Pushing “student agency,” “real-world experiences,” and “competencies” will never transform education. It’s all window dressing or delusion. Education will be transformed when we stop believing assessment of learning is the end goal.
As long as we are measuring individual outputs, we will remain stuck in the same paradigm. We still consider learning as something we can compare across people, time, and space. We look for criteria to signal quality without any consideration for *why* we learn.
Projects that sit on the Drive as slides. Tests for supposed knowledge that is soon forgotten. Presentations that reward eye contact, diction, and structure, as if speaking to an empty room.
This is such a waste of time and young people know it.
It is not about what the individual learned, it’s about what they are doing with their learning to make the world a better place. It’s about how others’ lives are better as a result of the application of learning. That’s how we transform education.
That’s regenerative education.
Applying learning to make the world a better place (in service of Life) is the highest value we can ever assign to our learning, our learning&doing. There is nothing that can trump that. There is no greater measure.
No test, rubric, performance, competency map or anything will ever be more meaningful than learning applied the service of Life.
Of course we still need skills, competencies, and content. They’re baked in! They’re also means to greater ends. Purple prose and valid stats will always get you further than sloppy work.
This new way of measuring collects the voices of the community (human and other-than-human). It gathers testimonials from all kin and searches for patterns in both quantitative and qualitative data. It harmonizes the different ways learning has affected everyone. It seeks what Joanne McEachen calls contribution.
From there, we draw conclusions, deepen the learning, reiterate, keep going.
It’s no longer about the individual. It is about how that individual has applied their learning to make the world a better place, in the service of Life.
The skills and competencies become means to a higher end. They become secondary to the real work.
You then tell stories of learning&doing through the voices of the community, not your report card.
That is transformative. The rest is the same ol’ with shiny words.
Coconut Thinking 