Making Mastery Work

Making Mastery Work: A Close Up View of Competency Education (2011) reports on the work of the Proficiency-based Pathways Project, studying eleven schools with a wide range of competency based education models.  It details the extraordinary work happening in each grantee school based in seven key areas. Making Mastery Work was written by Nora Priest, Antonia Rudenstine, and Ephraim Weisstein.

 

Proficiency-based Pathways Project: In 2010, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Gates) approached the Nellie Mae Education Foundation (NMEF) about partnering to learn more about competency education models in New England. Both Gates and NMEF have a long-standing commitment to supporting educational models and programs that have the potential to increase student motivation and engagement in order to ratchet up achievement, particularly in communities where academic success remains elusive. Both see enormous promise in competency education, while realizing there is much about it that remains unknown. Thus they launched the Proficiency-Based Pathways Project to support and foster understanding of current state-of-the-art competency education practices in New England.

 

Grantees: The varying approaches of seven grantees can be viewed in the links below:

• Big Picture Learning 
• Boston Day and Evening Academy
• Diploma Plus
• Casco Bay/Expeditionary Learning 
• MSAD15 
• The National Center on Education and the Economy
• Vergennes School District

 

Webinars: To provide an opportunity to hear from the schools directly, four webinars were offered in 2013. You can hear all four webinars here.  

• Creating Systems of Assessments  
• Aligning Competencies with the Common Core 
• Student Experience: Pacing and Personalization  
• Spanning the Grades:  A look at elementary, middle school and high school competency-based models