Personalized, Competency Based Learning (PCBL)

Personalized, Competency-Based Learning (PCBL)

Overview

What is Personalized, Competency-Based Learning (PCBL)?

In a personalized, competency-based learning system, the following principles influence the daily actions of the educational community:

Students are empowered daily to make important decisions about their learning experiences, how they will create and apply knowledge, and how they will demonstrate their learning.
Assessment is a meaningful, positive, and empowering learning experience for students that yields timely, relevant, and actionable evidence.
Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.
Students progress based on evidence of mastery, not seat time.
Students learn actively using different pathways and varied pacing.
Strategies to ensure equity for all students are embedded in the culture, structure, and pedagogy of schools and education systems.
Rigorous, common expectations for learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) are explicit, transparent, measurable, and transferable.

The Utah State Board of Education is continuing the innovation for Personalized, Competency-Based Learning (PCBL) with the release of the Utah's PCBL Framework and continuation of the Competency-Based Education (CBE) Grants Program. PCBL moves the focus of the classroom from teaching to learning based on fixed and well-defined targets for all students. It provides equitable access for each student to demonstrate core knowledge and skills in personalized and differentiated ways and can also empower students to engage in opportunities for deeper learning. PCBL moves instruction beyond information dissemination to a focus on transferable skills necessary for success in the modern world.

Utah’s Framework

The Utah's Personalized, Competency-Based Learning (PCBL) Framework seeks to create a bridge from the Utah State Board of Education’s Board Strategic Plan and Utah's Portrait of a Graduate to the work of educators and students in Utah’s classrooms as they work to achieve the learning outcomes as described in Utah’s Core Standards and the Utah Portrait of a Graduate Competencies.

To achieve this, the PCBL framework leverages six essential components necessary to create a personalized, competency based learning approach. The six essential components are:

Purpose and Vision
Student Agency
Demonstrated Competency and Assessment
Customized Supports
Equity and
Social Emotional Learning

When these elements are used in concert with one another they set the learning conditions to support schools and districts in achieving the ideals of PCBL. Furthermore, the PCBL Framework provides clear indicators and promising practices for educators and students needed to cultivate student learning including clear learning expectations and targets that allow students to know what they need to do to demonstrate mastery.