CBL: From Educator-Designed to Co-Designed

CBL: From Educator-Designed to Co-Designed is a self-paced course that supports teachers in rethinking their role as a classroom leader and content expert and making shifts to adopt the stance of a coach and facilitator. One of the goals of competency-based learning is to support student agency. Making the shift from educator-designed to co-designed experiences is integral to creating a culturally responsive learning environment that empowers our students to become purposeful, self-directed learners. This is the fifth in a series of five courses about practical and purposeful shifts that educators can make in their classrooms. This course is self-paced and open for one year to participate.

This course is:

• Collaborative: Ideal for individual teachers, school teams, learning leaders, and instructional coaches
• Flexible: Fits within a teacher schedule; you choose your time commitment in this experience.
• Practical: Designed for immediate application; grounded in foundations of competency-based learning while prioritizing action steps educators can take now.

In this course, you will:

• Read research and resources on designing learning environments for student agency.

• Interview a student to bring their voice into the conversation of how to rethink your classroom to promote student-driven experiences.

• Use your student interview to redesign a unit or lesson you currently teach for agency.

The purpose of the Competency-Based Learning series is to guide educators in translating the theoretical underpinnings of CBL into sustainable classroom practices. The CBL series offers self-paced courses that are approximately five hour experiences. Each course is open from the first of the month to the end of the month. Participants engage asynchronously on their own timelines.

Regardless of where you teach and the language your school uses for learning goals and grades, a CBL approach offers a mindset and a framework for supporting students in developing skills that transfer across subjects and contexts and that contribute to environments and systems that promote educational equity. You do not need to be an educator in a “CBL school” to join in this series; all five courses are designed to apply to any classroom and curriculum.

Each course is self-paced and includes a downloadable PDF workbook for design and reflection. Participants will leave with practical, tangible work products that can be applied directly to their practice, whether teaching in online, in-person, or in hybrid learning environments this year.

These five courses have relevance as both a series and as individual courses taken on their own. Participants will retain access to all courses to allow for ample time to revisit ideas, resources, and examples.