What Is Competency-Based Education?
Competency-based education, an educator-led reform, is taking root in schools and districts across the country. The concept behind competency-based education is simple: learning is best measured by students demonstrating mastery of learning, rather than the number of hours spent in a classroom. By redesigning the education system around actual student learning, we will prepare each student more effectively for a future in an increasingly global and competitive economy.
Competency-based education is a major shift in school culture, structures, and pedagogy focused on ensuring that all students succeed and addressing fundamental shortcomings of the traditional model. Districts and schools turn to competency-based education for different reasons: to help students learn most effectively, to achieve greater equity, to foster deeper learning, or to create a system of continuous improvement.
Competency-based education is being implemented at deeper levels in more schools and districts every year, and most states have made initial or extensive policy adjustments to allow for competency-based education innovations. Many districts are making the transition because they know they can’t help all of their students reach career and college readiness without greater personalization.
Competency-based education is a system in which:
- Students are empowered daily to make important decisions about their learning experiences, how they will create and apply knowledge, and how they will demonstrate their learning.
- Assessment is a meaningful, positive, and empowering learning experience for students that yields timely, relevant, and actionable evidence.
- Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.
- Students progress based on evidence of mastery, not seat time.
- Students learn actively using different pathways and varied pacing.
- Strategies to ensure equity for all students are embedded in the culture, structure, and pedagogy of schools and education systems.
- Rigorous, common expectations for learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) are explicit, transparent, measurable, and transferable.
A competency-based school should implement all seven elements of the definition. Strong implementation also requires policies, pedagogy, structures, and culture that support every student. These topics are explained further in What Is Competency-Based Education? An Updated Definition and Quality Principles for Competency-Based Education.
A Note About Language
As you learn about competency-based education you will encounter multiple phrases used to capture the practice of students advancing upon mastery: standards-based, mastery-based, performance-based, or proficiency-based.
CompetencyWorks uses the phrase “competency-based education.” Why? When we started, states were already using different terms. So we decided to use the term that the U.S. Department of Education was using at the time.
What we call it isn’t important. What is important is that we share a working definition that drives policy and practice towards a learner-centered system in which success is the only option.
CompetencyWorks Posts
May 31, 2023
Competency-Based Education Across America
June 20, 2024
Student Agency in Action
June 13, 2024
The Wyoming Future of Learning Pilot: Student-Centered and Competency-Based
Amy Starzynski
June 6, 2024
The Culmination of Mastery and Community: Senior Exhibitions at the Parker School
May 30, 2024
Getting Started With Real-World Learning at a Comprehensive High School
May 23, 2024
2024 Aurora Institute Field Survey: Strategies and Practices that Advance CBE
CompetencyWorks Resources
CompetencyWorks, Report
November 12, 2019
What Is Competency-Based Education? An Updated Definition
Dr. Eliot Levine, Susan Patrick
CompetencyWorks, Book
October 11, 2018
Quality Principles for Competency-Based Education
Chris Sturgis, Katherine Casey
CompetencyWorks, Report
November 8, 2018
Moving Toward Mastery: Growing, Developing and Sustaining Educators for Competency-Based Education
Katherine Casey