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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
If a student has the ability to demonstrate mastery of the essential competencies needed for a course, great. Why do we want to hold them back?
Narrator:This is the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. The Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Jared:Welcome back to the Transform Your Teaching here on the campus of Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. My name is Jared Pyles, with me is Dr. Rob McDole. Hello, Dr. McDole.
Rob:Hello.
Jared:With us today is one of my good friends, and his name is Nate Brock.
Nate Brock:My name is Nate Brock.
Jared:And he is a good friend of mine. What's your title?
Nate Brock:My title is Lead Evaluator in the Science Education Department at Western Governors University.
Jared:We are talking about competency based education. We're continuing with that series. I know that you and I have talked off air a ton about competency based and how it differs from what I do here at Cedarville and our educational philosophy and our approaches that we take to it. So we wanted to have you on for your insights. So I appreciate you coming on, my friend.
Nate Brock:Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Rob:Yeah. Welcome. So, Nate, what's your background? How did you get into competency based education, Western Governors University?
Nate Brock:By accident, almost. So I was a science educator. So I taught in high school science for about fifteen years. And somewhere along the way, about halfway through, I was looking for places to get my master's to kind of move up in the world of education. And one of my coworkers had just gone back to school as an adult and got her undergrad teaching degree from a place that she said was called Western Governors University.
Nate Brock:And I never heard of the university before. But what she said was I would really enjoy it because it was a true competency based university where you can completely move at your own pace, use your already proven skills, knowledge, competencies to basically proceed however fast you wanted to proceed if you could demonstrate the knowledge at each level of the course and you could complete as much as you could in a specific timeframe. So I looked into it and it seemed too good to be true, but it worked out perfectly for adult learners going back to school. So I was able to complete my two year master's degree program in about six to seven months while being a full time teacher because of the competency based model of the university. So fast forward, a few years later, I wanted to kind of pursue higher ed as an option to look at if I wanted to transition out of the high school classroom to go into higher ed.
Nate Brock:So I was able to come on part time in the evaluation department at Western Governors, which we might talk about a little bit later on how the disaggregated model works for that university in particular. But I was able to work part time for about four years or so while still being a teacher. And then, the opportunity came up to kind of head up a leadership role, over the Science Education Department in the School of Education and I was able to utilize that and become full time in that university.
Jared:Have you heard of competency based before you heard of Western Governors?
Nate Brock:So it goes by many different names. I had not heard the term competency based, but standards based, mastery based definitely in my education classes.
Jared:Had you used it at your high school?
Nate Brock:No. I was pursuing looking at standard based and I sort of use it in my own classroom. But as a school, we had not fully transitioned to that. I know other high schools around. I know the high school my kids currently go to is mastery level, so standards based is what they're doing at their schooling as well.
Nate Brock:But I had not actually fully seen it done, especially on the level that they do. It's very, very different from any other higher ed institution that I've heard of.
Jared:Yeah. Mean, most high school education is gonna be standards based because you have to teach to certain standards. But as far as the methods, I guess, of competency based where it's self paced and stuff like that.
Nate Brock:Yeah. So they do for the high school, do it's more mastery based. So they're allowed to basically remediate assignments until they hit that 80% level for the grades. They have to have grades for the high school level. So there it's not a full competency based what they're doing, but it's kind of like a mixture, a hybrid, if you will.
Rob:So I have an outsider's view as well with Western Governors. My wife got her master's in instructional design from Western Governors. So when we first moved here, I'd been looking at that, something I've been trying to get into in this business that I've been in since 2000, probably 2003. I've been very interested in it. So she I said, you should try Western Governors.
Rob:You could probably get it done faster than any other place. She got it done in about four months, and it was phenomenal. I watched what she went through, and I was like, this is... this is legit. So that's my perspective, but we would love to hear what you have to bring to us from your experience at WGU and what makes it different and how they accomplish CBE.
Nate Brock:Yeah, so it's their entire learning model, which like I said, very, it's not that they're taking like a portion of it or a program or a course or things like that. It's their entire model of education from when they started about twenty five or so years ago is fully competency based. It was originally meant for adult educators either going back and getting a different degree or a way to provide a flexible learning environment for adult learners is where it was originally designed for. Way back when they had to mail their papers into a group of people to evaluate and get it mailed back. It's kind of adjusted since then but it's
Jared:I hope so.
Nate Brock:Yeah, a little bit. It's really solely student centered. So it's learner centered. It's not program centered or professor centered. It's solely student centered, skills based mindset.
Nate Brock:And if a student has the ability to demonstrate mastery of the essential competencies needed for a course, if they can do that in two weeks, great. Why do we want to hold them back? Why do we need to make them sit in a room for five months, three days a week to prove something they could have proven to me a week into the class? If they already have either life experience or educational experience or the motivation to put forth their own learning into this, why am I need to hold them back? And Western Governors is like, we don't need to.
Nate Brock:If you wanna go full bore and do it, go full bore and do it.
Jared:We talked about CLEP test earlier. It kind of fits that same thing where it's like, if you can show mastery of the content, then why would you spend money on a quarter or a semester long course when you could show mastery in two hours
Nate Brock:Right.
Jared:Kind of a thing. What's interesting to me is like, it used to be, like if I were to transfer to a different university as a student, I'd have to show the credits or the courses that there's a whole process of, you know, okay, I took this course at this university, does it apply for this course here?
Nate Brock:Yeah.
Jared:But this is kind of replacing that where it's like instead of transferring credit courses, you're transferring the knowledge you already have in your head and demonstrating it instead of something like that. It's just interesting how I made that connection.
Rob:Well, I wanted to get more granular with this in terms of what challenges CBE, you know, poses for those who are listening and have never thought of this model before. Does it have any other applications other than just adult ed? It seems like you were maybe hinting at there was more. And obviously, we've already talked about the fact that your kids are going to a hybrid version of that. Do you see that growing?
Rob:Do you see that taking over more?
Nate Brock:So I definitely see it becoming more prevalent, especially because of education as a whole, teachers as a whole, it's very it's a struggle finding teachers, right? The whole education system seems to be undergoing some dramatic changes, whether it's government instituted changes, whether it's institutional changes, whether it's financial based changes, it just seems to be at a pivotal point where what has always worked in the past isn't necessarily what's going to work in the future for the next generation of kids. For whatever reason, good or bad, pros and cons, who knows. But it definitely seems like education is changing and I do really truly foresee a much more prevalent competency based type of education. Whether it's to give kids more chances to demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of ways rather than just the typical you get a 90%, you get a 95%, you get a 60% for this random assignment and that's your grade.
Nate Brock:That shows how well or how little you've earned in class doesn't really make a whole lot of sense anymore. And especially when we get to a lot of the skills based education where the college degree honestly in a lot of society right is not being seen as prevalent anymore, right? Where it's just so expensive, it's so out of reach and people can get jobs without it, it's becoming less and less popular as a means to move ahead in your career. And so when you can give people different options to pursue a higher ed degree or a program or even skills based mindsets, the competency based model does make a lot more sense. So I do foresee it moving forward.
Nate Brock:There are definitely challenges to it and it's not for everybody, not for every institution and it completely depends on what your mindset of learning is. Like if your goal for your university is just to produce better learners then competency based is probably not where we need to go. If your goal is to produce skillful workers in specific fields then I think competency based is something that you could at least look at and pursue.
Jared:I'm gonna land on that right now. So as a former ELA teacher, I feel like CBE doesn't fit as well into that field. You know, we talk about flipped learning on here, and I feel like flipped is a bit like competency based, where you have to show mastery of something you did the night before, and then you come into class to practice that more or something like that. I did that with grammar because grammar is very objective, where it's like either that's a noun or it's not. Either that's a subject or it's not.
Jared:Either that's a complete sentence or it's not. But when it comes to discussion and literature, I struggle a bit with the idea of having a student just check a box and say, no, I read Fahrenheit. I know that these are the themes. Speak to that a bit. Like what that's my only apprehension because I feel like they're not going to get and this could be and I've said like in the last episode, this could be an ego thing.
Jared:I feel like a student can't truly learn to read critically or to evaluate text without an instructor. So help me with that a bit.
Nate Brock:So in your mindset, what would the student need to do to demonstrate they understand the literature?
Jared:Immediately what I do is I would say a question and response where they have to do, you know, here are the list of, it's just like an old school, here are the essay questions, I want you to answer one of these with textual evidence, right? To me, that requires practice ahead of time. That requires discussion. That requires someone helping the student bring that out in the text because that doesn't happen organically, especially with more difficult texts. So I would say you need someone before that point.
Jared:It's just like formative and summative assessment. I feel like you can't properly do formative and summative assessment in literature without an instructor upfront or on the side, whatever it is, that's leading them through that process. So to me, to answer your question, because I went long, they'd have to show textual evidence that they can understand the text by answering essay questions. And they have to be lit up to that point.
Nate Brock:Right. So specifically at Western Governors, so we have two different types of assessments for all of our courses. Some courses are specifically objective assessments. So your multiple choice, your classic test, right? Where it's provided for them, they know the score, have to get a certain score, that's determined by the test in order to demonstrate competency, right?
Nate Brock:Whether it's 80%, whatever. But a lot of our courses also have performance assessments which are essay or presentations or videos or things like that, which are then evaluated based on a clear set of rubrics from the competencies because it's all about the competencies, right?
Jared:Yep.
Nate Brock:That you're determined. And so I would say the argument would be, yes, you can have a professor giving their point of view on a piece of literature, but the ultimate goal of whether a student can dig deep into it is done by an essay or something similar anyway, which they would then be able to write and then is evaluated based on a clear set of rubrics.
Nate Brock:And if they've demonstrated mastery of that assessment, that's competency based. It doesn't have to take six months. It can do it in two weeks if they can dive in. It could take longer, you know, because understand that not every student, we talked two examples, right, of moving quickly through it, but not every student can do that. Right.
Nate Brock:There are certain timeframes that we have semesters, even though you can kind of start whenever, there's six months, you go for six months of a semester. You have to do like four classes in those six months. If you can only do four classes, that's your full time status. You're still fine. You don't have to do more, but you can if you want to.
Nate Brock:So not every student is going to accelerate through at a super fast time frame. Some students will take longer, will need more remediation, will need more one on one time with the professors or instructors in order to kind of tease out all of those mindsets that you're talking about. So it's not like every student is just going to work on their own and ignore any advice or instruction or mentorship from their professors. Where something like that could still work in a competency based and it is different, right? I think we'll talk about this a little bit later on, but the mindset of the professor or the instructor is very different in competency based versus traditional.
Nate Brock:So
Jared:follow-up. For those performance based evaluations you're talking about, who's the one doing the grading?
Nate Brock:So that would be the evaluation department. So for our university, it's a very disaggregated model where we have assessment developers will design the assessment based on the competencies that are set out either by institutions or whatever, right, by the university. And so then the assessments will be designed, which is the main part of competency based education. If your assessments are weak, then your degree is basically invalid, right? Because there's
Jared:Wow, that's cool.
Nate Brock:Essentially because there's no point in doing competency based if your assessments don't actually test the competencies.
Jared:Sure.
Nate Brock:Then you have no way to determine the rigor of your course, of your degree, of your program.
Jared:Okay.
Nate Brock:So we have an assessment development team that kind of works on the assessments. There's a group of people that work together to make it, but assessment, there's assessment developer team. Then there's our course instructor team, which are the ones that are designed to develop some materials to help teach or guide the students, whether it's through cohorts, through picking and choosing different like textbook materials or videos or things like that. So they're the ones that are the student facing. They can work with calls of the students one on one, if the students need help, things like that.
Nate Brock:But then you have your evaluation team, which is separate from all the other ones. And so the evaluation people are the ones that completely evaluate the assessments. They don't know the student's name. They don't know anything about the student. It's try to reduce bias.
Nate Brock:But they're the ones that are the ones that evaluating the student work against a clear set of rubrics and determining whether or not that work has met those rubrics.
Rob:That's all disassociated then.
Nate Brock:It's completely disassociated, 100%, which again has its pros and it does have its cons. What are the cons? The cons are that when you have evaluation, people who evaluate that are separate from the people who are teaching, are separate from the people that are developing the assessments, is you can have an inconsistent agreements with what truly demonstrates competency. And so you really need to work together when you have certain meetings among the departments. You need to have a sense of cohesiveness.
Nate Brock:But if there's disagreements, there's nothing you guys can really do about it, because it it takes all three departments agreeing that something needs to be redone in order to revise anything. But it's also up to so so in traditional ed, right, it's the professors that's determining whether the students are passing or failing. Mhmm. Right? They're the ones that are the ultimate person that decides this.
Nate Brock:Whereas with a disaggregated model, the course instructor, they're the ones teaching but they're not the ones determining if the student work has truly met competency or not. That's out of their hands. It's somebody else that's determining the competency and then the instructor has to then evaluate the evaluators work and comments and feedback and kind of fit that into what they feel is the best way to demonstrate competency as well. Wow.
Jared:I'm so deep in thought. I'm
Rob:It's okay. We can put a pause. There's We can
Jared:We have to play some elevator music at this point.
Nate Brock:The loading screen for your brain.
Rob:DC's Jared's brain thinking.
Narrator:Yeah. If this was a head of
Jared:visual album, they'd put that little gear Yeah. On my forehead. I have so many questions based on what you just said, because I'm trying to wrap my brain around. Because it's such a foreign model to me. I'm sure it was to you.
Nate Brock:Very much. So at WGU, we come across a variety of learners, right? We have a lot of people that are enrolled in our campuses on our four colleges. And there's a wide range of learning abilities, motivational levels, of different things. So I think what you spoke to is exactly what competency based is about.
Nate Brock:It's not just about the fast paced, go get it, you're done in two months type of thing, but it's also a place where the learners who struggle with pacing a little bit more, they can take their time. Mhmm. They can work through assessments multiple times until they truly get it. They don't have to be working at the rate of what the professor has deemed you need to work at. If you miss a couple classes in a higher ed model and you're behind and you already struggle with it, you have no chance of making that up.
Nate Brock:It's very hard to get back on track. Whereas with a competency based model, if you're struggling with a certain assessment or a certain standard, you can take your time on that. You know, go over it multiple times until you truly get it and then move on to the next one and then move on to the next one. And so you can work at your own pace. You can work much slower.
Nate Brock:So competency based at its core is a learner based concept. It's not an institutional based or a professor based, but it's a learner based mind shift to focus more on the student rather than what the professor wants.
Jared:You talked about cohorts earlier. What's the typical size of a cohort? Because if you're talking about students that come in at the same time, how does that work? I immediately thought of like developing a community within online students and online learners. What does that community look like as far as when you have students coming in and out at different paces or whatever?
Nate Brock:That would be probably what is considered to be the biggest negative among faculty at Western Governors.
Jared:Okay.
Nate Brock:Is the lack of that cohesion of a cohort. Because again, we allow students to start at the first of every month, any month they want. And so you don't have like a group of students that are consistently taking the same courses throughout. And the students are always changing because some students are done in two weeks, then some students are taking, you know, four months. So with a typical cohort, it really is just almost like a it's different for every course for every instructor, obviously, but for the most part, it's basically just a live chat session where whoever wants to log in, it's in that course at the time, can log in, ask questions, meet with other students if they need to, have conversations for like an hour or so at a time, and that's just pretty much it.
Nate Brock:So it's kind of it's very open to whoever can join. But that would be the biggest downside to specifically the way that Western Governors does it. Okay. Because, again, they don't have the traditional timeframes where the there isn't a real sense of cohesion among students that are in the same course together. You're not gonna get that.
Nate Brock:There's not like a post two comments on a blackboard discussion type of thing with the same students every every week.
Jared:Yeah.
Nate Brock:It's it's very, very different. And that is one of the biggest downsides that you will hear from instructors, in this model specifically.
Jared:Well, we like to wrap it up with a question we've been asking our guests that we have on. What homework would you give an instructor who maybe is considering maybe at a module level or a course level or a program level, what homework would you give someone who's contemplating competency based education?
Nate Brock:That's a very difficult question because it's a hard shift to make that transition from traditional to competency in a specific course. Because it really, if you want to do it full on, it's a huge mindset shift. And you also have to weigh the value that you bring to a course and there's an ego part to that, like you mentioned, right? How much value do I bring to the course versus can I mentor my students and be more of a mentor rather than a lecturer? So it's a big mindset shift.
Nate Brock:But I would say if you're looking at exploring competency based even at a minimal level, I would say you should always want to start with the end in mind. So look at your course. What do you want students to know at the end of your course? Which is great design for course anyway.
Rob:It is. What do you Like we've heard that
Nate Brock:to me. It's crazy.
Jared:Like I've said that before.
Nate Brock:What do you want the students to know by the time they leave your classroom? And then work your way backwards. Now let's design assessments. What kind of assessments can I design to determine whether or not my students knew those competencies, knew those standards? And now how do I design my course to get them that knowledge for those assessments to demonstrate the competencies?
Nate Brock:Dude. And that's essentially competency based education.
Jared:You were you were always my favorite friend, and now you've become even more my favorite friend.
Nate Brock:So have I convinced you to join competency based education for
Rob:a No.
Jared:You haven't. Not
Rob:yet. He's not easily turned.
Jared:That's my friend Nate Brock. He is not just my friend. He is the lead evaluator of science education at Western Governors University. Thank you so much for coming on, Nate.
Nate Brock:Thank you for having me.
Jared:Yeah. You have anything you wanna you wanna thank him as well?
Rob:Well, thank you.
Nate Brock:Well, you are more welcome.
Jared:That's gonna do it for us on the Transform Your Teaching podcast. Be sure to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Send us an email at CTLPodcastcedarville.edu, and check out our flip that we are launching. We've had one for generative AI open for a while now, but check that out and, leave us your feedback on those episodes and others that we have up there. But until next time, thanks for listening.