⁠Leading a Competency-Based Elementary School: The Marzano Academies Model

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Brian Cassina. Brian is the founding principal of John E. Flynn, a Marzano Academy, and currently serves as Director of Teaching and Learning for Westminster Public Schools in Colorado. Dr. Cassina has been an educator since 2006 with a background as a high school social studies teacher, instructional technology coordinator, principal, and now director of teaching and learning.

[00:38]

And he is the author, with Dr. Robert Marzano, of Leading a Competency-Based Elementary School, the Marzano Academy's Model.

[00:46] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

Brian, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. Glad to be here. So you're the founding principal of a competency-based school, and we've probably all heard of competency-based learning. But what does it mean to have a whole school that was founded as a competency-based school?

[01:05] SPEAKER_00:

First off, Johnny Flynn Marzano Academy is located inside Westminster Public Schools, which I mention only because Westminster Public Schools is a PK-12 school. competency-based education school district. And so we had been working in the competency-based education realm inside of our school district for almost 15 years. So when we opened the John E. Flynn and Marzano Academy under the pretense that it would continue the competency-based work that Westminster has been doing, we had a lot of foundational work to kind of plant our flag on as we opened up the school. But in a nutshell, I would say that a competency-based school is one that really starts to rethink how we organize and progress students through learning.

[01:50]

And more importantly, that we want to, instead of using age-based classrooms, all eight-year-olds are going to be grouped into a learning environment because they're eight years old. Instead, we kind of take the approach that it's better to group kids by like performance or current ability levels into classrooms and then progress students through their learning based off of demonstrations of competency, not because they finished out fourth grade and are moving on to fifth grade. And so that was kind of the foundation to our competency-based model. Of course, there's lots of teaching and learning and school design and structures that go into that, but that's kind of the general premise.

[02:31] SPEAKER_01:

I wonder if I might ask about the elephant in the room that probably a lot of people are wondering about a competency-based model. Don't you end up with really little kids and really big kids together? And does that create issues? How do you handle that issue of age not being the determining factor in who's in what learning environment?

[02:50] SPEAKER_00:

That is a great question. And that's actually one of the primary concerns that we work with a lot of schools and districts across the country as they try to implement competency-based education. And that is one of the primary concerns we hear, both from teachers not wanting to have, you know, a six-year-old and a 12-year-old in their classroom with different developmental stages of emotional and social development, but also from parents that are saying, I'm not comfortable with my second grader being in class with a sixth grader. And so what we try to do is limit our age spans in our schools to really be no more than two years chronological age years difference between There are exceptions to that. Sometimes we do have classes that may span three years, but we really do try to limit that to two years where when and where possible. And when we do see that three year span, it's usually with older kids.

[03:43]

We would never have a first grader with a fifth grader. The developmental differences are just so different at that stage is that you do need to take that into consideration.

[03:54] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's get into the idea of competency-based learning a little bit more, because I think that's probably the kind of defining feature of both the book and the school. So if we think traditionally about grade level standards, you know, we teach students two grade level standards, and then typically we move them up to the next grade level, kind of on a time schedule that's not really related to their mastery of those standards. How does that work differently? And how do you think about it differently in a competency-based model?

[04:24] SPEAKER_00:

So we have a tagline here in Westminster that says time is the variable while learning is the constant. Whereas in a traditional model, sometimes learning can be the variable while time is the constant, right? The end of May, the school year ends and everybody advances to the next grade level. So it requires having a robust recording reporting tool where we have all of our state standards and we still follow the Colorado academic standards. We've created proficiency scales, which those standards are embedded into. And then the teachers plan from those proficiency scales.

[04:56]

They are the curriculum that we have. And then they'll use the curricular resources that we have as a school district to teach those proficiency scales. And then students' competencies are measured directly against the proficiency scales. And once they have demonstrated competency in all of the, let's say, third grade literacy standards, then they move on to the next level. If that happens in May, then they move on at the next school year. But if it happens in November, they'll move on to that next level in November.

[05:27]

And so we don't require students to wait until the school year ends to move on. But also on the flip side, the same child can move through literacy standards really quickly and maybe not so with math. And so it's not uncommon for us to have a, let's say, a fourth grade age child that may be a fifth grade literacy student and a third grade math student at the exact same time. And so we really kind of bring the content to the child. instead of requiring the child to go to the content because of their age.

[05:57] SPEAKER_01:

So Brian, the book is organized around 16 indicators categorized in a couple of different groups like competency-based instruction and context of the school and curriculum and so forth. What are the indicators and where do those come from?

[06:13] SPEAKER_00:

The indicators are actually straight from Dr. Marzano's research. Most folks in education probably have heard of Dr. Marzano and the wide body of research that he has conducted over his 50 plus years in the industry. And so after about five or six years ago, he kind of noticed in his work that schools were attempting to implement a lot of great research-based practices, but it was kind of a a la carte menu. You know, we'll do vocabulary, but we're not gonna focus on cognitive skillsets.

[06:49]

And so kind of what he wanted to do was create the Marzano Academy's model and the 16 level indicators are the foundation of that Marzano Academy's model. And really it was from his meta analysis of all the educational research research-based proven strategies that when schools conduct these strategies, it increases student achievement. And so he identified 16 that he believes were the biggest kind of bang for your buck, we'll say, and put it all into a single school design. And that became the 16 school level indicators, as well as the Marzano Academy's model.

[07:27] SPEAKER_01:

I wonder if we could dig in a little bit to the indicators around curriculum, which are in chapter three of the book. You talk about proficiency scales, cognitive and metacognitive skills, vocabulary, explicit goals for student growth. And we mentioned that your school that you were the founding principal of does follow the state standards. So you're not exposing students to different content or different standards, and students are still expected to master grade level standards, but then they're moved on in a way that, as we've discussed, is different from what schools commonly do. Talk to us a little bit about how teachers think about and manage curriculum, knowing that it's not necessarily tied to one group of students for one year, but moves at a different pace.

[08:13] SPEAKER_00:

Great question. Yeah. So when you are a competency based teacher, it really requires you to be a content expert as well. And what I mean by that is just because a child, let's say, has mastered all of the content through third grade math and they're now a fourth grade math student. That does not mean that, first off, that they might have demonstrated proficiency at that at one time. But, you know, learning is not always permanent.

[08:39]

And sometimes some of those foundational skills of third grade math are required for fourth grade mastery. And so the teacher needs to have a good understanding of the third grade content so that we can what we call backfill or use those third grade content standards as scaffolding for the fourth grade. But also it requires the teacher to know what's coming up in fifth grade, right? Because you're going to have some students that need that backfilling and need that scaffolded support for their fourth grade instruction. And other kids are going to be ready to move on to the next level of fifth grade for a particular standard. And so we actually have created resources where you can see how a particular, let's say, Common Core math standard scaffolds from third grade to fourth grade to fifth grade.

[09:24]

We've provided these resources to the teachers. And so they can say, oh, you know, these group of students, I'm going to do a small group and we're going to be backfilling to the level three standards to help them attain those fourth grade math content that we're working on. But then this small group that I'm going to form, they've got this fourth grade content. And so I'm going to actually push them up into the fifth grade content and give them that opportunity. And we can in our competency based system, we allow for teachers to do backfill and push up. And we also allow that fourth grade teacher to give instruction and actual credit of competency, measures of competency to a fourth grader in fifth grade content.

[10:05]

And so you're no longer just a fourth grade teacher. You really become more of an intermediate teacher or just a math teacher in general. And so there's a lot of instructional planning that's a little bit different than just following a fourth grade math curriculum that this requires and having a deep understanding of the content itself and the state standards, which is where our proficiency scales really come into. There's a scaffolded progression of knowledge in those scales that teachers need to understand and backwards plan from. But really what we found is once teachers understand wrap their heads around that and become proficient with that type of instructional planning, they become better fourth grade teachers because they have such great understanding of the third and the fifth grade content that they're working with as well.

[10:54] SPEAKER_01:

That's so interesting because obviously we would agree that in any, say, fourth grade classroom, you have students who are at a third grade level in a particular subject, students who are at a fifth grade level, but typically the teacher is confined to the fourth grade curriculum. The teacher doesn't have either that knowledge or that flexibility or structures in place to address above or below grade level standards. So one thing I wanted to ask about with that is, you know, the school you were a founder of runs pre-K through sixth grade. What happens when a student masters all of the sixth grade standards before the end of sixth grade? Where do they go from there?

[11:28] SPEAKER_00:

Great question as well. So I'm going to answer this now from the district perspective, because this is actually a challenge that all of our schools have. On the top end, when you have a student who is kind of pushing beyond the traditional curriculum taught in the school, we do require and expect our teachers to be able to provide that next level of instruction. So we routinely will have eighth grade teachers working at the high school level with eighth grade students. And that's in coordination with our high school teachers. And that's something at the district level that's required a lot of coordination.

[12:01]

We actually have a whole host of standard operating procedures about how do we know an eighth grader is actually ready for high school content? Not to say that middle school teachers aren't capable of making that determination, but sometimes the one teacher's perception of a student, capabilities may not align with a different teacher. So we've kind of put very specific guidelines in place about a child must be ready to in order to push them into the next level. And so that's been one thing. We do have concurrent enrollment actually from our middle school to our high school. So like I mentioned earlier that, you know, you may have a student who's performing above grade level in math and maybe below grade level in literacy.

[12:41]

And If we get to a point where that student's needs can no longer be met in math at the middle school that they're at, we do have concurrent enrollment with the high school, or maybe they'll start their day at the high school, take a math period or two at the high school, and then come back to the middle school to finish out their day. But then on the flip side of that is when you have a traditional fifth grader aged kid that's ready to go on to the middle school, to our comprehensive middle school, but they aren't at a sixth grade level yet. That's another area. Do you retain them into the elementary school as a sixth grader because they're not performing at grade level? And we've made the decision that we don't retain kids because we're going to bring the appropriate level of instruction to them. So we also require that all of the middle schools have teachers that are willing and able to teach down to the elementary level for sixth grade students.

[13:30]

And so we provide both that targeted instruction at their current school. And then we also ensure that when they do make that transfer, so like at the high school level as well, we have high school teachers that are teaching all the way down to sixth and seventh grade content at the high school. And same with our middle school at the elementary and vice versa. So it really does require the system to be coordinated though. And this is where we always say, if you have one school in the district attempting to do competency-based education, It's a lot harder to achieve the true tenants of CBE than if you have an entire school district that is working in step in unison and creating those procedures.

[14:08] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think that's a crucial point. And when I first asked about the indicators and you explained the fit between those indicators and our tendency in this profession to kind of cherry pick the parts that sound good and easy, but they don't really work in isolation, do they?

[14:23] SPEAKER_00:

No, they do not. You know, it's not to suggest that, let's say, having a personal project is one of the school level indicators for the Marzano Academies. And that personal project is really to try to engage kids into learning by applying learning in their own design. And that's a fantastic strategy that could work in any school anywhere in America. And it's not to suggest that that strategy wouldn't by itself have positive impacts. But when you tie personal projects into student efficacy and agency and inspiration, another two of these school level indicators, now you're starting to cook with gas because now you're starting to use a student's inspiration and create student agency that through the application of a personal project.

[15:08]

And so I think when you start to really think about how do all these school level indicators blend together and work together, that's where you really start to see the power of having a consistent and coordinated academy model like this.

[15:21] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. One particular change I wanted to ask about that schools may have a tendency to cherry pick and overemphasize without enough other elements in place is around grading. So let's say a district wants to shift to competency-based grading and reporting, and all of their focus is on the report card and what we're going to send home to parents. What are they missing in only thinking about how we report grades in a competency-based way?

[15:50] SPEAKER_00:

Well, the first thing that I would say is that the traditional point-based, percentage-based letter grade system, and we say this to folks all the time, it's not accurate of what a student actually knows or is able to do. I was a high school teacher in a traditional system. I didn't teach in CBE. I would have about 60% of my final grade come from test quizzes and final exam. And the other 40% came from, did you do your homework? Did you bring in a box of Kleenex?

[16:17]

Did you get your syllabus signed? And there was all points attached to this. And so in a lot of ways, 40% of that semester grade was not based off of student mastery of the content or the demonstrated abilities. And so what we really do is if a kid walks out with an 85%, but let's say that their actual mastery was closer to 60%, we're giving them a misperception as well as their families about what they're actually capable of doing. So in a competency-based education system, a student only gets credit for demonstrating mastery on content. there are no more points for turning in a signed syllabus or bringing in the tissue box.

[16:58]

And so that really starts to be a lot more accurate. And when the demonstration of competency is strictly based off of state standards, not only is it only based off of what a student can do, but you know exactly which standards the student is able to demonstrate and which standards they're not able to demonstrate. And so it gives a very clear picture of student ability. It looks different than a traditional report card, and it does require a school or a district to have a concerted communication plan with their parents and community about what this will look like. But we've really found that once our community understood what they were seeing with the report card that we present to them, that they actually preferred it because it's a much clearer picture of what their student is able to know and do.

[17:47] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I think we don't appreciate how much the traditional grading scale is just arbitrary. It is loaded with points basically for nothing, or as you said, bringing a box of Kleenex to school. Absolutely. I know there are a million details to competency-based grading and reporting, but one thing I wanted to ask about is, do students still get a GPA that they can use to apply to college?

[18:09] SPEAKER_00:

So we do not provide letter grades or a GPA for our K-8 students. When they get to high school, we do provide a GPA so that they can apply for scholarships and to colleges, of course. And that's one of the challenges with being a competency-based system is oftentimes it feels like we're trying to squeeze a round peg through a square hole. This is a perfect example of that. When you're not using letter grades to calculate a GPA as traditional schools do, it's a very different metric, especially when we aren't giving participation points and points for boxes of Kleenex. A lot of the things that we noticed was there's a lot of grade inflation when you get credit for bringing in a box of Kleenex.

[18:47]

And our students don't get that great inflation. Their GPA, and we have an algorithm that essentially takes the scores on the proficiency scales across all the subjects and creates a GPA for them that we can submit to colleges and scholarship applications. But there are no fluff points. And so that's one area that we've had to work with our teachers and our students to get comfortable with. And there's abilities for them to be able to still get a 4.0 GPA.

[19:15]

but it requires them to take their understanding of the content and demonstrate it and apply it in new ways. And so that was a bit of a transition for us. By far, I think the high school transition from a traditional to a competency-based system was probably the stickiest, maybe the thorniest of the whole system. But I think once we were able to educate our students and our teachers and our parents about What does standards reference reporting look like? How do you perform on this? And I would say the other key is we give kids multiple opportunities to demonstrate competency.

[19:49]

It's not as if there's a final exam at the end of the unit. And if you get a D on that or an F, even worse, You know, it's hard to come back from a single bad test score in a traditional system when it's point based. You can't make up those points. And so a lot of times kids find themselves in holes early in the semester and then they can't really claw out of it. And so one thing that we really emphasize to our students. to our community and to our teachers is kids have the opportunity to demonstrate competency even if they need to take three or four times to do it if they can demonstrate that competency and they can show that they are able to perform whatever the state standard says they get credit for that even if it's maybe two or three months after the class has moved on from that unit

[20:32] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's so powerful. I remember taking an analytical chemistry course in college and getting a bad grade on a test and thinking, I really want to know this stuff. I know I'm going to need it for my future courses and as a teacher. And I remember just that disappointment that I can never get those points back. Even if I learn this stuff and really get it down cold, it's not going to help me in the course. So you're saying it's not that the points are averaged and...

[20:58]

You know, it's the traditional kind of computation of a grade, but it is based on their ultimate mastery of the content, even if it does take multiple times.

[21:09] SPEAKER_00:

That's exactly correct. We believe that learning is the constant. And so it doesn't matter when you demonstrate that competency, it's that you do demonstrate that competency. And a lot of kids need multiple attempts. It's not that they can't do it or won't do it, but they just aren't going to get it the first time. And so being able to provide students with multiple attempts.

[21:31]

And that was a bit of a transition for some of our traditional minded teachers at the beginning as well. And to be able to give a student. because this was the classic case of resistance to this was, well, the kid just didn't study. They didn't show up to class for a couple of times in the unit. They didn't study. They fluffed it off.

[21:49]

You know, they deserve to have a failing grade. We heard that they deserve the failing grade, right? And what we really needed to kind of reset that mindset to say, it doesn't really matter what the circumstances were for them to be where they are. If they are willing to to still come in and try and demonstrate that competency at a later date, why would we not give them that opportunity, right? We want to incentivize learning. We don't want to de-incentivize it.

[22:15]

And so we've really found that regardless of circumstance, if you give kids the opportunity to demonstrate learning and sometimes they just need to have, you know, sometimes unit two is going to provide schema that was missing for them in unit one, which is what prevented them from demonstrating that competency. That's another thing too, is we say to our teachers, do not delay your scope and sequence of your instruction because let's say maybe 35% of your class didn't get it the first time. Move forward. And we've done a great job of being able to show when certain common core standards will spiral back into the curriculum. And so even if they didn't get it in unit one, they may get it in unit three with unit two scaffolding knowledge now to be able to lay on. So we found that we do get a much higher success rate when we expand out our timeframes for when students can demonstrate competency.

[23:07]

And another way is how they demonstrate that competency as well. We have what's called anytime, anywhere learning. And that is that any student, and it's really done more at the middle school and high school level, but any student who wants to use an experience they've had at, let's say, a job or maybe a Boy Scout project that they're doing, it doesn't matter. If they're doing something outside of school, and of course it has to be prearranged with the teacher. They have to say, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'd like to demonstrate.

[23:35]

This is the proficiency scale I'd like to demonstrate my competency on. We allow for them to submit work they're doing from outside the school walls as demonstrations of competency, because that too is obtaining mastery of learning targets. So it really does provide more opportunity. And I think it's a more realistic and accurate approach way to go about educating kids.

[23:59] SPEAKER_01:

Love it. Well, thank you for sharing so much perspective on how these different pieces fit together. Cause I just have to say, I again, want to discourage cherry picking and, you know, kind of. Approaching something that you've been working on for, say, 15 years on the cheap, which I think there's a tendency to do in our profession. We go to a conference, we hear about something that sounds exciting, and then we think, okay, and how can I do it for $10 or less? But you said this has been a decade plus journey for your district.

[24:25]

Is that right?

[24:26] SPEAKER_00:

It has been. And, you know, we still are the largest PK-12 school district in the country to be implementing competency-based education across all schools. And when we started out, there were not a whole lot of people playing in this sandbox, right? And so a lot of the early work we did was us kind of figuring out what didn't work, quite frankly. And, you know, give an example of that is initially we thought we needed to move away from, we don't have grade levels here. We have what we call levels.

[24:54]

So level two is equivalent to second grade, but we call level two. Initially, we thought in order to break that grade level mindset that we had to go to 16 levels. so that people wouldn't see a level associated with a grade level. That ended up being really confusing because they still did. And so, you know, level 11 was actually closer to eighth grade, but it was being seen as, you mean my kid's almost done with high school? No, he's in eighth grade, right?

[25:20]

And so then we went to nine levels, and then that posed a different problem, but similar in its vein. And so now we landed on 12 levels. And so that took us about six or seven years, though, of having to kind of move through some of those challenges. And I can't That's one example of about 100 I can give you of where we made some early mistakes that I think a lot of systems now, if they learn from our early mistakes, they can avoid those and probably get to where we are in a much shorter timeframe than the 15 years has taken us.

[25:52] SPEAKER_01:

And even so, I think people's patience and long-term commitment is something that I hope they'll imitate as much as anything else from you, because this does not sound like overnight work, even with all the guidance that your book provides.

[26:04] SPEAKER_00:

No, it does not. And it requires the buy-in from every stakeholder in your system, from the school board of education, all the way down to even your support staff. One thing that a lot of school districts, I think, believe this is true and we do here is, in a lot of ways, the bus driver is the first and last face that kids see in their school day, if you think about it. And so we really believe that every position in the school district, regardless of what role they play, they need to be versed in that we do things a little bit differently here and are able to at least kind of speak to it, at least at the surface level, depending on the role. But buy-in matters. And our school board every year reaffirms its commitment to competency-based education almost more symbolically than any other reason.

[26:48]

But 100%, it takes time and commitment. And, you know, there's no shortcuts to any place worth going. And so you got to be willing to kind of you know, put in the work and follow that compass of we know this is the right direction, even if it's hard.

[27:02] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Leading a Competency-Based Elementary School, the Marzano Academy's Model. And Brian, in addition to picking up the book, what are some learning opportunities if people are interested in finding out more about a competency-based model?

[27:16] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so westminsterpublicschools.org. We actually hold a three-day summit here in our school district in October. And that's to share our experience, to talk about those pitfalls I mentioned earlier, and also share the successes we have. And from our past years, the people that come out and do that three-day summit learn a ton. The Aurora Institute puts on a big competency-based conference every October as well.

[27:40]

That's another place that has fantastic resources and competency works is another place. And then also Dr. Marzano, he is a champion of standards referenced in competency-based education. And a lot of his materials, both through his published books, but also the Marzano Academies itself, also has a ton of information. And the Academy is a model to follow to obtain and achieve competency-based education.

[28:05] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Brian Cassina, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[28:09] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.