Representatives: Jonathan Vander Els, Executive Director of NHLI, and Ellen Hume-Howard, Director of Curriculum for Sanborn

EdSurge case study

How State Reform in New Hampshire Led to Teacher Autonomy

After spending a few years thinking deeply about assessment in a competency-based system, Sanborn’s Memorial Elementary School teachers noticed that non-academic skills weren’t being measured with the same rigor as academic skills and began wondering how they could better integrate these skills into instruction each day.

Memorial Elementary School and the district’s middle school launched a MyWays micropilot to help teachers design opportunities for students to discuss and set intentional goals related to the non-academic skills they call CARES: cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-regulation.

The district plans to use the MyWays whole-student competency plot to map student development of specific competencies over time as a way to measure growth for non-academic skills.

Dilemma: Embedding essential skills and dispositions.

A cohort of educators are taking an online course offered through 2Revolutions on essential skills and dispositions. The MyWays materials are integrated into the course.

Questions: How do district and state leaders support New Hampshire educators, especially those in the Performance Assessment for Competency Education (PACE) districts, as they work to embed essential skills and dispositions and work study practices into their instruction and assessment?

Video

Jon Vander Els. New Hampshire Learning Initiative. MyWays is helping with metacognition and self-assessment, so students better understand connections between learning experiences across time and location.