Competency-based education (CBE) has the potential to improve teaching and learning, empower students to own their learning, and help students develop the skills and knowledge to be successful in their post-secondary lives. But CBE can be challenging and complex for practitioners to implement. It requires a focus on everything from aligning systems, to developing a common language, to establishing grading practices, and much more. We’ve seen practitioners jump into later stages of implementation without first ensuring the core building blocks of a mastery model are solid. 

In our work supporting dozens of high schools in designing and implementing high-quality CBE systems, we have learned a great deal—primarily around the importance of ensuring that the many complex and interconnected systems of CBE are phased in strategically and intentionally. Not only does this make CBE models more effective, but it creates positive momentum among practitioners and students. 

We have also seen how important it is that practitioners have access to guidance and resources on CBE implementation, which takes about three to five years. That’s why we developed a resource to outline the key phases of CBE that can provide guidance and help address common challenges around implementation. The resource leads with three key goals, which anchor practitioners in a high-level purpose for implementing mastery: 

• Improved teaching and learning: Learning experiences are designed to enable mastery and there is clear alignment and transparency between what students are expected to learn and the pathway to get there. 
• Individualized student progression: Students learn at their own pace and move on as they demonstrate mastery. 
• Student agency and investment: Learning goals are transparent and students and self-direct their own learning.

It then delves into the three phases that we suggest schools focus on to implement CBE: developing a common language, building core systems, and personalizing pathways. These phases are sequential and intended to help practitioners understand the importance of building a solid foundation for mastery. The final section demonstrates how practitioners can think about engaging in and tackling each phase. 

At this year’s Aurora Institute Symposium, we hosted a Meet the Expert series focused on CBE implementation. We were joined by about 40 practitioners from around the country who are seeing successes and overcoming key challenges around CBE implementation. Led by Springpoint’s Executive Director, Elina Alayeva, and Director, Leadership and School Design, Christy Kingham the robust conversation touched on CBE implementation, using this resource as a guide. Practitioners had positive feedback on the resource, along with great ideas and questions; we refined it based on what we heard. While attendees’ experience and context ranged widely, they were deeply invested in implementing strong mastery models and hungry for valuable tools and resources like this to help guide their work. 

It is our hope that this tool contributes to the field’s understanding of both what goes into implementing CBE and how to sequence the work. Is this a useful resource for your context? We encourage practitioners to send us feedback so that we can further strengthen this resource. For even more about CBE, take a look at our case studies that show what fully realized CBE models look like in high schools.