Is Competency-Based Learning the right choice for the future of Catlin Gabel students?
By Alexandria Nagy, ‘22
Image from US mathematics and computer science teacher Jim Wysocki’s Canvas page
The Catlin Gabel School (CGS) was founded on the principles of progressive education. One aspect of this approach to education includes a de-emphasis on grades. Students are urged to focus on their progress, skill-building, and the process of learning instead of grades or GPAs.
The school has utilized verbal equivalents to fulfill this mission, using words like “outstanding,” “excellent,” “good,” and “satisfactory” as substitutes for letter grades. More recently, however, many students have seen terms like “advanced,” “mastering,” “developing,” “insufficient evidence,” and “no evidence” appearing in their classes.
Upper School (US) mathematics and computer science teacher Jim Wysocki has suggested that many CGS math teachers such as himself, Derek Kanarek, and Traci Kiyama utilize this vocabulary in a schoolwide effort to implement competency-based learning and assessment (CBL). A number of English and science teachers have also recently adopted this system.
In Wysocki’s words, “CBL is the notion of both learning and assessment that is focused on particular goals and expectations surrounding whatever it is you are trying to learn… A competency is the big picture of what we are going for.”
Wysocki has been tinkering with different ways of assessing and grading for several decades now with the focus of fostering problem-solving skills in his students. When Wysocki began working for a digital learning consortium called Global Online Academy (GOA), his competency-based system solidified.
“I started working for GOA, and GOA has been moving towards CBL for a number of years now. In my role there as a teacher and a coach, I basically got thrown into the deep end. I took what I learned there, took what I learned here [from classes at CGS and kind of made a mix for what we are doing in Calculus classes this year.”
Like our familiar verbal equivalents, this CBL system assesses the knowledge and skills students are expected to learn as they progress through their education and equates that to a numerical grade.
“The numbers we landed on are, advanced means perfect, 100 points. Mastering means the student is doing everything I am asking them to do. That should be a solid A, which is why we set that as a 95. Developing-you still have some things to work on, so we set that as an 86. That is a high B that won’t dramatically lower your grade. Insufficient evidence means a significant lack of understanding, so we set that to a 70. The lowest you can get is no evidence, which is 50 out of 100.”
The last three grades in your grade book account for 65% of your total grade in Wysocki’s system. This structure is part of his effort to emphasize learning and improvement over time.
“In CBL, we are emphasizing what you have most recently done. Presumably, the idea is that if you have been getting better, those grades will be higher.”
Wysocki proclaims that skill-based assessment makes the process of learning and grading more holistic.
“Instead of looking at individual problems, I can look back and say, okay, these are the skills I see you’re getting. You got them all; clearly, you're mastering these skills… The old way, [on a math quiz or test], you would be getting double, triple, quadruple jeopardy [penalties] for the same error. Competencies tell us, oh, they understand everything else; it's just this one piece they are missing. You got most of it; I’m not going to keep taking off points for the same thing.”
Thus, Wysocki announced that CGS is part of the educational initiative to move towards CBL.
“The Upper School has suggested they are working towards CBL.”
With this in mind, Wysocki recognizes a roadblock to the implementation of CBL at CGS; grade transparency. Wysocki relies on elaborate programs and spreadsheet systems he designed himself to compute his grades. He does not expect this to be effective for all teachers.
“The major roadblock is the spreadsheet and transparency piece. At the moment, I would not expect every teacher to maintain a complicated spreadsheet.”
Moreover, students have expressed concern that, in Wysocki’s CBL system, getting every question correct on a quiz does not equate to a 100%.
“If I give you a quiz on something that you should be fluent at, it does not demonstrate creativity of thought or a deeper understanding of how to do something. You just did some skills, that really does not represent advanced work. It just shows that you can do what I’ve asked you to do. If I put 100% in there, it would skew the rest of the outcomes. It would reinforce the notion that just doing skills and getting answers correct is the goal of the class, and that’s not.”
Altogether, Wysocki upholds CBL as one of the better ways of assessing.
“I genuinely think every teacher should move towards CBL. It is a better way of assessing because I think it focuses on what we want students to walk out of the classroom with.”
Conversely, Mathematics US Teacher, Department Chair, and PS-12 Academic Leader, Dr. Kenny Nguyen, has opted to use a more traditional, point-percentage-based assessment system in his math classes.
Nguyen has also used various grading systems in the past. He agrees that grading and assessment have to be in the service of learning but stresses how there is no perfect assessment or grading system.
“Any assessment system you use, you can miscalibrate… You can tell me the best idea in the world, or the best methodology, and I can tell you a way to apply that methodology and have it totally fail on you. It’s the same with grading systems. I think what educators oftentimes don't do well is we come up with a philosophical system, or we come up with a grading system that we say is the best system at all times, and I don’t believe that. You have to take context into account.”
Additionally, he acknowledges that different methods are better suited to maximize the feedback a teacher gives to students. To Nguyen, a holistic approach does not simply mean assessing based on skills; it means capturing all aspects of student learning and weighing how much feedback to give to a student given the context.
“I think in education we get ourselves into this dichotomy that traditional is bad and progressive is good. That also does not mean that progressive is bad and traditional is good. CBL is a really good way of getting at that; [maximizing feedback], but you could also do that with a traditional method; a percentage-based system with straight averages or a point-percentage-based system that is calculated on a straight average.”
Thus, a pragmatic mindset is paramount when designing a grading system.
“I am very much a pragmatist. Oftentimes, I am thinking about who I am teaching with, who are the students in the class, [and] what have their experiences been.”
Nguyen asks himself what the best mechanism is to give students the type of feedback they need to succeed.
“If I am teaching Algebra 1B, I want a system where I am giving students lots and lots of feedback, and they are getting lots of opportunities to try, versus if I am teaching a graduate-level seminar, I am going to have one paper because that’s the system graduate students are used to and the way that is going to serve them best.”
The most important aspects of a grading system to Nguyen are clarity and transparency. To him, a clear and transparent design takes into account what the students are familiar with. This is especially important to Nguyen given the crushing uncertainty that has been burdening students throughout the pandemic.
“If you are doing something completely new and experimental, you need to scaffold that in very slowly… Part of why I am doing a more categorical-percentage-based assessment system is because we were in a pandemic last year. I wanted something that was going to be very, very familiar for students.
Nguyen further emphasizes the importance of balancing familiarity, quality of feedback for students, and liberty for educators in a good grading system.
“Everyone is going to have their own grading system. For me, [as we move towards CBL], what is going to be important is how we give enough freedom so that educators can choose what categories they think will be important, but there is enough similarity between the systems so students don't have to learn completely different systems and rubrics for every class.”
Altogether, Nguyen supports the move towards CBL to the extent to which there is data backing that this curriculum shift is improving the abilities of educators to give feedback to students and the abilities of students to improve their work based on that feedback.
“I am being very careful to think about how we will be collecting data. For me, as we make that shift, we need to be collecting data to make sure this is doing work for us over and above what we are currently doing.”
One of Nguyen’s heroes in grad school was a professor, Sarah B. Berenson, at North Carolina State University. According to Nguyen, Berenson was a full-tenured professor; one of the best in the country, and she told him something he still holds with him today.
“I was really deeply thinking about my methodological framework for my dissertation, and she said to me, ‘Kenny, here’s the trick. You’re a smart guy; you know constructivism, behavioralism, constructionism, you know all of those things. Here’s my advice; ‘if you are in a room of constructivists, be a constructivist. If you are in a room full of behavioralists, be a behavioralist.’”
Nguyen expanded, “At first, I thought, well this is a little wishy-washy, right? But the more I thought about it, I realized what she was saying to me is, as a really good researcher, as a really good teacher, you should know all of these systems. You should be able to use the one you need to use for the context you need to use it for.”
He argues that this same pragmatic ideology must also apply to grading systems.
“You wouldn’t use a nail to hammer in a nail. For me, it's about having all of these tools at my disposal and then knowing the right time and the right place to deploy those tools. How do you know? You have to collect data. That’s my hope and dream for us, that we take a pragmatic view through all of this.”
Altogether, competency-based learning and assessment is coming to CGS, and both Wysocki and Nguyen believe that this shift has to be in the service of learning. Wysocki upholds CBL as a leading method of assessment. Nguyen highlights the importance of facilitating this curriculum change through a pragmatic lens, prioritizing data collection, and addressing the issues of clarity and grade transparency.