Competency-Based, Project-Based Learning as the Orientation to Learner-Centered Education
As adolescents transition from elementary school to middle school, they deserve an orientation to this critical period of development that is personalized, relevant, socially embedded, and open walled. What better way than a co-designed middle school dance?
A Call to Help Learners Acclimate to Life at Embark
Entering my third year at Embark Education, I felt a newfound sense of comfort and confidence in my role as an educator. Instead of an underlying hum of worry about a particular lesson or the arc of a project, I felt confident and calm in the place that I had gone to routinely each day for the past two years, and coincidingly, the person that I’ve become. Upon reflection, I believe the most significant contributing factor to this new sense of confidence is that I arrived back at a place that now felt like home.
Take a dive into our micro-middle school through the lens of our learners, educators, alumni, and parents.
Instead of beginning a new school year in a relatively new place, it felt like the cyclical joy of a holiday with the weeks prior to its start filled with excitement and anticipation. I realize this feeling takes time to manifest - truly an emotion that cannot be rushed. Familiar faces become recurring characters and new faces are introduced to me with a reputation that precedes me, and even more comforting, one that is synonymous with our school. When others speak of Embark, I am humbled and proud to feel a sense that they are speaking about me and the many other educators who have contributed to how special this place is.
Excitingly, this year presented a unique, rewarding challenge: designing a project that would not only build community among returning and new learners, but also introduce all learners to our slightly redesigned competency-based, learner-centered, and embedded school environment within Pinwheel Coffee. That is, there were new educators. There were new rules of engagement and expectations for learner engagement and ownership. There was a facet of learning required by everyone - from the more senior eighth graders to the experienced educators stepping into our spaces again, but in a way, for the first time.
We wanted to provide a project that was less embedded in our coffee shop and more centered on an onboarding and orientation of life as a learner at Embark.
After careful deliberation with our Senior Director of Programs, Brian, I decided to have our learners co-design and host our first-ever middle school dance. It would offer all of the same components of Learning Experience design that we target at Embark - namely, the selection of two of our competencies to guide instruction and learning; open-walled experiences that encourage an understanding that learning can happen wherever and anytime; and a personalized, learner-centered approach that ensures each learner feels connection, relevancy, and authenticity in their engagement. However, as I will share in greater detail later, the process of learning would take center stage, rather than the final product. Above all else, I wanted learners to feel comfortable and excited about being a learner at Embark after this experience - as long as they engaged in efficient and collaborative project management while learning “How to Embark,” I would be fully satisfied with a culminating event with only a learner-created Spotify playlist, a few potluck items, and a few decorations that met the theme. Learners would be happy with that more attainable goal (hint: soda does wonders, and once songs are playing, the atmosphere does enough to ensure smiles and excitement), while I can facilitate and guide them through the onboarding and orientation in a more playful, integrated way.
It’s worth noting that this project was initially conceived as a multi-faceted homecoming event with three primary goals:
Strengthen the community bonds among current learners;
Create a more connected alumni network by inviting former learners back to our spaces; and
Engage current and former parents in a fun happy hour to better support learners at home
This offered another opportunity for learning with regard to planning and design. It’s important to include possibilities for the moonshot idea - to see what is possible. However, this multi-goal scenario - as Brian reminded me - would likely and unfortunately result in failure, simply because the goals were too high up to achieve in only three weeks. Rather than seeing this as a dichotomous choice between the moonshot and the low-lying stars, Brian offered a third way: could this project build upon the success of a previous project where learners designed imagery for our newly-expanded coffee shop walls, and in doing so, perfectly align with Embark's mission and vision, which is to help learners "courageously inquire, engage, and discover a sense of self in an environment that is learner-centered, integrated, and embedded"? If that is our guiding star, then it would be critical for us to focus on the first goal, and consider other opportunities for the other two to happen sometime in the future or facilitated by another adult at Embark concurrently. Upon reflection, an addition to this project came through a subtraction.
Bringing a Competency-Based Approach to a Social Event
Transforming a seemingly non-academic event like a middle school dance into a competency-based, learner-centered project required careful consideration. Through my experience working with educators throughout the country, I have learned and emphasized the difference between hands on, dessert-style projects and those that more beneficially include the critical elements of high-quality project-based learning: integration of essential standards, or minds on, and a sustainable hook to drive the why and allow learners to always have an intrinsic answer to, “Why am I learning this?”
With this in mind, my approach was to lean into our belief that educators can include more than the teachers of record - in other words, they are our barista staff at Pinwheel Coffee, parents with a particular expertise in their field of work, and most frequently, community members and local organizations. These educators would, then, act as consulting experts in event planning, promotion, project management, and dance to offer opportunities for learners to better understand best practices and be exposed to the sub-competencies of agency and quantitative reasoning. Then, with these two key competencies as guiding lights for instruction and assessment, learners could courageously inquire, engage, and discover a sense of self through developing a growth mindset, understanding their impact on others, and recognizing adults in our community as role models to learn from. Of course, rigorous, applied academics would coexist - budgeting for the dance, comparing vendors for price and quantity using ratios and proportions, spatial reasoning for layout of the dance floor and food station - oh, and all of this occurring in structured sandboxes, ripe for healthy, argumentative dialogue and collaboration. Believe me - the amount of time, energy, and communication needed for finalizing the theme was enough demonstrable evidence of the importance of these durable skills at such a critical age of development!
Embracing Open-Walled and Place-Based Learning
Perhaps, one of my favorite aspects of education at Embark is our Open-Walled Learning (OWLs). These are opportunities for learners to step outside our routine learning environment and engage with the world around them. To enhance the learning experience for the planning and hosting of our first middle school dance, we incorporated several open-walled learning opportunities that align with the key pillars of this educational approach - all of which were co-designed and established as educators at Embark.
Learning line dances to overcome the awkwardness of starting to dance. Middle school dances are awkward - they were when we were that age and much hasn’t changed. Some want to dance right away, while others understandably struggle to muster up the courage. So, this activity - which was inspired by an idea from one of our consulting parents as an introduction and integration of developing a growth mindset - embraces our "Safety & Comfort" pillar by creating a brave space just outside of learners' comfort zones. It also addresses "Hands-on & Experiential" learning by engaging learners in physical, practical skills - very similar in the intention of shop shifts at Pinwheel Coffee, as learners develop hand-eye coordination, professional communication with customers, and task orientation to fulfill orders.
Participating in improv sessions at another middle school to practice "yes...and" thinking. What happens when one’s song doesn’t play, or it does play and no one wants to dance? What if a line dance brings out a full crowd of socially-normed, synchronized dance moves that are foreign to some learners? How do we still engage and take the leap to just go for it? Nearby Montessori Academy of Colorado was up to explore these questions, so we partnered for a morning of "Engagement & Relevance" by connecting learning to learner voice and choice and encouraging intellectual curiosity. New norms and expectations of improvisation, such as try anything twice and keep the ball in the air, were adopted, offering learners the opportunity to participate without perceptions of judgment. This experience also contributed to "Rigor & Academic Impact" by developing durable skills that create spillovers of support for academic growth, such as creativity and mindfulness.
Attending a local high school's homecoming committee meeting to observe successful collaboration and event planning. Another great example of leveraging one’s network to establish community partnerships! Brian’s wife happens to work at East High School, and given the excitement and community that returns for these fall, multi day events, it was instrumental for our middle school learners to see, feel, and capture how their older high school peers conduct initial ideation. It reinforced the collaborative, democratic process that encourages learners to communicate their thinking to effectively work together, contribute productively, and use group decision-making processes to ensure input from all is taken into account. This experience aligns with our "Authenticity & Community Partnership"pillar by reaching out to community organizations and leveraging their expertise, especially if those experts are also students! It also supports "Productivity & Autonomy" by setting high expectations for our learners and fostering self-management skills.
Thrift shopping for costumes, food, and activities based on the chosen theme, "A Night in Paris." As we got close to the actual event, there was still a need for our learners to equitably dress. What themes and attire come to mind for our middle schoolers when they think of Paris? How do we create space for all learners to participate in the pageantry, regardless of different household income levels? Our Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Alex, led our learners on an adventure to local thrift stores to answer these questions, using public transportation. Learners rotated between shops, while connecting with Alex on shopping cart items and their developing thoughts on why what they chose fits the theme for the dance. This experience addresses "Hands-on & Experiential" learning by engaging learners in real-world problem-solving - budgeting, social conformity, and transportation. It also supports "Productivity & Autonomy" by believing in learners' capabilities to make reasonable, well-supported choices and empowering them to make certain decisions. In other words, as my colleague, Carissa, asks, “What should learners do? What could learners do? What should adults do in order to best facilitate learning?” These questions are inspired by Jim Rickabaugh’s “3 Questions to Explore When Placing Learners at the Center.”
These experiences not only prepared learners for the dance itself, but also developed crucial life skills and fostered a growth mindset. Ultimately, by incorporating these OWLs, we demonstrate that rigorous, high-quality, place-based education is inherently academic. What is often overlooked is helping learners understand that professional communication and engagement with the community fosters both independence and solidarity, while also instilling a sense of empowerment. However, it doesn’t need to be, as ages of communities have implemented such practices before it was even termed “place-based learning.” Creating context and turning any opportunity into a learning moment is the foundation for more exploratory, rigorous, and high ceiling / wide walls academics.
Implementing Effective Project Management
We had the vision, experiences, and theme, but how would it get it all done? Given the tight three-week timeline, I employed robust project management techniques to:
Establish a clear vision of success for the dance by painting done with learners, so that they mutually agree among a shared goal and how to accomplish it;
Scaffold goals backwards, creating weekly milestones and daily tasks, that offer up celebrations, shared and individual accountability, and a coherent orientation to continued productivity by moving onto another task after one task is completed;
Implement a public tracking system for accountability, support, and outreach;
Allow learners to own or delegate tasks, identifying peer contributors, and setting deadlines; and
Provide a system for requesting additional support from educators or resources during weekly critical friends sessions.
As Alex has prioritized this year, student engagement and ownership - defined at Embark as, “when learners demonstrate concentration, insatiable curiosity, immersive investment and pride in the work. It can be shown or seen by the way learners talk about the work, the vibe in the space fitting the task at hand, and learners opt-in and go beyond their own volition” - fully took shape. Any redirection that was needed often came directly from peers. Learners would work independently on tasks, tapping into a flow state of concentration and focus. Of course, the three-week project period was not without its challenges. There were moments of lost focus and excitement-driven distractions. However, these were such minor occurrences, paling in comparison to those that I experienced and witnessed in more traditional classrooms. As was similar during my time at High Tech High, what could be perceived as uncoordinated chaos of small groups of learners working was actually an intentional de-centering of the classroom - I didn’t have to manage or actively know what everyone was doing, as I trusted they did.
Incorporating Community Expertise
We leveraged the expertise within our community to enrich the learning experience in a number of ways, yet there were many more subtle ways that haven’t been discussed. One benefit of frequent, transparent communication with parents is that you truly get to know what assets the learner and their family bring to a learning community. One such example relevant to this project was knowing the professional background, expertise, and personal interests of our parents, as we invited a parent entrepreneur to share insights on event planning and community building during the second week of school. Additionally, despite being a micro-school, we have a larger umbrella non-profit organization that houses key functions of traditional schools, like a Finance Manager, Marketing Manager, Capacity Manager, and CEO. So we invited these community members in to conduct the critical friends protocol briefly mentioned above. It allowed these colleagues to develop a more tangible and relational sense of our mission and vision, while encouraging learners to see these adults as additional educators they can learn from.
Rigor is Fun and Intellectually Stimulating
As the night of the dance approached, the true success of our project-based learning approach became evident. Learners managed the final week with reduced pressure and urgency, contrary to many traditional project-based learning environments, because we had taken the route of baby steps, milestone celebrations, and scaffolded project management. The event was thoughtfully designed through iterative conversations and reflections nearly from the first day, with learners as the primary contributors. I - along with my colleagues and invited community “consultants” - resisted the urge to "polish" the final product, allowing learners to truly own their work. Finally, the dance incorporated all the elements of a successful event: learner-chosen food, drinks, activities, awards, decorations, and music (check out the playlist they created!). A large reason for so many of the smiles and contentment among learners during and after the event is because they ultimately made it what it was. Painting was done, but at such a higher quality and expectation. The result was a genuinely fun social event that learners could be proud of, having reaped the benefits of their hard work and collaborative efforts.
Orientations and onboarding are usually lifeless, highly procedural, and unremarkable. It's unfortunate given that - at the very least - they should be memorable enough to establish and reinforce organizational norms and means of engagement. This project demonstrated that competency-based, project-based learning can transform even a seemingly simple social event into a rich, multi-faceted learning experience. Learners wouldn’t lose track of What it Means to Embark because they built on its tradition. Contrary to the many PowerPoints and unused school handbooks that are often recited and distributed at the beginning of the school year, this orientation was not only enjoyable, but also deeply aligned with our educational philosophy and goals.