Students now learning at their own pace.
Competency-based education, established in a few colleges, is on its way to K-12 schools. The Florida Department of Education has cooperated with national education organizations that advocate a new reality for teachers. K-12 schooling soon will be very different from what most adults experienced.
Traditionally, a major part of teaching has been talking — the “stand-up and deliver” method. Even today, less-well-informed state leaders believe that teachers who had high scores on standardized tests can pour more knowledge over students, and thus are the best teachers.
The gradual introduction of technology into the classroom has started to make major changes in what happens in schools. Little by little, teachers are spending more time managing student activities and less time talking to a whole classroom of students. Students have started to work at their own pace. At the same time, some students are working on reading while others are working on math, social studies and other subjects.
The notion of grade-level skills is vanishing. Like myself, one student can be good at math and move on at a rapid rate, but another can be slower at reading and take longer to achieve new reading skills.
Students never will be purposely asked to wait for others to catch up and never will fail a grade level; they will just continue to progress. The managing task for teachers will be complex. Just like the adult workplace, ability will be demonstrated in a wide variety of ways with little or no use for traditional testing.
In years past, I have seen such classrooms work very well, but only for short periods of time. Within two to three years or less, teachers burned out. Resources were limited, class sizes were too large and administrative support weakened. Innovative technology and political support have started to increase the chance for longer-term success.
From 1965 through 2005, I participated in a variety of research studies of classroom teaching. We often found that at any grade level, teachers with greater amounts of college credit in the academic fields did much more talking or presenting than teachers with adequate but wider content backgrounds. Teachers with less-deep but wider backgrounds were more attentive to individual student needs. Students tended to respond more positively to attentive teachers and more often ignored the talking teachers.
Who then should be encouraged to become teachers? Surely bright people, but perhaps those with narrow academic interests should seek other fields of work.
To be successful in the newer continuous progress competency-based classroom, teachers need to be people-oriented with the ability to deal with multiple tasking. They need management skills, the ability to work with a team of teachers and the desire to change when new methods and technology are introduced.
True, the amount of needed content background varies with the level of school — elementary, middle or high school. Yes, teachers most often need to know more about the subject matter than is already known by students. But good teaching is being redefined.