Westminster Public Schools (WPS) in Colorado has embarked on a transformative journey toward competency-based education. Through strategic planning and continuous improvement, WPS developed a learner-centered system prioritizing personalized learning and student agency. Their road map--rooted in shared vision and second-order change--highlights…

When implemented effectively, competency-based education (CBE) promotes high levels of learning for every student. Further, the practices and structures of a professional learning community (PLC) support this work. Explore a variety of perspectives and examples from educators who have shifted to CBE with great results. The book details how to do…

Gifted students can exhibit extreme variance in both their abilities and their interests, yet they are often treated within schools as one homogeneous, specialized population. "Personalized Learning in Gifted Education" helps educators strengthen their differentiation of both instruction and services for advanced students. This book: (1)…

Aimed at the growing number of educators who are looking to move beyond covering the curriculum, "Designing Authentic Performance Tasks and Projects" provides a comprehensive guide to ensuring students' deeper learning--in which they can transfer their knowledge, skills, and understandings to the world beyond the classroom. Readers will…

"Leading Personalized and Digital Learning" provides needed guidance for principals, aspiring principals, and other school leaders at a critical time when educators are looking to put the power of technology to work for student-centered learning. The authors identify eight leadership essentials that school leaders must attend to if they…

The rising cost of tuition, increasing competition, and mounting student loan debt has caused educational leaders to rethink degree programs and resources for learners. As such, open educational resources, prior learning assessment, open degree plans, and competency-based learning have gained popularity in the field of higher education.…

Classrooms across the country are discovering the power of service-learning--the ideal way to help students develop social and academic skills while giving back to their community. Now for the first time, there's a practical how-to guide on using serving-learning to promote inclusion and differentiate instruction for students with and without…

This material provides students of educational administration with easy access to a body of selected readings in individualized instruction, performance/competency-based education, and competency-based educational administration. Included are several self-paced individualized instructional modules used in introductory courses in educational…

This paper provides an historical and contemporary overview and criticism of individualized instruction, beginning with the Dalton Plan and Winnetka Plan of the 1920's. While there appears to be a proliferation of new individualized methods and procedures, they have existed in several forms in the past and have been utilized on a large scale,…

Although teacher-developed materials are usually created with objectives designed for a particular group of students at a particular point in time, they may be valuable for use by other instructors, at other institutions, in other circumstances. Materials which are immediately transferable to other situations should be called "usable." Materials…

Competency-based instruction provides the mechanism necessary to implement the democratic and humanitarian philosophies espoused by community colleges. This document discusses the need for competency-based instruction, identifies instructional methods, and provides insights into the curricular ends of this type of instruction. An instructional…

This book, written by and for a foreign language teacher, is intended as an informative and practical guide to the use of performance objectives in the foreign language classroom. A rationale for performance objectives is presented, followed by a discussion of purposes, resources, and activities involved. Attention is given to the selection of…

In addition to describing the traditional college curriculum and comparing historical moments in curriculum change in America, this history defines other historic dimensions: prescription versus free choice, general versus specialized education, elite versus egalitarian education, mass versus individualized instruction, autocratic versus…

The nine reports contained in this monograph describe in some detail projects to improve instruction initiated in 1974 at Memphis State University. The initial pages describe the criteria used to select the programs for funding. The nine projects fall into five areas: 1) computer-based instruction; 2) video technology; 3) individualized…

The state of the art of behavioral instruction and examples of successful implementation of behaviorally-based college teaching are provided in this book. In Chapter 1, the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) is covered, including a discussion of the problems inherent in traditional teaching methods that led to the development of personalized…