FOOD FOR THOUGHT + DISCUSSION
Translating CBE Vision into Learning Design
What if your Portrait of a Graduate could shape every unit, lesson, and conversation you’re building? Check out one of our most requested resources, The Teacher’s First Steps Guide, created in partnership with schools in South Carolina.
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Unpack the vision.
Start with small-group conversations about your graduate profile – where are you aligned? What feels fuzzy?
Connect to practice.
Use Future9 or your own framework to translate vision into observable skills.
Prototype with purpose.
Invite teachers to refine a task or lesson using one of the guide’s steps
Addendum on 4/21/25:
A Close Look at Competency-Based Learning — from cultofpedagogy.com by Jennifer Gonzalez
And 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:
- Susie Bell, Executive Director of Programs at the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), an organization that supports schools in implementing competency-based learning.
- Heather Messer, a teacher and advisor at a Wisconsin school where competency-based learning is a school-wide practice.
- Beth Blankenship, an English teacher who has figured out how to use competency-based learning at her Virginia high school, a school that still uses traditional grading.