that Beth was describing. They want to be, this to be replicated in other places.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: Because what they’re seeing on the faces of their students is that meaning is coming back into learning.

GONZALEZ: Yes.

BELL: That it’s not about the grade at the end of the day. It’s really about, this is about me as a student. And I go back to the description of competency-based learning, the definition that the Aurora Institute has promoted. And the first one is that students are empowered daily to make decisions about their learning. And that’s at the core of this, and what’s also at the core though is that educators are also empowered to do the deep work that they were trained to do and have the skills and talent to do. There is an art and a science to teaching.

GONZALEZ: Yes.

BELL: And it is so critical that we stop thinking that only, like, this is the only way to teach. Let’s harness the real power and creativity and opportunity we have with a talented teaching force to create new ways to really engage students and so that we keep them engaged, we keep them learning, and we kind of let them soar —

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.

BELL: — throughout their lives, telling their stories along the way.

GONZALEZ: So recent news from the Mastery Transcript Consortium world.

BELL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Is that you have been acquired by ETS, Educational Testing Services?

BELL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: Educational Testing Service, yes.

GONZALEZ: And every time I’ve ever heard of ETS it’s in connection with some sort of a standardized test.

BELL: Right.

GONZALEZ: And so many people who are sort of against the test-driven culture —

BELL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: — that we have in our schools do not see ETS as any kind of groundbreaking progressive organization. So when I heard that they had acquired you guys, I thought, we should talk about this, and why is this a good thing, why, why. Why the acquisition and is this good news for, for the consortium?

BELL: Yes. It’s, it’s actually great news for the consortium, and this is a question we get all the time, as a matter of fact. You know, this very small startup that wants to change the world and really isn’t interested in the paper and pencil test, but really focusing on performance assessments, multiple ways that students can capture evidence and share it, right? We are thrilled to be part of ETS. Mastery Transcript Consortium was acquired at a time that ETS has actually partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. And that partnership is resulting in a project called Skills for the Future.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: Skills for the Future is very much aligned to the work that Mastery Transcript Consortium has done. The research arm at ETS over the last couple of years has done extensive work around understanding the role of durable skills in students’ skill development, their ability to actually, the skills to actually predict outcomes of success for students. And those durable skills, if harnessed in the right way, can really be game changers for so many children, especially those who maybe don’t have access to upward mobility as others might. And so if we think about skills for the future, what we’re really trying to do is harness the best of what Mastery Transcript Consortium has brought to the table, which is this ability to capture evidence from different spaces, from all sorts of opportunities and experiences that students have had. And then couple that with new and novel assessments that are technology and AI-enabled to give students opportunities to both practice those skills, I’m just thinking back to something Heather said where you had to record, you know, she had to have individual conversations with students. There are capabilities in some of these practice experiences that we’ve developed, that ETS has developed, that actually guarantee that every student has a similar experience, that they get feedback directly from an AI avatar on how they’ve contributed to a story and go on all of these different experiences. So there’s so much there that will help support competency-based learning and also help support educators really understanding how their students are — through that body of work and through those skills practice experiences — how they are progressing in skills-based growth. And so that’s, I think, what’s really exciting about this. The Carnegie Foundation is wanting to get rid of the Carnegie unit as the measure of learning.

GONZALEZ: Wow.

BELL: And they were the ones who created it, right?

GONZALEZ: Okay, yeah.

BELL: Tim Knowles is on that mission, and the rest of the very talented team at Carnegie. And then ETS, under the direction of the CEO, Amit Sevak, as well as our managing director Laura Slover are really trying to push this movement forward so that we can create this new and really, I guess I’m trying to think of the word, but it’s really transformational approach to changing both of these two institutions and then changing how we support learners and building skills.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. You said a name, but the first name cut out. Somebody Knowles is on a mission?

BELL: Timothy Knowles —

GONZALEZ: Timothy Knowles.

BELL: — the president and CEO, I think it’s called president and CEO, of Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

GONZALEZ: Okay, okay. Since you said the name, I wanted to make sure it actually made it into this.

BELL: Yes, yes. Thank you.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: And yeah, so it’s been, it’s been quite a journey, and we’re excited. So this new, the Skills for the Future is now in a pilot mode in five states across the country in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Nevada, and Indiana.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: And in all of those states right now, high schools are piloting the tools and they’re also piloting the evidence capture experience.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: And they aren’t necessarily Mastery Transcript Consortium schools that are doing this. These are schools that signed on with this partnership to do that. So Mastery Transcript Consortium, we’re fortunate. We get to support this project and continue our mission to really support all of the sending schools that have used our tools and are, and we just continue to expand that to other schools as well.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. So if a school wanted to become part of your consortium, what does that process look like? What do they do?

BELL: They simply have to reach out to us. Someone on our — our account executive will meet with them and talk them through what the opportunities are to get involved. We run on a membership experience, so it’s an annual membership that schools can get involved with. They can start with as few students as they want to or build it up to an entire class or school. It’s really up to their own individual needs. So we do a lot of support with schools to figure out what’s the best way to implement. Our goal is at the end of the day is yes, we have a platform. It’s a digital platform. It’s a digital tool. What often ends up happening, and I’ve been on the receiving end of this, is that the tool drives how you do business. We want the tool to fit with their needs. And so we’ve really created flexible ways that it can be approached and implemented at their schools. We have three tools, the mastery transcript. We have a, if you’re not ready to get rid of grades, we have a learner record which still elevates that competency framework but allows you to maintain a traditional transcript.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: And then we have a progress tracker, so that growth tracker that you can use over time more frequently that really is that full portfolio of the work that was submitted by the student over time that they curate themselves and then the teachers can keep track of.

GONZALEZ: Do you offer any kind of professional development or webinar, something for schools that are just kind of like, “I want to learn more about this.” Do you have anything like that?

BELL: Absolutely.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: We do host them every once in a while. We also host usually an annual conference, an in-person conference for people to learn more as well. But yes, we don’t have anything currently scheduled, but we probably will sometime in May.

GONZALEZ: I think you’re going to get a lot of requests pretty soon.

BELL: I also wanted to just mention because we had, I had touched on the college piece before. We just surpassed 650 colleges across the country who have accepted a student with a mastery transcript or a learning record, but mostly a mastery transcript because that’s what’s been out in the atmosphere for a while.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. That’s good to know. And you’re seeing that number sort of grow a little bit over time?

BELL: Yes, we are. Every year we’re seeing that number grow. And we have, we have a dedicated staff member whose sole focus is on really supporting higher education to understand how to read our records, how they need to interpret the different pieces of work that are posted.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BELL: But really how to understand that each student’s unique individual story of learning.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. That’s a really important piece of this puzzle is getting higher ed on board.

BELL: It is.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Susie, thank you so much. This, this, you’ve spent a lot of time with me. If people want to learn more, where should they start online?

BELL: Mastery.org. That’s the, that’s our URL.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: And you can sign up right there to get more information. You can also find me and reach out to me as well. I’m listed there.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

BELL: Happy to support.

GONZALEZ: Thank you so much.

BELL: Okay. Thank you so much.

For a full transcript of this conversation or to learn more about the Mastery Transcript Consortium, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 249. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.