Defining Proficiency

#EdChatME
​February 27, 2017

On Monday, February 27, 2017, I moderated the #EdChatME Twitter chat all on the topic of "Defining Proficiency." #EdChatME is a group of Maine-based educators who are focused and committed to sharing practices and ideas, collaborative problem-solving, and connecting educators in and beyond our great state.  Maine has been deep in the throes of designing educational systems around the principles of proficiency-based learning for several years, yet many districts still don't actually have a clear definition of what "Proficiency" is.  This chat sought to help that issue.

---

For the last five years, I've been working with the teachers and administrators at AOS #94 to develop an innovative and student-centered approach to learning.  In listening to conversations with them, hearing their concerns, desires, and frustrations with how learning was happening in our district, we decided to tackle the issue of "defining proficiency" straight on.  Much of the feedback that I heard about students can be summarized  as follows:

• Students don't retain information year to year
• Students aren't invested in their own education

So we looked at each of these three issues.
Q) Why aren't students retaining information year to year?
A) After investigating how we teach and measure learning, the vast majority of assessments we use are based in a low-level of cognitive demand.  Simply put: we don't challenge them cognitively enough.  

​This chart (above) shows the percentages of assessments at our high school, based on the levels of cognitive demand according to the Marzano Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  70% of our assessments are at a Comprehension level or lower.  This is a huge discovery, because deep learning happens when we are challenged to critically think beyond "execution" and "summarize."  Our current work is involving understanding the criteria of proficiency, and how those criteria explicitly relate to the standards/learning targets we are working on.

---

Q2)  Why are students not invested in their own education?
To answer this, we are looking at the work of researchers, behaviorists, and scientists who study "intrinsic motivation."  Daniel Pink's book "Drive" lays out three key components to environments that support and nurture intrinsic motivation:

• Autonomy
• Mastery 
• Purpose

Do our classrooms, curriculum, and assessment systems clearly, explicitly, and intentionally provide students with opportunities for them to own their own learning progress and pathway?  Do our systems show clear purpose in what they are learning and why (beyond simply passing... that's not good enough, and our students deserve a better answer than that).  The realization that perhaps our environment is a contributing factor to student lack of motivation and investment in their learning is a huge "a ha!"

​
To help us with this work, we unpacked these three terms to help us best define what it means to be proficient:

• Content
• Complexity
• Autonomy

​
​And we used those terms to help us create a simple, yet explicit definition of what it means to be "proficient:"

Independently apply all expectations

This clarity of language has helped many educators throughout our district, not only be able to understand the tenets of proficiency-based learning, but to communicate these tenets to the parents, community, and, most importantly, the students.  We are by no means 100% "there," and we still have a lot of work to do.  But I also feel that having this grounded common language as a core piece that, when things go awry or when situations get difficult, we can come back to this common language, definition, and principle and move forward based on this simple, common idea.

Let me know what you think of all of this!
-MDC