Designing and Implementing Competency-based Curriculum

Overview:

If we consistently track student progress on core competencies across courses and over time, students are encouraged to transfer what they learn and use it in a variety of contexts. Ultimately, this helps students meet the goal of education - to take the knowledge they learn in the classroom and apply it throughout their lives. Competency-based curriculum design requires intentional planning and careful attention to the logistics of implementation. Designers should carefully choose learning outcomes that explicitly address aspects of the core competencies. Instructors must clearly articulate these outcomes in classroom teaching and assignments using consistent wording across courses. They should also apply consistent metrics when they assess learning outcomes. Finally, data from student assessments must be tracked at the department or program level to help curriculum designers determine whether students are learning the core competencies they hope to teach. In this session, we will discuss how to define outcomes for individual courses, how to use clear and consistent language that can be shared across courses and departments, and how to use rubrics for assessment. We will also explore tools and techniques that can help instructors find manageable ways to integrate competency-based approaches into their teaching.

Speaker:

Dr. Kara Gardner Kara Gardner earned a music and humanities Ph.D. from Stanford University, then taught in Stanford’s Introduction to the Humanities Program. Before joining the Minerva schools in 2013, she led seminars in music and dance history at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Conservatory of music. She won an award for innovative pedagogy at USF in 2008. Her book Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance (Oxford University Press, 2016) won the 2017 Kurt Weill Book Prize. She joined Minerva in 2013 and now serves as Associate Dean of Partnership Teaching and Learning.

All Faculty and Teaching Staff are welcome