History and Overview of CBE

Video Transcription

Ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to look at the history and an overview of CBE, or Competency-Based Education. For today's lesson, I've chosen a quote by Soren Kierkegaard, which states that, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." So even though we're going to go backwards to look at some of this information, we're going to see, then, how we can apply it and use it as we move forwards.

By the end of the lesson today, you will be able to connect competency-based education to mastery, and specifically to student self-pacing. You will also be able to connect to competency-based education to student proficiency.

First, let's go ahead and take a look at the history of competency-based education. Now, competency-based education really came into play in the 1960s. That's when it hit the scene. And it was developed in order to ensure that students were taught skills that they needed to know beyond just the high school level, making sure that we were preparing students to be ready for college and career.

Competency-based education is really based on outcomes-based education. OBE, or Outcomes-Based Education, really is focusing on designing the instruction backwards from the outcome. So looking at what you want students to know and then moving backwards so that you can ensure you're able to get them there. In this, students usually have the opportunities for what's known as self-pacing, so making sure they're working at their own rate. And there are many different flexible pathways within competency-based education, so lots of different ways to get to that end result.

It's important to know that competency-based education can be implemented in many different ways. You could focus in on face-to-face education. This could be online education or even hybrid models, which are popping up all over the place, that really allow for both face-to-face instruction, as well as stuff that students are doing online and outside of the actual classroom.

Competency-based instruction outcomes tend to really be tied to a lot of real-world applications. So students have the opportunity to see what these skills are going to look like outside of the classroom, but it also helps them to be able to really self-pace so that they can hone in on things that are really applicable to what they're going to be interested in doing and, hopefully, move through those quicker, either that they know better or that aren't as applicable to what they need to be learning.

Now let's take a look at CBE and competency-based curriculum. So CBE is really the working definition of competency-based education's five principles. In 2011, an organization called iNacol organized this educational summit to discuss various elements of competency-based education. Included in this summit were educators, instructional leaders, educational advocates, everyone who was there to help see what is a better way for us to be teaching to our students.

And during this summit, there were five design principles that were developed when we look at competency education. So the first of which was that students are going to advance upon demonstrated mastery. The second was that there should be explicit and measurable learning objectives that are designed to really empower students' learning. The third is that assessment needs to be meaningful, that these learning experiences need to be positive for the student.

The fourth is that students are to receive differentiated support and that this differentiated support needs to be rapid, immediate, so that students are getting what they need based on where they are in their learning process. And the fifth is that the learning outcomes need to include the application or the creation of knowledge, the idea that students are taking what they're learning and they're able to move it beyond the classroom walls.

Now that you've reached the end of today's lesson, you're able to connect competency-based education to mastery and student self-pacing. You've also been able to connect competency-based education to student proficiency. Now that we've reached the end of the lesson, I want you to think back over the teaching that you will be doing. What do you think will be the hardest part of incorporating those components and competency-based education into your lessons?

Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in the video. The Additional Resources section will be super helpful for you. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so that you can easily target the resources that you want.