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Ask an educator about what it’s like teaching a room full of students, and you’ll likely hear a similar refrain: No two kids learn the same way or grasp concepts at the exact same time.As a result, educators often say they resort to “teaching to the middle.”

More schools are starting to question whether traditional age-based classrooms are the best way to go, and to change the dynamic of teaching to the middle, they’re experimenting with competency-based learning, a system that moves kids along at different paces once they’ve shown they can grasp a key concept of a unit.

Kim Carter, executive director of QED Foundation, is a big supporter of competency-based learning.

“The choice is, do we want an education system that’s obsolete or do we want a system that is valued and creates value,” Carter said. The foundation offers training, coaching and consulting that focuses on student agency, as well as communities of collaboration both inside and outside school. Eventually, she says, that pace should be negotiated, with the student gradually taking over more responsibility for her learning.

Competency-based education is gaining momentum across the country. Already New Hampshire and Maine schools have transitioned to the model. Schools in Oregon, Iowa, Minnesota, and many other states are following suit. The Common Core State Standards are also pointing in the direction of requiring competency rather than just a passing grade. Though Carter says the language of the Common Core favors performance-based assessments — students will have to show what they can do — she thinks it’s unfortunate that a test will measure the learning, because at best, a test approximates meaningful assessment, but does not demonstrate real-world application of knowledge.

“The standardized tests that allow us to compare across states tell us nothing about the individual,” Carter said. “They were not designed to tell us anything about the individual; they are designed to measure the effectiveness of programs. That’s a very different thing.”

If learning becomes more personalized, tests should too. “The whole idea of competency is the ability to apply, document, and defend your learning,” Carter said. She proposes that schools use a common rubric to assess “uncommon learning.” In other words, she proposes teachers need to be strict in their expectations and required criteria, but more flexible in terms of how a student gets there. Students don’t all have to read the same book or create the same project, but they do have to demonstrate that they understand and can use the core competencies.

If a student gets 50 percent in a class in a traditional school, she fails and has to repeat the course or grade level until she scores higher, even if the score means that she understood half the material. Forcing her to repeat everything is inefficient and puts the student at a disadvantage for the rest of her academic career. In competency-based classrooms, students relearn and demonstrate competencies in only the areas that challenge them before moving forward.

“‘Batch and queue’” is horribly inefficient and destroys kids’ concept of self,” Carter said. “It’s like manufacturing, where you put everything through the same system and compare it to standards at the end. If it doesn’t match, put it through again.”

CHALLENGES TO IMPLEMENTATION

Shifting to a truly competency-based system means big changes for schools and would produce a ripple effect. “If you are truly going to go competency based and not just have a veneer of change, it will require retooling our systems,” said Carter.

Teacher training tailored to a competency-based education system is still one of the biggest hurdles. Many training courses have been the same for decades and don’t reflect some of the changing trends in education, Carter said. Successfully implementing a competency-based system is no easy feat — it means valuing what a child can demonstrate he knows, rather than assuming a correctly answered test question signifies he can apply that knowledge.

“Competency-based education is a huge shift, not just in terms of actual practices, or what we do in the classroom, or how we document what happens in the classroom, but a change in what we believe,” Carter said. And teachers need to act their way into believing, they can’t just be told to do it. She points to nursing or other higher education programs that ensure graduates have the basic skills and competencies before they can progress as good models to follow.

[RELATED READING: Five Big Changes to the Future of Teacher Education]

The other big barrier is teacher evaluations. Right now teachers are assessed by how well students do on a test. But understanding how well a student really knows the material should take more than that, just as teacher assessments should be based on more data points, Carter said. Teachers and students are trapped in the same system, one that is at odds with competency-based models.

“Our whole evaluation system is pretty young in the sense that we have only a few rudimentary means of assessing what students know,” Carter said.

Ultimately, teachers need to be trained and supported in the same way as students. And for both groups the standards have to mean something. Carter fears that if the education system continues as it has been, it will not only be obsolete, it will provide diplomas that have little validity.

School of One

Engaging, motivated teachers are at the heart of every successful school. For schools like Rocketship, where 75% of teachers come from Teach for America, which recruits mostly recent college grads to commit to two years, finding ways to train and keep them becomes that much more of a priority.

What’s their strategy? First, they pay more than typical public schools – on average between 10 and 20 percent more, according to Judith McGarry, Rocketship’s spokesperson.

And since most of these teachers are “very young” — for many of them, it’s the first time teaching in a classroom – McGarry said teachers’ progress is tracked closely. Every eight-week assessment of students’ progress is compared to the teachers’ own eight-week assessments.

“We think that this constant feedback helps them ramp up really quickly,” McGarry said of new teachers. “So we do actually use student achievement and student testing as one measure of how we evaluate teachers’ effectiveness. But we don’t really have the problem that the Los Angeles School District did, because, first of all teachers walk in knowing this is how they’re going to get evaluated, and second, it’s one of multiple measures that we use for their effectiveness.”

Other measures include meeting regularly with the principal to work on their professional growth plans, collaborating closely with other teachers, and working with academic coaches. Sometimes classes are videotaped, so teachers and coaches can evaluate the way the class is run play-by-play, and sometimes educators wear microphones and earbuds to get live coaching while they teach.

It’s all part of the teachers’ “professional growth plan,” which defines their trajectory at Rocketship. First-year teachers are called “Emerging Fellows” and attend leadership workshops and have the chance to think about whether they want to move ahead in the Rocketship school system.

In their second year, teachers are called “Rising Fellows” and, along with their teaching duties, must manage Learning Lab staff, who are typically teachers’ aides. They’re also given the chance to take over managing the school during the fall and the spring for certain increments of time.

Third-year educators are called “Principal Fellows” and become more involved in managing the school while going through coaching and professional development.

It’s an intense program that requires a great deal of motivation to carry through, but that applies to any motivated teacher, not just TFA recruits. McGarry said.

“The TFA burnout problem is frankly the problem that any teacher faces who has promise and drive and motivation, and it’s been going on for years,” she said. “It’s because teaching has been a profession that has not rewarded or encouraged innovation or hard work or talent. So we actually have a lot of structural differences in our network that do all those things: reward talent, provide an upwardly mobile career path for teachers, and give them a reason to believe that this could be a sustainable work-life balance.”

Matthew Williams

Tiffany Gee teaches math at Rocketship.

Teachers give out their phone numbers to students, and students call them. Tiffany Gee, who teaches math at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy, says some students call on a regular basis, but she doesn’t necessarily mind because “it helps them know they have a regular resource they can count on.”

“A lot of parents don’t remember how to do something. It’s been a long time since they’ve done fifth-grade math! So I’m there to help at night,” she said.

Does she wish she had a break in the evenings after intense days of teaching? “Once in a while I wish I had a break, but for the most part, students are short on the phone,” she said. “They’re not calling because they want to bother me. Plus, they have no excuses for not having homework done.”

McGarry says none of this is lost on Rocketship.

“If we pop into any classroom right now and you ask a teacher how hard they’re working, they’re going to tell you they’re working really hard, so we make no mistake about it,” she says. “But, at the network level, we’re absolutely obsessed with figuring out how to make the workload reasonable for teachers, because we want these people in our network for a very long time.”

By offering them a detailed trajectory, avenues to progress within the network even if they’re not interested in teaching per se, Rocketship hopes to provide enough incentive to keep them interested in staying.

For Gee, who has taught public schools in Gilroy, Calif., and in China, teaching is fulfilling — at least for now.

“I’m not sure how long I want to be a teacher,” she says. “I’m taking it one year at a time. I’ll see where it takes me and where I go from here. I’m not really sure.”

Flickr:Kevin Dooley

Should test scores be used as a way to measure teacher performance? The question these days is not so much “should”–  but “how”?

In Massachusetts, teacher unions are attempting to control their own fate by having a hand in creating the guidelines.

From The Boston Globe: