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A Tool for Enhancing Our Practice: An Inside Look at the PSCG Competency Implementation Guide

Sydney Schaef, Managing Director of reDesign, chats about the newly created tool, First Steps: A Teacher's Guide to Competency Implementation. Learn more about the benefits of engaging with this interactive tool and get a practical look at how you can leverage it to build efficacy for educators and learners around The Profile of the SC Graduate (PCSG) competencies!

 

What exactly is this implementation guide?


It is a toolkit for educators who want to try out implementing the PSCG competencies in their daily practice. The whole purpose of the framework itself was to make the Profile of the SC Graduate something actionable, something we could implement in all learners across the state every day. So this toolkit was designed to support the process of implementing those competencies. So if you’re an educator in SC and you want to see the Profile come to life in your classroom, this is a great tool for you. Or if you’re an educator and you believe in some of the competencies we’ve developed: Learning Independently, Navigating Conflict, Sustaining Wellness, you can pick this up too and try it out.


It’s a really practical guide. It takes some fairly complex ideas and makes it a step by step process. So if you are brand new to these competencies, step 1 in the guide is to explore the competencies. make connections to the Profile, and explore the anatomy of a competency. Or if you’re a veteran teacher, and you are already familiar with the competencies, it can support your deeper dive. It also supports multiple entry points, so you can dip into a less complex stage of the work, try it out, and move forward and try more advanced Implementation. It also includes videos of teachers who are speaking to their own experience and sharing insights to help you along the way.


It also has a lot of embedded tools and resources, from work examples to templates and even a teacher journal to support you in your meaning-making process.

The last thing I think is special is that it embeds an action research process that sets you up to capture data on student growth in the competencies, but also to study your own process: how did this go and what did we learn so we have some thoughtful data and tools we can try out.






How can this tool be used in targeting skills when it comes to the competencies, such as rubrics, learning targets, or analyzing student work?


Once you choose your entry point, the guide will prompt you to select a competency that best aligns with you, your content, and goals. Once you choose a competency of focus, that's when you drill in. Each competency is built out of a set of essential skills. For each skill, we have a developmental continuum that describes how those skills evolve at higher levels of complexity at developmental milestones.


That’s what I love about the Profile and the competencies. We want every learner in SC to be a critical thinker. So what does that look like in reading? In designing solutions? This tool walks teachers through choosing that skill and how you pull those indicators from the framework and build a rubric.


Once we have developed the rubric we are going to use, we figure out a data collection plan. Am I doing this with the entire class or a small group? Then I start to look at learning targets: how does this skill work with this standard or standards? We plan for explicit skill instruction and practice, giving learners the opportunities to see these skills in action and try them themselves. You’re guided in collecting the student data and analyzing them to see what's next.




The work doesn't stop at data collection and grading. That's where the fun begins! What can we see about learners and where they are? What happens now? What is the feedback we need to provide and additional supports?

As far as the format of this guide, can you tell us about that? Is it self-paced? Is it more for an individual teacher or a group of teachers?


The guide is structured as a step guide with ten steps you can follow. The neat thing about it is that you can jump into whichever step makes sense within your own planning process. If you are an individual teacher, you can use this guide on your own in a self-paced process. Or if you are in a department or you're an instructional coach working with a team of teachers, you can use this with lesson study or use it in a grade level PLC. Or if you are going to use it as an entire school, you can all pick a different competency, and use it in this field testing implementation process together. So it’s really flexible and you can use it in the way that makes the most sense for you as an individual or as a team. You can keep coming back and peel back the layers of this guide as your implementation grows and progresses.







Walk us through what an experience might be like for an individual teacher? For example, what would the process look like for a middle school math teacher who is going to teach a unit on integers?


So if you have already explored the competencies, you would select a competency, which is step 2. For you, this would probably be reasoning quantitatively. Then you would select a skill, and it could be problem solving or constructing explanations. You would figure out within your unit, what is your entry point: Do I want to adapt a performance task I’m using? Do I want to build this into my rubric in a particular way? Do I want to modify my lessons so I’m more explicitly teaching this sort of transferable skill of problem solving while I’m addressing the content of integers?


Once you choose your entry point, you decide what kind of data you are going to collect and when you are going to collect it. Then you move into the planning piece: How can I adapt my lesson or learning experience so I can explicitly teach those skills? What do I need to adjust as a teacher so the learners can see the thinking process around these skills and the content? How do I ensure the gradual release approach? What is my plan for that data collection?


Then you implement and gather the data. Then we get to dig into the student work. The work doesn't stop at data collection and grading. That's where the fun begins! What can we see about learners and where they are? What happens now? What is the feedback we need to provide and additional supports? We move teachers through that second cycle of responsive supports and another round of data collection before we assess the learners on the rubric and reflect on the process and determine next steps. Step 10, of course, is sharing and celebrating their learning!




 

Want to hear more about the Implementation Guide?



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