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      This chapter discusses four principles for competency-based education that are universally helpful for maximizing student learning and guiding all students to reach their potential. It then offers detailed guidance to help your team develop this aspect of your vision for your classrooms, school, and district. While this core idea focuses on competency-based education, please keep in mind that the remaining five core ideas are essential and interdependent aspects of the PCBE paradigm of education.

      We do not offer these principles and guidelines as a blueprint for what you should do. Rather, we offer them to assist your team as you engage in rich discussions and collaborations to design an ideal PCBE system in your unique context. For guidance on forming your team, see steps 1.2 and 2.1 in chapter 10 (page 189) for an independent school or steps 1.2 and 2 in chapter 9 (page 159) for a school or schools in a district.

Principles for Competency-Based Education

      For an education system to be focused primarily on learning (rather than sorting), student progress must be based on learning (not time). This requires learning targets to be clearly established, student assessment to measure what each student has actually learned, and student records to indicate what each student has learned, rather than comparing students to other students. Thus, competency-based education is a four-legged stool. The four legs are the four principles within this core idea.

Principle A: Competency-based student progress

      Principle B: Competency-based student assessment

      Principle C: Competency-based learning targets

      Principle D: Competency-based student records

      If any one of these legs is missing, the stool will fall. So, what should each of these legs be like? The following is an introduction to each of these principles.

       Principle A: Competency-Based Student Progress

      In a competency-based system, students move on when they have learned and can demonstrate the understandings or skills. If it’s important enough to teach, it is important enough to make sure students learn it. Thus, no student moves on before mastering the current topic, and each student moves on as soon as he or she masters the current topic. Student progress is based on learning rather than time (Bloom, 1984). This means many students in a classroom are working on different topics at any given time, which requires a personal learning plan for every student. This may seem like too much for a teacher to manage, but that’s only true if you try to do it within an Education 2.0 system. The use of different teaching tools (such as the self-correcting materials in the classroom vignette at the beginning of part I, page 11), the use of technology to track student progress, and a totally different way of organizing learning in a PCBE (Education 3.0) system actually make teaching easier and more rewarding for teachers, as well as better for student learning (Kulik, Kulik, Bangert-Drowns, & Slavin, 1990).

       Principle B: Competency-Based Student Assessment

      For a student to move on as soon as he or she has learned the current material, the teacher must know when the student has mastered it. This is a very different purpose for assessment than in Education 2.0, which is typically norm-referenced assessment, designed to identify how much a student has learned compared to other students (Gallagher, 2003). Hence, PCBE requires a different paradigm of assessment—criterion-referenced assessment—which compares student performance to a standard (or criterion). Competency-based assessment requires a completely different set of psychometrics from norm-referenced assessment, making it a truly different paradigm of assessment.

       New Hampshire

      “Students across New Hampshire are evaluated not on pop quizzes, but on demonstrated competency tied to teacher-driven, performance-based assessments” (Dintersmith, 2018, p. 24).

      This kind of assessment must be performed on each individual competency, or learning target (see Principle C: Competency-Based Learning Targets), when the student is ready for it. This is in contrast to the current practice of a large test that covers many competencies—whether or not the student is ready for it—and students pass even if they have not mastered up to 40 percent of the competencies (Marzano, 2006, 2010). In fact, competency-based assessment does not have to be in the form of a pencil-and-paper test. Rather, it should be performance-based and follow the motto of practice until perfect— the performance on practice becomes the test (Patrick, Worthen, Frost, & Gentz, 2016; see Principle F: Instructional Support, page 29). Furthermore, it is important to assess the student’s ability to combine many smaller competencies into broader competencies, or standards. This fits the concept of badges.

      Badges are an assessment and credentialing mechanism to validate learning in both formal and informal settings. Like scouting badges, they are a way of certifying mastery of a set of specific competencies. Digital badges are being used increasingly in K–12 and higher education settings.

       Principle C: Competency-Based Learning Targets

      To know when each student has learned the current material, the teachers have to define the content in the form of learning targets, which are more detailed than typical state and national standards (Educational Impact, n.d.). A good target is a kind of learning goal or objective that provides enough information for the teacher—and the student—to judge that the student has achieved mastery. Criteria for mastery are key. Even deep understandings and social-emotional learning can be formulated as learning targets.

      People are right to caution that breaking down standards can lead to fragmentation in instruction (Wiggins, 2017), but learning by doing (principle E) places the learning targets within a holistic, meaningful context, while instructional support (principle F) allows the teacher to assess mastery in a broad range of relevant, realistic situations. This means that state standards must be broken down into learning targets that have criteria for mastery. Furthermore, there are different levels of mastery for most learning targets, and those levels constitute a proficiency scale (Marzano, 2010), which Marzano defines as “a series of related [learning targets] that culminate in the attainment of a more complex learning goal” (p. 11).

       Principle D: Competency-Based Student Records

      To make decisions about what a student should learn next, one must know what the student has already learned. Current student records (report cards with a single grade for each course) tell you nothing about that—they only tell you the courses the student attended and how well the student did compared to other students. What you need instead is a list of individual learning targets the student has mastered, often accompanied by a portfolio, rubric assessment, or other proof of mastery, sometimes called a digital backpack. Student records should also provide information about who the child is as a learner—interests, strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and so forth.

      Technology can make this more comprehensive kind of student record easier to maintain than the norm-referenced report cards commonly used today. When students take a tutorial on a digital device while

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