Our first step with competency-based assessment was to acknowledge its limitations.
One of the many failures of ed reform was its refusal to accept the limitations of standardized tests, and a subsequent refusal to limit their role in the national assessment conversation.
The ‘achievement mongers’ discovered that the pursuit of higher test scores in closed-loop accountability cycles was self-serving—leading to more grant funding, investment dollars, and social prestige than most educational leaders had ever enjoyed.
And thus, they doubled down on preparation for tests expressly designed to marginalize the very students they were serving.
Such hubris always finds its roots in a blatant disregard for human limitations, a failure to accept, as Wes Jackson reminds us, that “human cleverness must remain subordinate to nature’s wisdom.”
There is a lot we don’t understand about the brain and learning, and educators must learn to sit with this fundamental source of uncertainty in everything we do. We endeavored to shift the purpose of assessment and offer this uncertainty a seat in our classrooms.
An assessment system should be regarded not as a nexus of power, but rather as a toolkit for observation, conversation and reflection.
I believe that competency-based assessment conversations can be both constructive and compelling, but only after we avow that student performance on a set of related tasks is only partially descriptive, and may not capture all that is invisibly incubating.
Given our constraints as educators, we should strive to use as much data as possible to describe performance against an expectation that is reasonably small and well-defined. In our program, we carved out a lot of practice time and offer students multiple opportunities to demonstrate proficiency.
This felt like a practical way to honor all that a single task cannot completely describe about a student’s position in his/her/their learning process, while still providing that student with guidance for improvement.