Competencies First? NO!

Groundhog Day 2008

The other day someone asked me why we haven't done the competencies first this year. While a tempting suggestion, I'd like to try to explain why that easy path isn't also the best path.

The plan that we have laid out this year is:

• District Goals
• High School Goals (Graduation Expectations)
• K-12 Curriculum Goals
• Department Goals
• Course Goals (Competencies)

And we have proceeded through this list from top to bottom. Always going back to the biggest of the goals before proceeding to the ones below.

It is tempting to want to start at the competency level and work the other direction, or to work from many directions at once. The reason that this is tempting is because the material and the ideas at the competency level is the material that is closest to the hearts of individual teachers. We are always going to be more comfortable talking about what we know--so it makes sense to begin with competencies-the big goals for our individual courses.

From my perspective as a chemistry teacher I know that it would be a lot easier for me to talk with intelligence about the goals of my class than to discuss the goals of the whole school, or even my department. I studied science for 6 years in college and graduate school so I am pretty sure that I know what needs to be taught in the class. So I could quite easily sit down and determine a plan of events that would cover the most important aspects of the field of chemistry.

While any teacher taking this approach would be likely to come up with a fine course of studies, it would also be likely that it would be different in some ways from another teachers. Those differences might be small, like a different lab to teach the same thing, or they might be big, one course preparing a student to take college courses in the subject, one course teaching students to gain jobs immediately in that subject. Beginning at the competency level causes this to happen.

If we spread to other courses, again with the bottom up example, we might find that the science department courses mainly teach students to go to college. They teach other things but are designed for college readiness. The math department might, at the same time, be teaching students for life skills in math--problem solving, everyday math, etc. They still prepare students for college but their main focus is on the everyday use of math. Well, this dichotomy leads to questions about the goal of the entire school and how those goals are set out. Without talking about the bigger goals of the school departments never can be quite sure of what their existing courses should be like and moreover, what new kinds of classes they should offer in the future.

In a small district with one high school it may be hard to imagine how this could be a problem. But imagine a district with 13 high schools like many in big cities. How does each high school know what departments they should have and what types of classes they should offer? How do they know if they should focus on science and technology or if they should be more traditional schools? Without some kind of overarching goal structure these many high schools would not know what kind of high school experience they should give.

Consider too the elementary schools in Concord. With 7 schools in many parts of the city they need to coordinate so students are receiving similar kinds of educations. Especially since they will all be joined together at the middle and high schools later in their careers. How could they know what to do without articulated district and school goals?

So the path that we have chosen for CHS this year is one where we look a the big goals of the district and of the school and then decide our other goals from that point. Once we know what the goals of the school are then we can decide how we will give our departments support to meet those goals. Once departments know their goals, stemming from the goals of the school, they can determine what types of courses they will have to meet those goals. They might also decide that they need to change existing courses or add new ones to meet the stated goals. Once course teachers know all of the goals they can use that information to determine what exactly goes into their course.

Choosing lesson plans first and then determining where they fit is something that young teachers often do. They are scrambling hard to just keep the kids in seats and they are literaly just trying to have something to do that day. As they progresss in their careers they begin to see where the lessons actually fit within bigger goals and they begin to implement them more purposefully. They begin to really use lessons to get to the point of the unit they are trying to teach. This is a hardscrable way to go through the first few years of teaching. And in Concord we have stopped making teachers do this. Rather than turn them loose in a room with a text book we tell them the units, and the goals and we tell them where the lessons should be used and why.

The point here is that building from competencies up is the blind and hardscrable way to do it. The purposeful way to go about building a high school is to consider the big goals first and then use the lessons that still fit. It is not a process of creating more lessons but a process of using existing lessons in a more purposeful way.

Bench Press

3 December 2007

I was listening to the sports talk radio show Mike and Mike in the Morning the other day and one of the hosts Mike Golic said, "They don't do the bench press on the 50 yard line." He was making the point that the game of football is more than speed and strength. Those things are important and need to be trained for but doing only those things would miss out on the big picture. It is necessary to play together as a team to be successful with the ultimate goals of football teams.

I always find a way to relate everything I hear to work but I don't feel that it is too much of a stretch to see how this analogy works with the CHS work this year. It is a vast over simplification of the process that we are going through but it does help explain what we are trying to achieve. In my last post, "The Circle," I spoke of the path that we are following, 1) District Goals, 2) CHS Mission and Graduation Expectations, 3) Overarching Competencies, 4) Courses, and 5) Competencies. Each of these steps, from 1 to 5, act as filters for the next. Each filter needs to inform the step that comes after so that the main goals of the school will be fulfilled. (Fulfilled? Yeah, that's a little over the top by you get the point.)

To continue with the football analogy, consider an extreme example. What if all a team did was work out in the weight room? They could work out to the point that they were the strongest team in the league. This would help them and they may win a few games based just on strength. But they could probably be beaten quite easily by a moderately strong but cohesive and well coached team. The team that only worked out in the weight room would have missed the big goal in favor of focusing on one of the smaller aspects of football preparation.

When you have an ultimate goal it is also sometimes necessary to filter out some other goals and that is what we are doing this year at the high school. With our work on graduation expectations we are trying to always filter what we do by thinking about the graduate that will walk across the stage in June. What do they need and what would we like them to be able to do? This year in the NFL the New England Patriots may have to do some filtering as they near the end of their season. Their stated goal for this year, and every other year, is to win the Super Bowl. This year, though, they also have the chance to go undefeated. This has not been done since 1972 (or somewhere around there) and would be an amazing achievement. But going for the undefeated season might actually hurt New England's chances to win the Super Bowl. If an important player was hurt in chasing the undefeated season and was not available in the playoffs it might cost them their larger goal.

I remember a game in the 90s where the 49ers were 14 and 1 and going into their last game. They had a chance to win at one point but didn't push too hard, wound up loosing the game and ending the season with a 14-2 record. At the time I was young and didn't understand the big picture. I was confused as to why they had not put in all their best players to try and win their last game. After they won the Super Bowl that year I realized that they had been filtering their goals. 15-1 would have been nice but a total waste without a Super Bowl victory. They chose 14-2. They sacrificed one smaller goal to achieve another larger goal.

As we continue with our high school work this year there will be times when we have to do the same thing. We aren't trying to win a football game of course but we do have the ultimate goal of preparing that student that walks across our graduation stage. Just as a teacher would consider all of the little details of their course that they could teach--but don't because they miss the big goals. In biology teachers have decided in recent years to not focus so much on very minor details like alleles. (Do you know what alleles are? Don't worry about it, most likely you are still a highly functioning member of our society--and that is the whole point.) They looked long and hard at their course and decided to leave out (or de-emphasize) some details in favor of the big goal of having biologically literate students. Now as a school we are trying to work with doing the same thing. What are the big goals that we have and what are the smaller things that we can filter out so that they don't interfere with students meeting those goals?

These are not easy questions and this will not be easy work.

The Circle

29 November 2007

I was looking at the CHS plan the other day. Here it is from top down. Each one is designed to inform the one below it.

1. District Goals
2. CHS Mission and Graduation Expectations
3. K-12 Curriculum Guides
4. Programs--The Departments at the School
5. Overarching Competencies--the ones that are specific to a subject area or department. Like graphing in science.
6. Courses
7. Course Competencies

As I looked at it for the hundredth time and compared it to books and planning guides and my notes from the past few years I began to think of it differently than I ever had before.

First, I began to realize that in this year of work CHS has literally gone from number 1. right down (or will go) to competencies. Because of the way the year has been organized and because of the pressure from our accrediting body this has been the way we have had to go about it. The thing is--we went about it exactly the right way. Why in the world would you start to think about course competencies before you had thought of the overarching competencies of a subject area? Wouldn't you want to know which competency type things were going to appear in every course? Well we have done the same thing with our whole school. We have identified what we want graduates to look like and are working on seeing how they get there.

Second, I came to see that in designing our process to go over many years what we really are doing is going through the steps from 1-7 and THEN going back to number 1 to revise from the top down again. We will use the data that we have collected this year to inform what we should do, how we should change things to make them better.

Each time I look at it it becomes more clear that we are doing the right thing. How many people believe that? I'm not sure--but I am confident that we are doing the right thing.