Former president explains competency-based model
Linda Schott
As Maine’s K-12 schools move toward a “proficiency-based” diploma, the University of Maine at Presque Isle has also been offering students new approaches from the related competency-based education movement.
It’s the future of education – more flexible and empowering for students – and it’s starting to work well at UMPI, said Linda Schott, UMPI’s now former president.
During her three-year tenure, Schott started transitioning the university toward a competency-based model, and though she’s now leading Southern Oregon University in her new job, Schott said that UMPI is on the right track – on the front lines of what she calls a “revolution in education.”
Proficiency-based education, or competency-based education as it’s known at the college level, is based on new research about how children and adults best learn, as well as some older ideas about nurturing human development, Schott said.
Two of the main principles of proficiency/competency-based education are “student voice and choice: Students should have a say in how they best learn and a choice about how they best demonstrate their learning.”
That approach lets students learn in a more natural way, at their own pace, while measuring their progress incrementally in ways that show they actually understand, Schott said. The competency/proficiency-based model also includes an emphasis on “experiential learning, the value of doing things, rather than just sitting and listening.”
So far, in the K-12 sector, teachers have raised concerns about aspects of new proficiency initiatives as well as the standardized testing that has been taking place for more than a decade.
Earlier this year, SAD 1 teachers asked the administration and school board to end the use of a new proficiency tracking software, saying it takes too much of their time for recordkeeping, among other complaints.
Schott said there will no doubt be problems to work out in both K-12 and higher education.
“We’re going through growing pains with the new system,” Schott said. “Like anything, it can be implemented well or be implemented poorly. There are examples of it going both ways around the state,” she said.
“There’s not a lot of justification for the old system. The industrial model of K-12 education especially was designed for a time when we wanted people to work in factories, where they were going to do rote tasks, and we set up an educational system that prepared them to do those kinds of things. We did it well and people could go through that kind of K-12 education and then get a good job. It may not have been the most intellectually stimulating, but they could make a living for their families. That’s not where the economy is anymore. Now we need more creativity and innovation.”
At UMPI, Schott said, one of the new competency-based approaches has involved an “emphasis on formative assessment rather than summative,” the traditional format of testing for everything at the end of the semester.
“Formative assessment helps you learn,” said Schott, a longtime history professor. “Students get a chance to not get it all the first time, but they’re not penalized or told they’re failures.”
More UMPI classes are also taking field trips and doing on-campus experiential learning. “Our faculty are taking students out more, especially the science faculty,” she said.
Discovery, or experiential learning, has long been prominent in progressive private schools like the Montessori schools and in the education systems of Scandinavian and Nordic countries, where children regularly have classes outdoors (even in winter) and also have longer recesses.
“When you only go on one field trip a year, it’s like a holiday and you’re not focusing on your learning. There’s a lot of value to a much freer learning environment and getting kids out into nature,” she said.
On the K-12 level, she said, “the schools that are really embracing proficiency-based education are finding out ways to do that well,” though school gardens or on-campus nature trails, Schott said.
Part of the learning benefit from getting outside the classroom is just being active, said Schott, adding that she once suggested having treadmills at UMPI’s learning center.
“Walking stimulates learning. The research is clear that if you are trying to learn something and you do it while you’re moving, you’re more likely to remember it, or if you’ve been sitting and reading for half-an-hour, if you get up and move for 10 minutes, you’re more likely to retain. It’s true for the kids, too.”
At the other end of the education spectrum from physical activity is technology, about which Schott is optimistic for both the K-12 and college levels. UMPI recently received a grant from the Davis Foundation for faculty to experiment with different ways to incorporate technology into their teaching.
Schott said she thinks the best education technology will be those that complement a teacher’s work and even do some of the assessment and record-keeping. She mentioned the online math testing programs of the Khan Academy: “if you try a problem and get it wrong, it diagnoses what went wrong and it sends you where you need to go to try again.”
There are also educational benefits in some of the computer games that kids have taken up themselves in droves, such as Minecraft, a creative “sandbox game” where players mine Lego-like blocks and build structures.
“My boys played Minecraft and they loved it, and now universities are developing ways of using Minecraft to teach kids all kinds of mathematical and spatial concepts,” Schott said.
Technology and all of the other approaches in competency-based education, Schott said, are ultimately geared toward “educating a broader portion of the population” and making education more valuable – as college tuition and student debt continues to rise.
“The vast majority of students are educated at places like UMPI, and yes, they have debt,” Schott said, mentioning that the average student loan debt for UMPI graduates is around $20,000, much less than the national average of $37,000.
“It’s not overwhelming if they finish their degree,” Schott said. “What is the catastrophe is the kids who get 80 credits and stop, and have to pay the debt but don’t have the better-paying job. That’s why it’s so important for us to focus on better teaching and learning methods.”
