New Book! (2020)
Vision and Action:
Reinventing Schools through Person-
alized Competency Based Education
Outstanding Book of the Year Award
Systemic Thinking and Change Division,
Association for Educational Communication and Technology
2020
The purpose of this book is to help teams of educators (teachers, administrators, staff, coaches, facilitators, and even board members), parents, and students to transform their school systems to personalized competency-based education. We offer proven ideas and methods both for a vision of PCBE and for the action (or process) for transforming your school or district to that vision.
Why PCBE?
Educators are well aware of several serious problems related to the United States educational systems:
These problems cannot be addressed with piecemeal reforms in our education systems. Personalized competency based education (PCBE) is the most promising – if not only – way of effectively addressing the serious problems with U.S. education systems today, and it requires fundamental change.
If you are not yet convinced of the importance of transforming to PCBE, we encourage you to read Chapter 1 of our earlier book, Reinventing Schools: It’s Time to Break the Mold. Other reasons include the following, which are all backed by evidence.
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Improve student learning
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Improve what students learn
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Provide more flexibility and options for learning
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Empower students
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Reduce student behavioral problems
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Improve equity
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Lower the cost of education by lowering administrative overhead
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Reduce the bureaucracy
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Improve the quality of life for educators
For a discussion of criticisms of PCBE, click here.
Reader Reviews from Amazon
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"an excellent resource for any educator who wants to build a competency based school"
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"very well organized and easy to read"
Read a Published Review of the Book
"We highly recommend this text and find it to be an excellent resource for significant strides toward PCBE and overall systemic transformation of schools." (Carr-Chellman & Dixon, TechTrends, 2020)
Zoom Interview
In April 2022, a professor who used Vision and Action as a textbook in a course on personalized learning interviewed me about some questions related to the book. The questions are as follows:
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Why is personalized learning critical in the current society?
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What do you think are the essential components of personalized learning?
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What theories support personalized learning or its components?
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What is the role of the teacher?
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What can an individual teacher do?
The interview is available here.
Tool for Teaching Teachers
This book is used as a textbook for teacher preparation courses on personalized learning. To see the syllabus for such a course at Kennesaw State University, click here.
Translation to Farsi
This book has been translated to Farsi by Amanda Amoozan.