Ooh, the life of the digital world. It lives on and on—until it’s buried under the daily production of nearly half a zettabyte (whatever that unimaginably large number actually is) of new data. And yet, even with a wave of new reports on personalized, competency-based education published over the last five years, I’m getting more and more requests for old CompetencyWorks papers.
That makes me smile—and pause.
I smile because it tells me more schools are realizing they need a new blueprint. Trying to improve learning inside a rusty ranking-and-sorting architecture only gets you so far. But I pause because it suggests we may not be meeting schools where they are. I’m not pointing fingers. I am wondering if it’s time for some rethinking.
When we launched CompetencyWorks, there wasn’t really a field yet. Our work wasn’t to invent the innovation, but to help a community find itself.There were pockets of extraordinary innovation—schools and districts doing brave, thoughtful work—but no shared language, no common meeting place, and very few ways to learn across contexts. The goal was simple: make the learning visible, connect the dots, and help people learn from one another.
CompetencyWorks didn’t disappear; it evolved. It was folded into Aurora Institute and now lives on through FullScale. Along the way, some of those early papers became harder to find. And yes—many of them are getting old. We know far more about competency-based education today than what’s captured here.
Still, beginnings matter.
These papers reflect how many of us first started making sense of CBE—what we were noticing, naming, and wrestling with as the language and the field were taking shape. I still find value in returning to them to understand the path we took and how that might have shaped where we are now (for good or bad).
PS I’ve included the Mastery Transcript Report on Utah as well as they developed the best state strategy I’ve seen. Skip to the case study.
Quality Principles for Competency-Based Education by Chris Sturgis and Katherine Casey, 2018. This book is a primer on competency-based education.
Levers and Logic Models: A Framework to Guide Research and Design of High-Quality Competency-Based Education Systems by Katherine Casey and Chris Sturgis, 2018. This paper, inspired by researchers and practitioners, changed my understanding. Competency-based education starts with the research about how we learn.
Designing for Equity: Leveraging Competency-Based Education to Ensure All Students Succeed by Chris Sturgis and Katherine Casey, 2018. A good start but I would write a different paper knowing what I know today.
Quality and Equity by Design: Charting the Course for the Next Phase of Competency-Based Education by Nina Lopez, Susan Patrick and Chris Sturgis, 2017.
Reaching the Tipping Point: Insights on Advancing Competency Education in New England 2016. States and districts do a two-stepped dance of taking a big step forward and then another little one back. Slowly knowledge builds along the way as does demoralization. It’s interesting to look at the innovators and think about where we are now.
Chugach School District: A Personalized, Performance-Based System 2016.
Implementing Competency Education in K-12 Systems: Insights from Local Leaders by Chris Sturgis, iNACOL/CompetencyWorks, June 2015. (Please note that only one implementation strategy is described. Other entry points are developing as schools build upon efforts to introduce blended learning or other instructional initiatives.)
Progress and Proficiency: Redesigning Grading for Competency Education by Chris Sturgis, 2014. There are so many good books on grading I recommend skipping the paper.
Necessary for Success: Building Mastery of World-Class Skills – A State Policymakers Guide to Competency Education by Patrick and Sturgis, 2013. I include this as a historical marker of initial thinking.
The Learning Edge: Supporting Student Success in a Competency-Based Learning Environment by Laura Shubilla and Chris Sturgis, 2012. This is one of the most frequently read papers. I think it’s because it is the hardest for schools to do because the traditional value has been on standardization when what we need is responsiveness.
The Art and Science of Designing Competencies 2012. Ugh, this one definitely needs to be rewritten.
Clearing the Path: Creating Innovation Space for Serving Over-age, Under-credited Students in Competency-based Pathways by Sturgis, Rath, Weisstein and Patrick, 2010. Witnessing the pain and trauma of teens that were repeatedly offered ineffective education was the starting point on my road to competency-based education.
Let me know what your favorite resources are. I’d be delighted to put together a Rockin’ Resources page here.
