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What If We Measured Learning Through Skills Gained, Not Time Spent in the Classroom?

Edsurge

Texas State Technical College, which prioritizes training programs that set students up for well-paying careers, is in the process of shifting its programs to a competency-based model, meaning one based on students proving they have a set of skills, regardless of how much time they’ve spent getting to that level of proficiency.

Classroom 205
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How to do online learning well? A California district has some answers.

The Hechinger Report

The result was the adoption of “a learner centered, personalized, competency-based” approach that allows students to meet learning goals on their own terms, Rooney said. Related: Why a high-performing district is changing everything with competency-based learning. Training the teachers. Does it work?

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What Happens When Students Work at Their Own Pace

Digital Promise

For the 2014-15 school year, Piedmont Middle School, in rural northeast Alabama, reimagined how its students learn by letting them progress based on their mastery of skills and standards. Despite a full year of planning and training, teachers didn’t feel comfortable giving up so much control to students.

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Does the future of schooling look like Candy Land?

The Hechinger Report

State leaders from Utah to Michigan to North Carolina are getting more involved in figuring out how to support the expansion of personalized, competency-based learning, she said, although it’s too early to decipher how much of the stimulus money flowing to school districts will go toward these efforts. The response?

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New, MIT-based program proposes transforming physicists, engineers into teachers

The Hechinger Report

The “Great Dome” on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is hosting an experimental program to recruit physicists, engineers, chemists, linguists, biologists, neuroscientists and other experts and train them to be primary and secondary school teachers. Sign up for the Future of Learning newsletter.

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Transforming Physicists, Engineers into Teachers at New MIT Program

MindShift

And by putting other talents first, it’s also a closely watched reversal of the conventional approach to training them. “We This gives them experience with a process, known as competency-based learning, that a growing number of primary and secondary schools where they’ll eventually teach are beginning to adopt.

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What a blended learning classroom really looks like: An urban teacher’s reboot

The Hechinger Report

Student learner pathways are customized based on students’ strengths, weaknesses and goals; and learning experiences vary. Competency based learning allows students to increase ownership and responsibility in their learning and choice in their pacing. Students also have the ability to work at their own pace.