The Pedagogy of the Academic Program at One Schoolhouse, January 2024

Introduction

One Schoolhouse partners with independent schools to advance their diverse approaches to education through our Academic Program and the Association for Academic Leaders. When we are successful in our mission, our partner schools deliver excellent, sustainable, and inclusive programs that equip learners for the future.

Our Academic Program is designed to supplement exceptional independent schools and to help Academic Leaders fill out a robust academic program for their community. It does not endeavor to replicate holistic school life, but we do seek to support students in developing essential competencies, challenge them with dynamic learning experiences, and prepare them for college.[1] Courses in our Academic Program are intentionally developed to be learner-driven, informed by seminal and emerging education research, and iterated on by data gathered within our own living practice. The pedagogical approach is designed backwards[2] from competencies and the lessons are personalized to honor learners’ unique needs[3] and identities.[4]

This approach suits this particular moment well, as educators deeply consider what it means to learn, how learning experiences are designed and facilitated, and how learning is measured and assessed. We are asking foundational questions, such as: what is knowledge? Who has it? What creates it? And what voices, sources, and experiences contribute to its creation and dissemination? Teaching and learning are evolving to meet current needs, and a pedagogy that focuses on developing competencies in the learner has the flexibility to be able to meet this moment.

Competency-Based Education and Academic Program Competencies

At the Academic Program, we believe schooling should be organized around how students – each with their own unique identity – grow.  This belief positions learning, rather than teaching, as the design driver of our courses and all their components. Our teachers create scaffolded learning experiences that support and guide the student journey towards mastery[5] and the acquisition of competencies, but it is students who drive learning forward through goal setting, planning, and meaningful reflection.

We have adopted a competency-based approach, where learning is measured through a student’s demonstration of mastery, because we believe this pedagogical approach best sets students up for future success. We define a competency as a cultivatable aptitude or collection of skills, abilities, and behaviors. The Academic Program has two school-wide competencies that reflect our values, and are observable and measurable.[6]  In taking our courses, students will (1) gain academic maturity, and (2) engage constructively in a diverse and changing world. To our two school-wide competencies, each teacher adds one to three course-specific competencies. Together, these competencies honor the intersection[7] of the traditional disciplines with noncognitive traits and habits.[8]

Academic maturity is a set of skills and habits of mind that allow a student to successfully navigate and thrive in any learning environment. In our courses, students not only practice responsibility, intellectual adaptability, interpersonal flexibility, self-regulation and organization, and a range of communication skills, but they are also taught to make healthy decisions around time, self-care, and limits.[9] In considering the last several years since the pandemic, we see the need to help students develop academic maturity as essential to their future success, in school and beyond. Their ability to self-direct, take responsibility for their learning, and learn collaboratively, among others, will be essential tools for an ever-changing world.

Students cannot develop academic maturity in a vacuum. Authentic relationships and deep connections between teachers and students are essential for developing this competency, and as such, dedicated and explicit space is provided at the beginning of all of our courses to lay the foundation for a strong student-teacher relationship. These relationships are deepened across the course through regular check-ins, personalized feedback, and reflective exercises.

We understand engaging constructively in a diverse and changing world to encompass a combination of interpersonal, intercultural, and adaptive skills. Students develop this competency by spending the bulk of their learning time in the research, exploration, interactive and problem-solving activities that shape cultural competence and neural capacity.[10] They come to actively embrace diversity as a source of strength and enrichment, seek out, value, and incorporate experiences and perspectives different from their own, and act with empathy in their interactions with others.

In order to develop this inclusive world view, students practice empathy, work collaboratively, respectfully engage in disagreements, encounter people and ideas that are different from their own, and demonstrate mastery through real-world application.[11] By engaging in activities that make learning relevant, students practice intellectual curiosity as they assimilate facts to solve an interdisciplinary problem, analyze a new situation, create meaning from a range of sources, or build something new. [12] These learning experiences equip them to engage constructively in a diverse and changing world.

In developing these two school-wide competencies, alongside course-specific competencies, students are well-suited for an evolving future. They will be able to tackle yet-to-be-defined challenges and opportunities, apply their learning to new problems and situations, and nimbly acquire skills and abilities needed to succeed in a diverse, faced-paced, and dynamic world.   

Course Design

To ensure our courses support students in building mastery and developing competencies, teachers design backwards[13] from competencies. Beginning with where we would like students to be at the end of our courses is not a new pedagogical approach; when coupled with competencies, however, our courses direct students towards growth, in both content knowledge and skills, rather than finite artifacts of learning. Our courses are more cyclical than they are linear: scaffolded assignments offer students opportunities to incorporate new learnings and new ideas, to draft and revise, and to rethink previous assumptions and biases that might have informed their original thinking and approach. This iterative process simultaneously requires that students incorporate various forms of feedback, including self-assessments, into their learning and supports their growth in this area. In this way, our courses are structured to de-emphasize a final product, maintaining a focus instead on competencies and learning goals. The process of learning, how a student progresses towards mastery, is the goal, rather than a final product of learning.  

Lessons, then, are designed to honor learners’ unique needs[14] and identities.[15] Teachers design multiple pathways that give students choice in how they access and develop their learning. The learner, then, is not only centered in the course, but their identity, experiences, and goals as a learner structure how they navigate the learning journey through an Academic Program course.  

While teachers design backwards from school-wide and course-specific competencies, students approach each course by setting a series of personal learning goals that will organize and structure their learning. To achieve these goals, students develop a plan, monitor their progress, and then reflect on their learning process. Incorporating important aspects of current understandings of metacognition, often described as “thinking about one’s thinking,”[16] a course structure organized around goals and personalized by students through self-regulation[17] allows students to become “expert learners,” capable of transferring learning from one context to another or applying learning to new problems, challenges, or situations.

It is the opportunity to regularly reflect on their learning that enables students to develop the ability to understand and assess their own learning. Students reflect on “how am I learning?” just as much as they might consider “what am I learning?” Because research suggests that reflective self-assessment is difficult, particularly for those encountering a topic or skill for the first time,[18] a student’s self-assessments are complemented by other types of feedback and assessment, including formative assessments, peer feedback, and teacher-graded assessments, all of which are linked to clear rubrics with measurable criteria for success. These are essential components of all of our courses, providing students with robust inputs that support and inform learning and provide students insight into how they are progressing towards their learning goals. Not only does this approach help students accurately assess their learning, it also helps them identify how they can grow in their ability to self-assess. 

In a learning environment where a student is aware of their own learning and is able to identify successful strategies and where they have grown, in both their skills and knowledge, they are able to take from a course something far more enduring than a product or artifact of learning. They have begun the process of consciously and intentionally building a flexible learning toolkit, one well-suited for a multitude of future learning pursuits. Competency-based learning is inherently process-oriented, allowing students to experience learning as an opportunity for growth, rather than a context in which producing final products signals learning is complete. For both teachers and students, this emphasis of process over product requires a different approach to teaching and learning, most notably the role each plays in a course.

The Role of the Teacher When Students Drive Learning

What the student has learned, both about themselves and the world, and about the discipline itself, is what we hold to be the central purpose of education, over what a teacher has taught. In our courses, teachers and learners adopt roles that differ from ones they might have previously held in a learning environment: teachers at the Academic Program act as a designer and coach, helping students achieve their learning goals, progress towards mastery, and develop competencies, while learners take responsibility for driving their learning process.

In order to do this, our teachers create a safe learning environment in their courses, one in which students can take risks, try new learning strategies and approaches, and come to value mistakes as learning opportunities. Teachers provide resources, feedback, and support, helping students identify and make use of what will best facilitate their progress towards their learning goals and overall growth.

A Future-Looking Pedagogy

We believe that the future of learning is competency-based and process-oriented. The responsibility for learning must rest with the learner, while the teacher must scaffold meaningful learning experiences that culminate in authentic assessments grounded in the real world.

We have held this to be true for many years and the emergence of accessible generative artificial intelligence tools, platforms, and related resources has further reinforced this position. GenAI tools and resources have forced all constituent groups in education to pause and ask important questions around the purpose, process, and products of learning. Many of the assessment strategies that have been classroom mainstays for decades have lost their utility in a context where GenAI tools can create quality artifacts of learning. These assessment strategies focused on an outcome, a final product, rather than the learning journey and competencies developed in the creation of that final product. Learning organized around process, grounded in metacognition and self reflection, and oriented towards real world application is particularly well-suited for this moment, and can seamlessly integrate these new and evolving GenAI tools into a student’s learning toolkit. Feedback, iteration, revision, reflection: the opportunity for all of these is expanded and deepened in this age of GenAI. Because Academic Program courses are already designed to foster and develop these abilities, we are excited for the ways our teachers will incorporate GenAI into learning experiences, assessment strategies, and reflective moments.

These same tools have also prompted a set of questions around what it means to create knowledge, who has access to and can disseminate knowledge, how knowledge has been used to marginalize and erase, the ways power and knowledge are intertwined. We have been wrestling with these questions for many years and have sought to support our teachers in diversifying their learning resources, materials, assessments, and course structures to ensure all students feel a deep sense of belonging in our courses. Seeing themselves and others like them in the curriculum, seeing their identities and experiences both honored and centered in how learning is organized, and seeing their choices as a learner valued is powerful for many students. Our practice of and commitment to intentionally designing for belonging creates a safe space to question and challenge conventional wisdom, practice, and expertise. It provides students the opportunity to understand the world in new and different ways and equips them with the abilities necessary to create a more just world.

Conclusion

We believe that this approach to learning represents the future for all learners, but also recognize that it represents significant shifts for schools, teachers, students, and the parenting adults who support students. This is, and has been, a multi-year and ongoing process at the Academic Program, one that has enthusiastically been embraced by our teachers and the students who enroll in our courses. We look forward with excitement and enthusiasm to where this pedagogical approach will take teachers and students at this time of great change.

[1] Gube, Maren and Suzanne Lajoie. Adaptive expertise and creative thinking: A synthetic review and implications for practice. ScienceDirect. Mar. 2020. Web. 26 Nov. 2020.

[2] McTighe, Jay, and Grant Wiggins. Understanding by Design Framework. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. 2012. ASCD. Web. 6 Jan. 2021.

[3] Dobo, Nichole. Online Learning: Students Want Quality, Not Just Convenience. The Hechinger Report. June 2017. Web. 8 Jan. 2021.

[4] Levine, Eliot, and Susan Patrick. What Is Competency-Based Education? 2019. Vienna, VA: Aurora Institute. Web. 14 Oct. 2020.

[5] We recognize that mastery can be a problematic term, given its connection to master-slave language.

[6] Schaef, Sydney. What IS the difference between competencies and standards? reDesign, 2016. Web. 11 Nov. 2019.

[7] Martin, Jonathan E. Reinventing Crediting for Competency-Based Education. New York: Routledge, 2019. Print.

[8] Patrick, Susan, Kathleen Kennedy, and Allison Powell. Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education. Vienna, VA: International Association for K-12 Online Learning, 2013. iNACOL International Association for K-12 Online Learning. Web. 6 Jan. 2021.

[9] Damour, Lisa. Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. New York: Ballantine, 2019. Print.

[10] Quartz, Steven R., and Terrence J. Sejnowski. The Neural Basis of Cognitive Development: A Constructivist Manifesto. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20.4, 1997. PubMed. Web. 6 Jan. 2021.

[11] MacLeod, W. B., D. L. Butler, and K. D. Syer. Beyond Achievement Data: Assessing Changes in Metacognition and Strategic Learning. Vancouver: U of British Columbia, 1996. University of British Columbia. Web. 6 Jan. 2021

[12] Ebersbach, Mirjam, Maike Feierabend, and Katharina Barzagar B. Nazari. Comparing the effects of generating questions, testing, and restudying on students' long‐term recall in university learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology. Jan. 2020. Web. 16 Jun. 2020.

[13] McTighe, Jay, and Grant Wiggins. Understanding by Design Framework. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. 2012. ASCD. Web. 6 Jan. 2021.

[14] Dobo, Nichole. Online Learning: Students Want Quality, Not Just Convenience. The Hechinger Report. June 2017. Web. 8 Jan. 2021.

[15] Levine, Eliot, and Susan Patrick. What Is Competency-Based Education? 2019. Vienna, VA: Aurora Institute. Web. 14 Oct. 2020.

[16] Chick, N. Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. 2013. Retrieved 1/9/2024 from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.

[17] Metacognition. MIT Teaching and Learning Lab. Retrieved 12/15/2023. https://tll.mit.edu/teaching-resources/how-people-learn/metacognition/#:~:text=Metacognition%20is%20the%20process%20by,and%20then%20evaluate%20the%20outcome.

[18] Kruger, Justin and David Dunning. “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” Journal of personality and social psychology 77 6 (1999): 1121-34.