The research & review data that reDesign gathers helps our team center educator & youth perspectives in the design of new curriculum & assessment tools. This round-up of lessons learned from recent user feedback makes connections between designing tools that support competency-based education & the most effective ways to support adult & K-12 learners when trying something different.
As the Research Lead at reDesign, my role intertwines with our team of designers who create competency-based resources for educators to use in their communities. This year, we have increased formal opportunities for teachers, leaders, and young people to inspire, review, shape, and reflect on our work. This helps us better understand how educators can shift from focusing primarily on content standards towards integrating transdisciplinary skill sets into meaningful projects and units.
This week, I got deep into analyzing insights from multiple sites and studies that shared a common thread of trying out new, future-ready approaches to building competency during instruction and assessment. In between laptop sessions, I took my own beginning steps towards trying a meditation-heavy yoga class for the first time. As I stretched on the mat, I found striking parallels between what our user input revealed and the experience of challenging yourself to give a different approach a chance.
Takeaway #1
The right scaffolds can turn stumbling blocks into connections and possibilities.
As someone who hasn’t found meditation to come easily, I was intrigued but nervous to embrace a class that required sustained internal awareness along with movements I hadn’t done in forever. My injured back was stiff and my breathing patterns didn’t feel natural, until the instructor came over and offered an adjustment that accommodated my current abilities. Likewise, when educators and students are faced with a new possibility for their learning, it can be exciting yet overwhelming. This is where scaffolds come in, as personalized supports that let the learner know, “You’re not alone in this”, and “I have some ideas that might guide you”.
Scaffolding can also ground learning within the context of students’ lives, their emerging views of the world, and their surrounding environment. Both academic and social-emotional skills are developed within communities, even when aiming to activate individual thinking. When learners at any level engage in demonstrating what they know and can do, they’re on a journey nested within collective cultural, social, cognitive, and language practices, which an effective facilitator can help unpack and illuminate.
Examples of Scaffolding & Supports from the Data
- When asked what kinds of resources would be most helpful to implementing competency-based learning, educators said that given an oversaturated marketplace and low remaining bandwidth, they needed to know what to focus on, with an inclination towards the easily digestible and application-oriented. They identified flexibly available, bite-sized chunks of activities, courses, and tip sheets as most practical for their capacity-building as they got oriented to a fresh framing for teaching and learning.
- In a focus group on teacher guides, a participant explained that while we might be hesitant to be overly directive, reducing her planning lift would free up time and energy to adapt the pieces that needed modification or expansion for her students, opening up more possibilities to “make it her own” because of that head start.
- Students who used our argumentative essay materials noted that when the facilitator eliminated confusions about navigating the task materials and the text was reduced to be less dense, they felt better equipped to complete cognitive-heavy challenges.
Takeaway #2
Supporting learner agency includes providing pathways to alternative options.
At times, providing learners with “voice and choice” ends up being limited to choosing a direction for fulfilling an assignment rather than fully tapping into learner perspectives, interests and problem-solving. However, students do benefit from being able to initiate planning, manage information, and assess their current readiness when choosing from materials/tools, format, content/topic, and learning pathways.
For me, seeing through a new approach to yoga took more than a supportive entry point – it also required creating the conditions for informed choice and risk-taking, such as psychological safety and becoming skilled at gauging my own comfort level. Similarly, teachers set the conditions for developing knowledge, skills, and mindsets by facilitating learner decision-making about where to go next in their learning and how. When we released reDesign’s Future9 Competencies, we took a whole child approach to K-12 learning that aims to make the potential steps on that journey more visible while promoting teacher and student agency.
Examples of Leveraging Options from the Data
- When we asked educators and leaders to share first impressions of the Future9 and gauge their interest in using them, the average rating on a scale of 1-5 was 4.7. Competencies like engaging in inquiry, designing solutions, and expressing ideas had strong universal appeal across diverse orientations to the field. Yet, there was individual variation in the other skill sets that had the most appeal and relevance to their teaching. The group inherently recognized that depending on their school setting and subject area, the parts of the framework that had the most resonance might vary, and that was okay! They could find their own hook, while remaining connected to the broader enterprise of fostering rich exploration, problem-solving, and communication.
Takeaway #3
Affirmation matters when it comes to maintaining interest and engagement.
A small, initial success is what gives learners confidence to return to the mat and keep trying something complex that requires productive struggle. Many of our learning tools push students to examine their thinking process bit-by-bit, rather than rushing towards an end product. If these self-monitoring, critical thinking, and self-assessment skills are an underdeveloped muscle, it may feel excruciatingly difficult at first to hit pause and make time for formative stopping points that allow students to practice the underlying skills that they need to get from point A to B. But, over time, those mini-victories can accelerate their learning the next time around, and help them see mini-strengths within the bigger assignment. In yoga class, when the teacher celebrated my effort and presence, it made me feel like if I kept showing up, that incremental effort would lead somewhere greater.
Examples of Valuing Affirmation from the Data
- High school and college students participating in a pilot of reDesign’s personal narrative task noted that usually, they’re simply asked to produce an essay on a certain topic. It took them longer than expected to move through making meaning not just of their topic, but of the type of writing task they were engaged in…but, ultimately, they saw that it deepened their understanding to think through formative activities connected to each step, coupled with encouragement and prompting from our facilitator that moved them forward.
- When our Youth Advisory Council was asked to consider what kinds of supports they might need to feel prepared for future careers, learning, and life, they cited trusted adults like parents or teachers as integral, acknowledging that it wasn’t just about their experience and knowledge, but also, their ability to serve as a sounding board and build students’ confidence.
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