In this episode of UEN Homeroom, Dani and Matt are joined by Virgel Hammonds and Lillian Pace from KnowledgeWorks. Join them in conversation on PCBL (Personalized, Competency-Based Learning) in Utah, and get insight from these experts on what personalized learning looks like in the classroom and how we can support PCBL in our state.
In this episode of UEN Homeroom, Dani and Matt are joined by Virgel Hammonds and Lillian Pace from KnowledgeWorks. Join them in conversation on PCBL (Personalized, Competency-Based Learning) in Utah, and get insight from these experts on what personalized learning looks like in the classroom and how we can support PCBL in our state.
KnowledgeWorks Website: https://knowledgeworks.org/
You can find UEN on Instagram @UtahEducationNetwork and Twitter @uennews.
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Hi, Dani.
Hey, Matt. How's it going?
Good. How are you doing?
I am doing very well, thank you.
That's awesome. I don't know about you, but when I was in school, I felt like I got tested every week with some sort of multiple choice test. What about you?
Yeah. There were a lot of bubble sheets.
A lot of Scantrons. That became a dirty word.
Yeah.
And I always wondered why I couldn't study the things that I was really interested in.
What were you really interested in in elementary school, Matt?
In elementary school, I wanted to be Indiana Jones.
Oh my god. Kind of me too. I wanted to be an Egyptologist.
Yeah. And so I really wanted to dive into history and exploring and what that meant and then space and those sorts of things and following my interests. But sadly, I didn't get a lot of opportunities to do that in school. I don't know about you.
Yeah. I think that we just did what we were told.
Yeah. And that's why I'm so excited about our guests today because we're talking a ton about PCBL, or Personalized Competency-Based Learning, which is a two-part system. I think that's really important to talk about, where we have personalized learning, where students are encouraged to explore topics within maybe a class or within a field that they're interested in that provides them some context.
Well, on the flip side, we look for competency-based on some preordained skills that we want the students to master within the course. I think that's a really interesting concept. I'm really excited to talk to our guests about it today.
I am as well. So today, we have Virgel Hammond and Lillian Pace from Knowledge Works. Let's dive right in.
Sounds good.
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Listen to the Utah Teacher Fellows Podcast. Hello. My name is Ryan Rarick. I'm one of the hosts of the Utah Teacher Fellows Podcast. And I invite you to join the social media team from the Utah Teacher Fellows as we interview different teachers and teacher leaders throughout the state. We explore the greatness of the profession through individual teacher stories. Find the Utah Teacher Fellows Podcast at theutahteacher.com or on any major podcasting platform, such as iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Amazon, and Stitcher.
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All right. We are back with another episode of UEN Homeroom. And we're so excited to have two amazing guests from Knowledge Works today. We have Virgel Hammond and Lillian Pace to discuss everything PCBL, from the amazing work happening at the legislative side all the way down to classroom level.
Where we want to start is just a little bit with Utah's been working on PCBL for a little while now, a few years. And some educators, including district levels, may not have a clear understanding of what PCBL is and how it functions in the classroom. Can you guys give us a little bit of an elevator speech about what is PCBL and why it's important in our schools?
The way I describe personalized competency-based learning is almost in a metaphor and a comparison between the current traditional systems we have and what we aspire to create through personalization, is I think about it is in a traditional world, oftentimes, our learners are passengers in the learning system. So there's always our teachers, our educators, our support teams are the drivers in helping kids to guide them in learning and acquiring new knowledge and skills.
And in a personalized sphere, the opposite is true. So learners become the drivers. They understand the potential outcomes of standards. But they drive it in a way that makes more meaning for them, makes it much more personalized. And the best part of that is that it helps them to apply it in ways that make much more sense to each one of them.
In the passenger context, I think it's-- I don't know if you all, as parents or as kids or drivers, if you recall, as a passenger, all of a sudden, you might drive the same route every single day but not really actually know how to get to that destination versus as a driver. It becomes really clear that you have to-- you have to know some things.
You have to understand the directions. You have to understand the rules. You have to understand processes to be able to get to that location. So with greater ownership, there's greater responsibility. There's greater opportunities to engage with others as well who are also on their own destination in their own journeys.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great analogy, and I think it makes a lot of sense putting the student in the driver's seat and not just the person who's along for a ride. Doesn't even know where we're going and why. I'm wondering, on the classroom level, what are some appropriate changes that educators can make over the course of a year towards supporting PCBL in their classroom?
I think if I could just build on the previous question, Lillian, and I think you're about to go into it, but I think one simple step to help kids become greater drivers is to help kids to become a part of designing what the learning environment is going to look like, sound like, and function. So oftentimes, I recall as a middle school and high school teacher, one of the very first things we do is here are my rules. Here are my processes. Here are my structures. Here's how we're going to function in my classroom.
What we're seeing in classrooms across the country that are much more personalized, trying to honor the voices of the young people before them, is that these educators are giving kids much more opportunities to design what the learning structure is going to look like. So how will we function as we're doing direct instruction? How will we function as we're doing small group time or individual work time? How do you advocate for-- how might we advocate for a different demonstration of learning rather than the one or two that I am providing for you as an educator?
So having those collaborative conversations around learning designs, how we function as a learning environment, as a learning community, is something that we're seeing educators do from the very beginning. And as they're doing that, they're also getting to know and understand what ticks for the-- what clicks and what ticks for our learners as well.
Yeah. And if I could actually just jump in and build on that a little bit, I think one of the pieces that really resonates with me about these more student-centered or personalized approaches is it's really about a more efficient system. So I think a lot about an educator standing in front of a classroom. If they're delivering a typical scope and sequence throughout the school year, on any given day, they're presenting information to maybe, say, all 25 students in their class.
And maybe three students are exactly where that teacher is on that given day, meaning that they're grasping 100% of what that educator is teaching. So what does that mean for the other 22 students in that class? Some are not actually able to grasp at the level of the content in that particular moment on that particular subject. Some might actually be beyond that particular content, and they don't feel challenged.
And so we've created a system where we've got 22 children on any given day in classrooms all across the state of Utah or all across the country where we're missing students. We are not creating systems that are enabling them to be challenged every single day.
And I think Virgel does a fabulous job, I think, in speaking from the educator perspective, and I often focus on the systems and the policy perspective. And we have to figure out how to create learning systems that give educators the tools and supports that they need to be able to challenge all 25 students in their classroom on every single day.
I absolutely love that, Lillian. And I want to follow up a little bit with a sidestep here. I think there's a lot of buy-in, especially here in Utah, from district-wide, school-wide leaders, admin, those sorts of things. How do we create buy-in at a higher level, from the legislative end or from a larger scale? And how do we create those partnerships in a way that help teachers to feel empowered and then to empower their students as well in the classroom?
Yeah. Well, I often say-- my background is actually in the federal level. And then I spent the last 10 years also doing state policy. It is amazing to me how big the divide is between our state houses or our federal legislatures and the classroom. You have to remember that most of these policymakers, they're not educators. They don't have a background in that.
All they know is the experience, if they're parents, of what their children experience going to the school system or their nieces or nephews or grandchildren. They don't have the experience of seeing and understanding how learning could look and feel different and really feel meaningful to students and educators. So the first thing I say is we have to paint a picture for them of what this looks like. Sometimes that means inviting them into the school buildings to see it firsthand.
And other times, that means going up and talking to them and telling stories about what looks different, what kind of policy barriers exist that are making it hard to do this dynamic learning. I will share, obviously a big part of this too is messaging. And we have to figure out how to communicate, in the most effective way, where the current system is breaking down and what is possible moving forward.
And so I've found, in talking with policymakers, the best evidence of that is looking at what happens between our K-12 system and our higher education system. So if you look at the data, it shows that we literally are losing almost 50% of our kids into remediation in post-secondary, meaning the K-12 system didn't do its job. We have students going in and having to take remedial classes in post-secondary.
And we hear from our employers all the time that the skills gaps are significant. They cannot find the workers they need to enter into these entry level jobs and be successful. And so if we know that the end users of our K-12 system are telling us students aren't ready, we've got to figure out how to do education differently. And that message, I think, really resonates with policymakers who are thinking more systemically, who are very outcomes-based in their policymaking.
I have another follow-up question with this as well for both you and Virgel from different perspectives here. I think a lot of times, we see that kind of work happening with our local leaders, whether it be a state board or with our districts or school leaders, those sorts of things. But where does a group like Knowledge Works step in and fill gaps both on the legislative side, the policy side, but then on the flip side, how does it fill some gaps for classroom education and prepping students and teachers for PCBL to run in classrooms?
Yeah, well, I'll jump in on the policy side, and Virgel, I'll let you speak to the classrooms side. So on the policy side, we know how challenging this work is going to be to change our policy systems. They are so embedded in traditional education structures that it's going to take a comprehensive overhaul of our policy systems to be more student-centered, to be more educator-facing.
And so it's going to take a lot of really hard work. And so Knowledge Works, what we've done is studied all of the best systems around the country to understand what it would take to do this work really well. We've put together tools to help policymakers begin to imagine the types of shifts that are needed. But most importantly is we come to the table as neutral partners, just as experts in what we've seen work in other places.
And we offer that as suggestions, but we try to facilitate conversations of policymakers to design systems that are unique to their state, that are unique to their communities. And we're there to help them do that because if, at the end of the day, this doesn't look and feel 100% designed by the stakeholders in the state, it will fail. Virgel, I don't know if you want to build on that from the classroom side.
And the same can be said about the classroom. It's how do we-- what are the learning structures we want to collectively design? How do we build collective efficacy as a learning community? And really, it's leveraging the policy flexibility and the policy-- and the opportunities created by policy to locally create a shared vision for learning. What is it that we, as a collective within our community, within our classrooms, what do we aspire to create?
What are the types of learners we hope-- what do the young people look like when they leave from our local high schools with a diploma on their name? What skills, knowledge should they be leaving with? And then how do we create those structures so that those opportunities to develop those skills and that knowledge starts from the very beginning, even going back to before kids enter our classrooms? And what is our role as a learning community?
So for me, as an educator or a principal or for me as a father or a brother, so how can I be supportive to this shared vision that we collectively have designed? And then the other key piece that we nudge and poke and prod a bit about is, how do you do that in partnership with our young people?
So oftentimes, we adults, we always come with a mindset of we need to build, design to better serve our kids. And it's always with this really great positive intentions. But oftentimes, the answers or the greatest ideas come from the young people themselves.
So here, just listening to our learners and what are their needs. What are they seeing be successful? How do we amplify and multiply those opportunities? And how do we continue to nurture ideas that come from the voices of our learners as well as the ideas and partnerships from our communities?
Well, I think that sounds like a great time to actually throw in a question from a student.
Hi. I'm Timmy from Mueller Park Junior High. What does personalized learning look for me, and how will it change my grades?
That's a great question. And I would ask you back the same question. How would you like learning to look like for you? How might we make it much more personal for you so that engages your interests, things that motivate you, opportunities that you see need to be changed, and you can be the driver of that change?
And so I would flip the question a little bit and hope that you see that in a personalized competency-based learning environment, there is an opportunity for learners to advocate for how they will demonstrate their learning, how they will show evidence of growth and progress and also the opportunity to apply learning in much more contextualized ways.
So oftentimes, I was just in another state last week, and a learner wanted to apply a lot of her English and social studies standards to women in history. And so she said, here's how I'm going to demonstrate that I'm developing my writing skills, my literature skills as well as my understanding of key moments in history through women's movements or movements driven by women.
And that was just so inspiring to hear her passion, her purpose come out. And I would say back to you, is what would that passion or purpose be for you? And what might that-- how might you flip the standards that we're learning in your classroom so that it's tied into your purpose and your aspirations?
In response to grades, I think grades is a completely different conversation. I think there's a number of ways to record evidence of learning. But one piece that we have seen in classrooms across the country and communities across the country is that the voices of our young people are actually amplified much more in learning environments that are personalized.
I think we see kids that are much more motivated because they see that they're applying the content in ways that are inspiring to each one of them, much like the learner I referenced around movements driven by women. She was all in. She couldn't stop talking about it. She was so excited about the opportunity to demonstrate her learning in this way.
And what we have seen is that achievement and growth on traditional measures of assessment certainly increase. But most importantly, it's that the learner agency, learner voices is greater than it ever has been because of the opportunities to personalize learning.
Yeah, that was a great answer, Virgel, and I really appreciate this question. For me, I think about the transparency that comes with this type of approach to teaching and learning. From a student's perspective, I know it can feel intimidating to start a school year and to question, what are all the things that I'm going to have to learn? And just to wonder what the teacher is going to bring to you each day.
Imagine if you knew, you had the roadmap in front of you of all of the different competencies that you knew you needed to master and a teacher that was your partner that came to you and said, we're going to master these things. I believe in you. I know you can do this. How would you like to master those? And that's the piece that Virgel's bringing up. What are the things that interest you? Tell me about you as a person. How do we bring your interest and cultures into the classroom and really celebrate that as part of your learning experience?
And the grades piece then, you actually know if you get an A, that's because you mastered all of that content. You know that you have succeeded. You know that when you move on to the next grade level, that there's no gaps in your learning.
And what that means is that when you eventually get to the end of your K-12 experience and you're graduating from high school and you receive a diploma, that that diploma actually means that you have mastered everything that was required of you in K-12, and you are really ready for success. And so many students in our traditional system, they get that diploma right now, and we call it the honesty gap because we're not being honest. They're not ready.
It's because we decided that they learned enough by the end of the school year, and we moved them on. And we move them on with big gaps in knowledge. And so I think from a student's perspective, that must feel really wonderful to know that they're telling me what's expected of me. They're giving me the power to design, co-design how I'm going to master that, and then at the end of the day, I'm going to be ready.
That's wonderful. And that jumps right into some questions we have about what you're talking about there, the gap between K-12 and higher education. Because when a student leaves the K-12 classroom, we often expect them to have certain sets of skills. But we're finding, like you said, the honesty gap exists, and there's some issues where students then transition into the workforce or into higher education.
So what does that transition look like from a PCBL standpoint, and what are some considerations that you might be seeing for transcripts, curriculum changes that students should be-- students and parents should be aware of? But also, what's to get excited about at the national level? What are some things that are maybe shifting to help support, in policy, that shift from K-12 to higher ed with PCBL?
Yeah, well, you've actually hit the nail on the head on probably the biggest area that we need to work through. So when we talk about systems change, and we say it's complex, this is a-- this is a challenging piece of this. I would say the K-12 system is starting to come around to the need, I think, to create more personalized and efficient learning systems quite frankly because the pandemic accelerated the need to think differently about how to educate students.
In some cases, we're seeing some of that change in the higher ed space, but not quite at the level I think that we would hope. And so what we have been advocating for at Knowledge Works is to bring both the K-12 and the post-secondary systems together to really create a cohesive framework for what it means for a student to be able to progress through K-12 and into post-secondary and be able to do that in a competency-based personalized learning environment.
So I would say systemically, there's some work to do. I would also say that there are a lot of questions that emerge around things like transcripts. So is a high school transcript going to be looked at the same way by colleges? We've talked to tons of admissions officers. They're highly intelligent people. They get transcripts from all over the country, all over the world.
They know how to look at these and be able to tell what student is really ready for success in their institution. But the reality is is there's still a cultural fear, a barrier, if you will, that this looks different from how myself and I got into college or I got into work. I want to make sure that my student is set up for success. So I think we have a lot of work to do. There is a great organization, Mastery Transcript Consortium, who I know is also partnering with many districts in Utah to start to figure out this transcript piece.
At the end of the day, I think if we can make this shift culturally, a transcript that not only says this student has absolutely mastered everything that's expected of them in K-12 and look at all the unique individualized ways that they've brought into their learning experience and all the incredible projects that they've completed, that's going to be a much more exciting transcript to an admissions officer than some of the ones that look more traditional.
But I do know that there's culturally a lot of shifts that we've got to make in order to get that to become a reality. So Virgel, I know you deal with this firsthand from the classroom perspective, so I'll let you chime in there.
I would say Utah has a great head start in answering this question, actually. When you look at Utah's profile portrait of a graduate, that was built in concert with stakeholders across the state. And the unique part about Utah's work is that it was designed pre-K through graduate-level degree.
So it's not just K through 12, but PK through 20, which was such a unique but also a great strategy for thinking about transitions to higher ed and the workforce, and which just builds-- which really prepares Utah learners for whatever decision they make about their futures post their K-12 experience.
Now, a piece that we are also seeing across the country is in addition to the portrait profile process done in collaboration with higher ed and workforce streams, is also doing that with our academic core standards and professional certifications. So similar processes to what Utah has done in addition to building those attributes and developing those attributes within the portrait and profile PK through 20, imagine also doing that with our content standards, our academic standards, and also taking the opportunity to connect those to our professional certification.
So learners are not only leaving our K-12 systems with a diploma, but they're also leaving with professional certifications that give them that head start in pursuing those professional careers post-high school, which might not require the collegiate career, but launches them into their profession, into the workforce, into supporting their families and communities much more quickly.
And so that's being done a lot. And then what comes in those conversations, it leads to the previous learner's question around grades, is imagine if your evidence of learning is also tied to professional certification or to credits tied in higher ed as well. So now I'm double-dipping my evidence of learning. So it's connected to standards at the college level, standards in the K-12 level, or to an area of professional interest that I will pursue post-high school.
I love that this focus isn't just on preparing our students for college, but also preparing them right out of high school for a career, for giving them that head start on professional certifications. Switching just a little bit, something that I know I've witnessed here in Utah as we talk to educators about what PCBL is, is their eyes light up. They get excited. They love this idea of learner agency.
And then they try and fit it back into the box, fit it back into what their school is or what their district is and the requirements. And it completely breaks. It doesn't work anymore. So on a systems level, what needs to change in order for PCBL to work and to be an integrated practice in classrooms?
I love the question because it's a common one that comes up. And here's what happens. Educators see this work in action, or they read the research, or they hear about the vision, or they meet colleagues across the country that are doing this work, and they become excited. Return back to our home schools, and they try to do this with their 30 kids or, if they're a high school teacher, their 150, 200 kids, however many they might have, and are not able to personalize and differentiate learning experiences for their kids because it's on them.
It's them as the superhero teacher trying to turn over every stone possible to meet the needs of their learners, to give learners that voice, to give learners that opportunity. But if you're doing that in isolation with your kids, it's really difficult. And we see educators doing that and really pushing themselves to create those opportunities.
But where it's really successful is when we're not thinking about or I am not thinking, as a single educator, thinking about my kids. It's where we collectively, as a team of educators, are thinking about our kids and how we support-- how we collectively support the entire population of our learners within our schools. Because then we can start to think about, how do we-- how do we target instruction to meet particular gaps or particular opportunities?
How might we regroup kids, not on an annual or semiannual or a quarterly basis, but how do we do that on a daily basis to target instruction, to target interventions, to support opportunities driven by learners? When we go from one educator trying to personalize learning for a group of kids to 30, 50, 60, a system of educators doing that, that vision of personalized competency-based learning becomes much more of a reality than when done in isolation by the superheroes that we call our teachers.
Yeah. That's a great, great perspective and a reminder too of why it's going to take our policymakers at the state and federal levels to really reimagine their role, I think, in the education system. What we have really been encouraging policymakers is to create some policy space to trust these local innovators, to try something different and to figure out what you can learn from that.
So we have really been encouraging states to create, whether it be pilot programs or flexibility waivers or whatever it might be, to just create a little bit of policy space for a district that has a new and innovative idea about how they want to educate students. Give them the space to do that. Study it. What do you learn?
And if you get promising ideas that emerge from that, let's figure out how to make that possible for more districts across the state. So I'll give you a couple examples of common policy barriers that bubble up, that when districts are given a little bit of space, they're able to re-imagine and redesign systems differently. So we often hear about seat time policies in policy context when it comes to these more students-centered learning models.
And what that means is we have created a system that every state says that students have to attend a certain number of days, complete a certain number of instructional hours each year, in order to move on to the next grade level. The challenge of that is we've actually said to our schools that we value more the amount of time that a student is sitting in a seat instead of how much that student has actually learned.
And that's a different value judgment that then starts to create all sorts of constraints around how we then teach and learn in order to complete those required number of hours. Imagine if we instead said, we want to make sure that these students master this content by the end of whether it be the calendar year, the grade level, the K-12 experience. All of a sudden, that creates significant amount of freedom for educators to design teaching and learning differently.
Another one we hear a lot is around how funding is calculated for school districts. Well, we know our school districts, our schools, they need money and resources in order to educate our students. So it is a very scary thought to run the risk of losing that money. Well, oftentimes, most states calculate funding for school districts based on how many students are sitting in a desk on any given per pupil count day.
Well, in a personalized competency-based, student-centered learning environment, you might have these really dynamic learning experiences and partnerships with communities, our workforce partners. Imagine the students out doing this incredible workforce internship. And they're not in their seat on that given day. Well, all of a sudden, that student doesn't count, and the school doesn't pull the money for that student to educate that student for the year. That's an awful policy barrier.
And yet the student is receiving this incredible learning experience aligned to their interest, their career aspirations. So these are the kind of barriers that we've got to figure out how to parse through. And the first step is really creating some policy space to trust our local leaders to try something different and then to submit their learnings back to policymakers so we can figure out what barriers need to be removed and scaled to other communities across the state.
That's amazing. And I just want to pull on this thread a little bit because Virgel, you said something in your answer I'm going to go-- ties everything really well together for me about teachers go out to conferences, see a national perspective. They hear what's happening in other states. They get so excited. Or they hear somebody discussing what you just talked about, Lillian, of the fight against required seat time versus letting students have choice.
I'm curious. What other things do you see, policies, ideas, routines across the nation that get you excited about PCBL and the work that's happening either in a statewide system or in a local system that maybe could translate well back here to Utah?
Sure. I'm happy to kick-start. I think that we've been talking a lot about the personalized learner-centered approaches, which are just critical because oftentimes or all of the time, learning has been personal, either personally successful or personally tragic, oftentimes. And so now that we're addressing that and we've spoken a lot about that, I think the piece that is exciting to see is the focus on competency designs.
So we have talked about the skills gap, about the diploma meaning something. And the reality is, as a former high school principal and superintendent, I'll be very honest and say I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I've shaken many hands of graduates and wondered what's going to happen versus really knowing that they are ready.
And so one of the competency pieces, the reason I bring up the competencies is because when we collectively design these competencies that scale PK through 20 and learners are a part of that design process, learners understand what proficiency or mastery means, what it looks like.
Last week in North Dakota, the previous week in Texas, where learners can clearly articulate the level of rigor they are to achieve, that competency, whether they are five years old or they're 18, when learners are able to articulate that, to demonstrate because they understand that the level of required rigor and are able to apply it in unique ways, that's the point where Lillian referenced earlier on the diploma actually being a guarantee rather than a promise.
It's a guarantee or a hope. It's a guarantee that you are ready for whatever aspiration you will pursue moving post our high school graduation. And those competency structures are the big piece. We oftentimes, in education, we talk about-- we talk about rigor. We talk about taxonomy scales. But the reality is, we haven't applied that very well systemically.
We rely on curricular resources to do that for us. But when learners are able to articulate the science around rigor and taxonomy scales and competencies and are able to do it in highly personalized ways, that's the part that is super exciting to see, how it grows from the individual classroom to across an entire system and in partnership with their community.
Yeah. Just thinking about that piece and how transformative it is, it also reminds me of an area that I'm extremely passionate about, which is the ever-evolving conversation around school quality and how we measure success and how much of a disconnect there is right now between our current assessment and accountability policies and what is happening in these student-centered learning environments.
And so I think what's really been exciting to me is to watch how communities all over the country are beginning to ask questions about how we could design assessment systems differently to be more responsive to these student-centered approaches.
So how do we make sure that our assessments are moving away from these multiple choice assessments that are really getting at such a narrow level of knowledge to these rich performance tasks, where students come ready to demonstrate the incredible knowledge that they're gaining in these systems and that they can assess when they're ready instead of waiting until the end of the school year and taking an assessment and then waiting another six months before those results even come back.
So I think there's some really incredible innovations and great questions that are emerging in that space that are going to be hugely impactful for educators as those systems begin to evolve and take hold. And similarly, we're starting to have some great national conversations around how to design accountability systems differently. Accountability systems, for the past 20 years, have been extremely top down.
The federal government has really defined what states are supposed to hold schools to to determine school quality. And we are now seeing a shift, an interest in centering those conversations about school quality in the very communities that are owning and supporting students success. And I think that dynamic, that shift is going to be really meaningful for these learning approaches that are trying to really capitalize and create momentum around learner agency.
All right. Thank you guys so much for that. We want a little praise. We want to know, what are some of the strengths about Utah PCBL, and have you seen any innovative bright spots in your time working with Utah that we could share with our listeners?
Would you like to start, Lillian? Or do you want me to?
Yeah. Go ahead, Virgel. I'll round out this one.
OK. I think a piece that I'm sure Lillian will comment on is the work of USBE and just how inclusive the team is in thinking about, how do we collect and capture the voices and thoughts and ideas from folks across the state? We don't see that. It's not a common practice to see-- for a state department to be as inclusive as USBE has been.
And it's one I want to applaud that. I'm sure Lillian can expand on that. But the work of individual communities, though, really starting to think about, what is the-- what is our own profile of a graduate? What do we-- what's that guarantee that we're going to tie to that hope, those hopes and those aspirations that each of our kids and families come to our communities with? We're seeing a lot of traction around local profiles and portraits of a graduate and also conversations on how it ties into the state's version as well.
Really great, honest conversations about, what are the strengths and assets that we have that we can collectively lift to support the creation or the opportunity to develop these attributes through our learning experiences? That's been tremendous to see, not just in some communities in Utah, but across all communities in Utah. I think folks really wrestling with community partnerships, so recognizing that our educators are doing tremendous work.
But what we're seeing in communities is other untraditional partnerships starting to come to fruition to help support learning in highly personalized ways, so community partnerships, the internships that Lillian spoke of. And then when we start to-- when Utah communities have had these conversations, what that has also sparked is a refocus on evidence of learning.
So if I am applying standards while on a family vacation or on a walk in a community park or while I am working and serving or doing community service, it sparks different conversations that educators and community partners are now starting to have.
And for us, what we talk about is that we consider that the evolution from school system to learning community, where it's not just us as learners and educators working to do this work, but we collectively, as a community, identifying what that vision for learning is and how we can all collectively support that. And we're seeing that in communities across Utah in these real purposeful, intentional conversations and, most importantly, the design processes that help personalize competency-based learning to become a reality in your state.
Yeah. Just to build on that, when I think of Utah, and I brag on Utah all the time with all of the states that we work with, Utah is moving faster than any other state, but moving, as Virgel said, so intentionally with the stakeholders in communities. There is a trust there that you don't see in other states, a belief that these communities and the vision that they're building is something we, as policymakers, can learn from and can support and can create the policy conditions to ensure that that momentum continues to build.
I mean, I can't remember off the top of my head exactly what year the Utah State Board really-- State Board of Education really got started in this work, but I want to say it's only been five or six years. And we have seen everything from a competency-based education pilot through the legislature. We've seen the development of a statewide portrait of a graduate, the aligned competencies, and efforts to make those really meaningful for educators in classrooms.
We've seen the creation of a personalized competency-based learning framework. They've tackled tricky legislative things like how do we define instruction? What if instruction actually meant all of the various different ways that students could learn instead of just instruction in a classroom, in a seat, on any given day? They're even beginning to tackle the really hard questions, as I alluded to earlier, about assessment and accountability systems and how those need to shift to really be more meaningful to communities.
And it has been such a joy to watch from afar and sometimes get to also be there to support the ideas that are emerging from these conversations. But there's no question that Utah is very much a shining star in the national scene when it comes to advancing these more student-centered learning approaches.
Thank you so much. We're so proud of the work that the State Board of Education is doing and all of our educators as well. So thank you for reinforcing that.
And thank you so much for your time today. We've really appreciated all of the different perspectives in both national and local and the classroom all the way up to making policy decisions. Where can we-- if teachers are interested about the work that Knowledge Works is doing, where can they find you on the internet?
Yeah. So feel free to search us, knowledgeworks.org. You'll have access to all of our tools and resources, videos from educators across the country who are presenting their wins as well as their challenges and problems of practice. There is also a Knowledge Works network if folks would like to connect.
And actually, Utah has its own access to the Knowledge Works network with access to educators and systems leaders and policymakers across the country that are on the same journey or have just started and would like to learn from other Utah-- from other educators, especially those in Utah. So I will share that access. We can perhaps provide a link for you all. But yes. And on Twitter, of course. Feel free to follow Knowledge Works on Twitter or Lillian Pace or Virgel Hammonds. It'd be great to connect in all ways.
Thank you guys so much. We'll be sure to link those in the show notes as well.
Thank you so much for your time today. We've really appreciated the discussion.
It was great to meet you both. Thank you.
We loved it. Thank you.
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My favorite thing that came from this interview, and there were a lot of amazing, wonderful, favorite things, but I loved how Virgel gave us that car analogy, that if you're not the one driving, you probably don't know how to get anywhere. And that is totally what it's like to be a student when you're not the one directing the learning.
Exactly. And I love that they bring in that car metaphor in a way that allowed us to understand that students should be driving, to some degree, themselves. They should be the engine for their learning, rather than a passenger in the car that's been designed by another person. Another way to think about it is that I always-- I didn't know I was doing PCBL when I was teaching classes. But one of the things I always encourage students to do is we're putting you in a field, something you want to search for and work with.
Stay inside that field. But there's a lot of space there. And so go wherever you want on the field. Examine the grass. Look at the animals. Explore the trees. Look up at the sky. Whatever you want. Find something that helps you want to learn and explore the world around you.
And I thought that that was really always such a valuable way to get students excited about writing because instead of me coming down and saying, we're all going to be writing about x subject, it's let's write about whatever you think is most pertinent to your life and your career. And I saw a lot of kids really work that way in really interesting ways.
Absolutely. I think it was a really great thing to have Lillian and Virgel talk to us about what it looks like at a systems level, what policy looks like, but also what it looks like as a classroom and what supports those teachers need.
Absolutely. I think one of the things that we think about a lot when it comes to PCBL, at least when I think about PCBL, is how do we get it down to and train teachers in the classroom to change how they operate? Because it is a different operating procedure in a way that helps them to do it with their students.
But there's so many layers to any kind of institutional change like PCBL, where we have to think about statewide legislature systems. We have to think about policy, higher ed, local control agencies. I mean, there's so many different things. And it's really cool to see that national down to individual classroom perspective that Knowledge Works gave us today.
Right. And not necessarily changing policies immediately to work for PCBL, but just allowing the flexibility so that we can try these things and see that, oh, it is working for us. And then maybe the policy follows behind that.
Exactly. It's not something that-- I think everyone that I've talked to about PCBL, it's not something that's going to change overnight.
Right.
And nor should it. It's something that incrementally will change and reinforce some of the cool ideas that are happening in the classroom and then continue to build and build and build.
Yep, exactly. So hopefully this brought you along on your PCBL journey, and we hope you enjoyed listening to our wonderful guests from Knowledge Works.
Yep. We'll see you next time.
Bye.
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For the last half of December, UEN Homeroom will be taking a break to enjoy the holidays. We'll be back in January with brand new episodes to share with the Utah community.
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