Rose Colby is the author of Competency-Based Education: A New Architecture for K-12 Schooling and co-author of Off the Clock. She is a Competency-Based Learning and Assessment specialist and serves as a national advisor and contributor to CompetencyWorks.org. Rose is a Fellow at 2Revolutions where she coaches schools and districts nationally in developing prototypes for the future of learning in competency education.

I’m fortunate to have known Rose for many years and have been following her work with competency-based education. I’m also lucky to have presented with Rose at iNACOL last October and will be presenting again at the next iNACOL Symposium in Nashville, TN. Below are a few excerpts from her podcast.
 
About your family
The Colby family has been in transition. We have two daughters who live in New York City. We also have three grandchildren. I have lived in New Hampshire all my life, but we wanted to be closer to our kids so last year we made a move to Connecticut on the New York border so we get to see our family on a regular basis.
 
Your background
I didn’t come through the regular pathway for teacher preparation. I was a high school biology and chemistry teacher and came from industry. When I was teaching, I was not aware I was doing some innovative things in my classroom. I was just teaching in the way I thought science should be taught at the high school level. I had more of a project-based learning orientation to my teaching. I went from teaching at the high school level to the science department head to assistant principal at our high school. Then I became the associate principal at the middle school where I became principal at Mountain View Middle School for seventeen years. I am proud to say that we were a school of excellence twice while I was principal.

 
 
Competency Education Consultant
In 2002, I became involved with a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project where I was able to work with superintendents and principals across the state working on student-centered learning projects. I became a Competency-Based Learning and Assessment specialist and a national advisor and contributor to CompetencyWorks.org. In the briefs from CompetencyWorks, the move is now going to personalized learning and competency-based education. 
CompetencyWorks. iNACOL. “Meeting All Students Where They Are  Report. 2018
Maybe your introduction to competency-based education is to personalize standards-based teaching. Competency-based is a higher evolution of performance. When students have agency, they will be able to show you they what they learned. The teacher’s role is more of a coach. Then on the competency end, those are the standards of performance around how the student is engaging personally in their learning.  We really need to empower our teachers around the idea of personalized, competency-based learning. We need to ask them “what does proficiency look like?”

 
Competency-Based Education: A New Architecture for K-12 Schooling
I worked with many schools and districts that wanted to go on “shopping tours” to see what competency-based education looked like. From doing this work, competency-based education looks different based on the infrastructure. This is not a one-size fit all model. We are in the beginning stages of this work and needed some kind of frame to work from.
We are not assessing the standards; we are assessing the performance. This means we cannot use traditional grading which is very subjective. We as an industry need to create validity and reliability in the framing of the evidence we are expect...