SAU 67
Serving the communities of
Bow and Dunbarton, NH
This page provides both an overview of what competencies are and guidance for developing and working with competencies. A competency has three essential parts: A competency statement, a rubric that provides guidance in understanding the level or performance expected and an assessment(s). Each photo below is a link to a short video. A description for each video is found below the link and if there are supporting documents links have been provided to those PDF's. While they are designed to be viewed sequentially, they can just as easily be accessed by topic for review or discussion.
Competencies
Overview
New Hampshire's education system is philosophically aligned with a competency based system. Competency based systems provide stakeholders with a deeper understanding of what students know, understand and are able to do. A fully developed competency based system provides performance expectations for each grade, course and curriculum area. A competency based system moves away from reporting students' performance with A's and 95's, to statements that describe the performance level expected and where a student currently falls on that continuum.
Complexity of Thought
At the center of developing competencies is the complexity of thought we are asking students to demonstrate. In education we often refer to this as Depth of Knowledge (DOK). DOK provides us four categories to sort the types of levels of thought we might ask students to perform at. Educators know that we ask for DOK levels 3 and 4 to be present in our competencies. We provide a word bank of DOK level 3 and 4 terms. But, just including those words does not bring fidelity to what we are truly asking when we talk about complexity of thought. This video presents the distilled work of a lot of different models that address complexity of thought. You will find Bloom's taxonomy, Webb's DOK and a lot of influence from John Biggs SOLO taxonomy.
The big picture: From standards to Competency
Here we present an overview of what a unit might look like using the Complexity of Thought rubric. At the base of the graphic are the standards that your curriculum area aligns to for your grade or content area. The document then takes typical classroom activities and assignments and demonstrates how they fit into the idea of complexity of thought. Here we also start to address the complications of grading that arrise when we move from our current system of grading to a new system of grading.
Competency Statements nuts and bolts.
This very short presentation will get you started creating competency statements. Competency statements have three parts. That makes them very formulaic. You will find that you will spend a lot of time discussing the wording and content. This is to be expected. It's important that you work on this process in teams.
Birth of a Competency
This video starts with a look at standards based education and recounts the movement from standards based education to competency based education. The video then focuses on the development of a competency. Using an actual competency you are walked through three iterations of the same competency. The video also provides what teachers were thinking as they developed the competency. Often the question, "Is this competency good," comes up. This video addresses this.
Rubric Development
This video explains how rubrics need to be developed for competency based learning. The video looks at the evolution of rubrics. It looks at the evolution of rubrics as a tool that was used strictly for grading and now used as a tool to help assess the learning process and provide a learning pathway for the learner.
Performance Task Development
This video presents the four principals used to think about what goes into creating a performance task. It presents information about the four types of performance tasks. The video also answers two questions, "How many do I need for my course?", and "Which type should I use?"