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S1.E2 | Charles Reigeluth: Transforming American Education

• Thembi Duncan • Season 1 • Episode 2

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S1.E2.

Imagine an education system with no grade levels -- or no grades at all! Imagine schools where students advance based on their mastery of the material, not just the passage of time. This is personalized, competency-based learning.

This week’s guest is Charles Reigeluth, Ph.D., an award-winning, internationally renowned author, scholar, and social scientist who has championed a transformative paradigm shift in American education for over 40 years.

In this episode, Dr. Reigeluth explains the revolutionary concept of competency-based learning and its potential to transform the landscape of American education.

Want to be a guest on KeyBARD? Send Thembi a message on PodMatch: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1740803399472257afce75768

KeyBARD is produced, written, and hosted by Thembi Duncan.
Theme music by Sycho Sid.

Listen and Connect:

Thembi: Hello, hello, and welcome to KeyBARD. I'm here with Dr. Charles Reigeluth and I'm so, so, so excited to talk to him about a number of issues around education, big change, systems thinking, and his books, and his journals, and his articles. And we're going to hear his philosophy today. So, welcome Dr. Reigeluth.

Dr. Reigeluth: Thank you very much, I look forward to this.

Thembi: Yay! Okay. So I want to begin the conversation with a quote that you delivered 11 years ago, in fact, and it was called---- If we do not make a paradigm change, we're going to find our educational system increasingly unable to meet the needs of our students, and our society is going to suffer greatly. Why do you believe that our society is going to suffer without a major shift in education?

Dr. Reigeluth: Well, the purpose of an educational system is to meet the needs of the larger system of which it's a part, and that would be the community and society in which it exists, including the needs of the individuals who are in that larger system. As the larger system evolves, the educational system must evolve to meet its needs. In the U.S. and other advanced countries, society has undergone a paradigm change, as explained by Alvin Toffler in a series of books, "Future Shock", "The Third Wave", and "Power Shift". Yet our educational systems have not undergone a corresponding paradigm change, creating an evolutionary imbalance that is increasingly damaging to both our educational systems and the larger society. 

An example is what I call the hidden curriculum. In the current teacher-centered paradigm of education, students are told to sit down, be quiet, do what they're told to do…and this made great sense during the industrial age to prepare the students for jobs on the assembly line and in top-down, bureaucratic structures which operate by autocratic rule. But now, in the post-industrial age, knowledge work is replacing manual labor as the predominant form of work. The hidden curriculum needs to change to promote initiative, problem solving skills, critical thinking skills and collaboration skills. Piecemeal reforms are not sufficient to bring about this massive change in the hidden curriculum. We need to transform to a new paradigm of education, and the longer it takes, the more damage the evolutionary imbalance will do to our communities, society, and country.

Thembi: What does a transformed education system look like?

Dr. Reigeluth: Wow, this question requires a long response. During the industrial age, when manual labor was the predominant form of work, we did not need to educate many people to high levels, so we needed an educational system that would sort out the laborers but retain the managers and professional people for more education. Therefore, we created a system in which all students needed to move on at the same time, regardless of whether or not they had mastered the material. So, the slower learners accumulated gaps in their learning that made it harder for them to learn related material in the future, virtually condemning them to flunk out. And we created a norm-referenced assessment system in which each student's performance was compared to other students, rather than to a standard of mastery, as is a tool to flunk students out. 

But now that we need to educate far more people to far higher levels, the sorting focus system no longer meets our needs. Instead, we need an educational system in which students only move on to new material when they've mastered the current material, and as soon as they've mastered it. This greatly accelerates the learning of faster students as well as accelerating the learning of slower students because the slower ones no longer have gaps in their learning that make new learning harder and slower. 

The industrial age version of equity was that all students should be the same. That they should all learn the same things. This fits the mentality of mass production where all the products are to be identical. The better version of equity is that every student should reach their potential. Now this learning-based student progress, which replaces time-based student progress, drives virtually all the other major changes in the new paradigm of education. For example, learning based student progress requires competency-based learning targets, competency-based student assessments, and competency-based student records. This means replacing grade levels with continuous progress. Replacing tests and grades with certifications of mastery, like doing practice until perfect. And replacing report cards with lists of competencies mastered by each student, typically with microcredentials. 

Now, these are huge changes, but if students are all progressing at different rates, their instruction needs to be personalized. In fact, since there's been such a rapid increase in the variety and complexity of jobs, our educational system needs to do much more to cultivate each individual's talents, in addition to learning a common core of knowledge. So we need to personalize the learning goals or targets, as well as personalizing the methods of instruction. 

One way to do this is through learning by doing. This includes project-based learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, maker-based learning, and so forth. We refer to all these kinds of learning by doing as project-based Learning or PBL. PBL replaces the extrinsic motivation of grades with the much more powerful intrinsic motivation that comes with mastering things that the student believes are important. PBL allows for team-based learning, a part of the hidden curriculum in which students learn collaboration and team-building skills for the workplace. It also allows for more self-direction in students’ learning, which is more motivational and is a part of the hidden curriculum that better prepares students to take initiative and become successful lifelong learners, which is really important in this rapidly changing world.

But there's an important corollary to PBL. It needs to be accompanied by support for both learning and assessment. For learning, coaching and tutorials should be provided during a project just in time for when a competency needs to be used in the project. This accelerates learning. And for assessment, each competency that has not yet been mastered should have a just-in-time that requires practice until mastery. This ensures that every student masters the competencies, thereby avoiding the freeloading that otherwise often occurs in project-based learning. And it ensures that every student has learned to generalize use of the competency to the full range of situations for which the student should be prepared, rather than just learning to use it in one situation, a single project. Tutorials can also ensure the automatization of competencies that need to become automatic, such as lower-level skills in a complex cognitive task. To sum up, the learner centered paradigm requires competency-based education, personalized learning, project-based learning, collaborative learning, and self-directed learning. These features greatly enhance student motivation and agency, and they require that the teacher’s role changes from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” which greatly increases teacher satisfaction.

Thembi: Listen, you had me at “No homework.” That right there is where I'm going to start. I really, I love what you said about “guide on the side” as the teacher role. I think it's so important that if education is going to make a paradigm shift, then everyone involved, including the educators, need to be a part of that. So one of the things I do want to ask you about is technology. You talked about tutorials and things like that. Sounds like you're already clear on how technology can be integrated into this paradigm shift. So what's the ideal role of technology in this shift?

Dr. Reigeluth: Yeah, that's a very good question. Technology really plays a very important role. It increases the effectiveness of instruction, and it reduces its cost. In the learner-centered paradigm, technology is primarily a tool for the student. Whereas, in the teacher centered paradigm, it's primarily a tool for the teacher. For the learner, it can create powerful, immersive, authentic project environments that can be used by students throughout the country, which lowers its developmental costs. 

Virtual reality and augmented reality have great power for enhancing this the of the environment. Technology can also create highly effective, just-in-time tutorials that can be used by students throughout the country, which again lowers their costs and greatly reduces the demands on teachers, so they have more time to provide important guidance for students full well-rounded development. Including higher order thinking skills, social and emotional skills, and other dispositions. 

But technology is not just important for instruction and assessment. It's also important for automatically keeping records of student competencies mastered, as indicated by the tutorials. As is already being done by the Khan Academy, and it is an important tool for planning both what each student will learn next and how it will be learned. That is, the selection of projects, teammates and more. So in sum, technology is very important for planning student learning, instruction for student learning, assessment for student learning and record keeping for student learning and such use of technology results in more high touch as well as more high-tech than in the teacher-centered paradigm.

Thembi: That's so interesting, because I think for a lot of people, they envision technology as something that decreases the amount of connection, whereas you're offering a way that technology can increase and support and dovetail right with this change, which is really, really incredible.

Dr. Reigeluth: Yes, it all depends on the way the technology is used.

Thembi: Well, speaking of the way the technology is used, I'm interested in your partnership with the Indianapolis Metropolitan School District of Decatur Township. You worked with them on this very paradigm shift that you're talking about. Can you tell me how long you worked with them? And what was the outcome of that partnership? 

 Dr. Reigeluth: Sure, I'd be glad to. I facilitated their paradigm change effort for about 11 years. The reason it took so long is that the leadership team that we formed there, which was about 25 leaders representing all the different stakeholder groups, could only afford to meet for about two hours per month. If we'd been able to secure outside funding, 10 to 20 hours per month would have been reasonable, so progress would have been 5 to 10 times quicker. But we were still able to make huge changes. The one large high school was divided into 4 academies, two of which use project-based learning, personalized learning, collaborative learning and more self-directed learning. A separate high school was established for problem kids. That was all that I just mentioned, and competency based as well. The four elementary schools were already fairly personalized, but they became even more so. The two middle schools also made some progress, but not as much as the elementary schools did. When the Superintendent retired and a new one was hired, he chose to discontinue the paradigm change process so that he could make his own mark. Which is a common problem in school change, but most of our changes have endured. 

Thembi: That's wonderful. It sounds like you ended up kind of with a mixed bag of really helpful changes and then maybe some things that were challenges. Can you talk about your biggest challenge that you encounter when you're helping schools and school districts make this kind of change? 

Dr. Reigeluth: Sure. First, you can't transform one school within a school district because then it becomes incompatible with the rest of the district and invisible forces work to transform it back to the teacher-centered paradigm. That's why most of the more than 1,000 schools that have transformed today to our charter schools, which don't have a large teacher centered system to comply with.

But the greatest challenge in paradigm change is the need to help a critical mass of stakeholders to evolve their mental models or mindsets about what education should be like. Developing a broadly-shared vision of the new paradigm is key. This requires broad participation in the paradigm change process, which brings me to the next challenge, funding. 

Without funding, teachers, administrators, board members, parents, and other stakeholders simply cannot afford to spend the time that it takes to complete the transformation process. Within a reasonable number of months or years. 

So working with a whole school district, helping a critical mass of stakeholders to evolve their mental models about education, and securing external funding are the top three challenges that I encountered out of very many challenges. 

Thembi: Seems like you really have a strong system, if you can go in with so many challenges and still make change over time. But it's clear based on what you said before about the 11-year time span that you spent and probably were going to keep going if the Superintendent didn't stop the process, that it's a long-term change, it sounds like.

Dr. Reigeluth: Yes, indeed. 

Thembi: So you mentioned charter schools being ideal – I'm using the word ideal – in being able to make this shift. If they're a school versus a district, what are some assets that schools already have, or districts already have that can be leveraged in to help make this kind of shift?

Dr. Reigeluth: Good question. This will vary a lot from one school district or one charter school to another. Capacity for paradigm change and motivation for change are really the key. Some school districts have what we call a high level of readiness for paradigm change, and others don't. 

One readiness factor is the amount of trust that exists among the various stakeholder groups. The change effort is not likely to succeed if there was recently a teacher strike in the school district or if the school board does not trust the administrators. Or if a group of parents is fighting the teachers or administrators. 

Another readiness factor is a Superintendent whose leadership style is developmental or participatory rather than autocratic. 

Third is a school board that buys into that leadership style, refrains from micromanagement, and recognizes the need for paradigm change. 

Fourth is whether there are teachers who are already discontent with the teacher centered paradigm and therefore interested in exploring options. In fact, broad recognition of failings of the current paradigm is a considerable asset that can be leveraged for paradigm change. 

Unfortunately, there's not much a single teacher can do alone to change the learner-centered paradigm. 

Thembi: But it sounds like, based on what you're saying, if a collective critical mass of stakeholders in a district or in a charter school are willing to have change, and quite interestingly, if they're recognizing that the current paradigm doesn't work, they don't have to stop there and feel bad about it. They can -- they can talk to you about this huge type of paradigm shift, right? 

Dr. Reigeluth: Yes, indeed. 

Thembi: So, okay, we've got to deal with the real things that have happened in the world recently. We can't talk around it. We've got to face it head-on. We had a huge health crisis, worldwide health crisis for two whole years where there was an interruption in student learning, and I want to know what long term impacts do you anticipate this is going to have on our ability to evolve towards such a paradigm shift as you're suggesting?

Dr. Reigeluth: Uh-huh. Yeah. I don't think the impacts will be very large. Many teachers were forced to use online learning, but were not prepared to do it well. This left many of them feeling bad about the experience and wanting to get back to familiar classroom instruction. Many of those teachers will be less interested in a paradigm change effort, but some teachers will be more interested. 

Another factor is that some students fell way behind, while others did not. This increased the need for customizing learning to individual needs. But without sufficient guidance and support for teachers, they're not likely to be able to transform their classroom practice sufficiently to deal with this problem. They're more likely to just use tracking. 

The one bright spot is that some schools have established after school programs or summer programs to help students catch up. These programs have the potential to be competency based and therefore personalized, which would set a good precedent and a valuable experience for transforming the schools themselves. But not all such programs have used a competency-based approach and personalized learning. I suspect that relatively few of them have or will as we go forward. 

So, bottom line is I don't think COVID will really have much influence, but may I also comment that for schools that have transformed, they have been able to deal with this problem much more effectively because they are personalized and competency-based.

Thembi: Personalized and competency-based. Okay, so I'm a classroom teacher and I say, “All right. I differentiate learning for my students. That's personalized. I'm already shifting the paradigm.” What would you say to that? 

Dr. Reigeluth: Well, personalized learning is but one part of the learner centered paradigm. Competency-based education is really the foundation for this new paradigm because it allows student progress to be based on learning rather than time, and that ensures that learning takes place. It represents the difference between a sorting focused educational system and a learning focused one. Everything else is designed to support the learning focus, from personalized learning and project-based learning to collaborative learning and self-directed learning. 

The learner-centered paradigm replaces grade levels with continuous progress, replaces courses with projects, replaces grades on tests with certifications of mastery. Replaces report cards with lists of competencies mastered. Replaces classrooms with studios or workshops. And changes teacher as sage on the stage to Teacher's guide on the side as I mentioned earlier. Differentiation is only one small piece of the transformation that's needed.

Thembi:  This really is about getting the whole village together to make big time change. 

Dr. Reigeluth: Yes, indeed. 

Thembi: Okay, well now let's talk about your latest book. It's called Merging the Instructional Design Process with Learner Centric Theory: The holistic 4D Model – which you wrote along with Dr. Yunjo An. Okay, after 12 books, 64 published chapters, 130 journal articles, I'm sure I'm out of date at this point. I'm sure next week I'll be out of date again, but just scores of contributions to the field. What motivated you to write this book?

Dr. Reigeluth: Well, the initial motivation was a contract with the US Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command. To update the guidance they provide to their instructional designers, which is called the Interservice Procedures for Instructional Systems Design. And it was decades old. 

I believe that instructional designers need two kinds of knowledge, guidance for what the instruction should be like, and guidance for the ID process that's needed to create such instruction. Most ID process models contained little, if any, guidance about what the instruction should be like, and guidance about what instruction should be like contain little, if any guidance about the ID process needed to create it. I believed it was important to integrate both these kinds of guidance into a single model, because the ID process needs to be different in important ways depending on the instructional methods that are chosen. 

So unfortunately, a change in command ended my project before its completion. But I felt that the work I had done would be very useful to all instructional designers. My revised model did not just integrate instructional theory with the ID process. It also focused on learner centered instructional theory with competency-based learning, personalized learning, and all that we've been talking about here. And these are all based on the latest advances in cognitive and constructivist theories of learning and instruction, which hadn't been incorporated into the air Forces previous model. 

Second, it utilized a holistic approach to the ID process. Rather than the traditional approach of doing all the analysis up front by breaking the content down into little pieces and designing instruction for each of those pieces. My holistic approach uses 3 levels of design, beginning with creating a fuzzy vision of the entire instructional system. Then working out a more detailed version of that vision. 

And finally, creating a full blueprint of what the instruction should be like. Another innovation was for the design process on each of those 3 levels of design. To be composed of short cycles of analysis, design, and evaluation, so that analysis is done just in time before it's needed, and evaluation is done immediately after a set of design decisions has been made. And this is often called formative design. Another innovation was based on the distinction between education and training. I recognize that there are two fundamentally different kinds of knowledge to be taught. Task expertise, which is all about how to do things, and topic expertise, which is all about deep understandings. 

Given the behaviorist roots of our field, a lot of guidance has been generated for developing task expertise, but little has been generated for topic expertise. In fact, the word understanding was long viewed as a forbidden word in instructional design. I felt it was important to offer guidance for instruction on topic expertise, and I recognized that the ID process needed to be very different for analyzing and designing topic expertise. So my holistic 4D model offers such guidance. 

There were additional innovations that I won't go into now, but suffice it to say that I felt that instructional designers would appreciate these innovations, so that motivated me to publish this work on my own. That's when I asked Jim and Joanne to work with me to complete the work and to demilitarize the updated model. 

More recently, I've asked Peter Humbeline to join with us in further developing the guidance we provide in the holistic 4D model. We will have another book coming out later this year.

Thembi: That's exciting. Congratulations on that. You're just super busy, so. You know, it's interesting, you talk about how you're coming up with these ideas, you're developing these ideas and then you're bringing people on to add their expertise to the process and to help form change through these ideas. You're using these specialized tools that you developed to help schools and to help districts make this large-scale change. Are you finding either you or your research team or any in any of your travels? Are you finding that there's any sort of organic movement to the paradigm shifting, or are you just finding most districts are kind of in stasis?

Dr. Reigeluth:  Well, actually I'm very encouraged. I started working on paradigm change in 1983, if you can believe that, when I was still at Syracuse University. I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness for decades since then. But during the past decade, there's been an exponential increase in interest and activity for paradigm change. There are now more than 1,000 schools nationwide that are well into the learner centered paradigm. I've found that it is not effective to transform a single school within a school district, because then it's incompatible with the rest of the district and invisible forces were to change it back. This is why most of those thousand schools are charter schools, which don't have to exist under the constraints of a tightly coupled super system. But there are a few school districts that have transformed, such as the Lindsay Unified School District in California and the Chugach School District in Alaska. But what is even more encouraging is that nonprofit organizations have sprung up to help schools and districts to transform. In my book Vision and Action. Identify eighteen such organizations, including the Center for Innovation and Education, Center on Reinventing Public Education, Education Elements, Education Reimagined, Leap Innovations, Marzano Resources, Next Generation Learning Challenges. Teacher powered schools and transcend education and many more. I'm sure there are many more than 18 now. Also, the US Department of Education is slowly providing more support to help educational systems to transform. So I expect we'll see an exponential increase in transformations. For the next decade and reach a tipping point before then.

Thembi: That is very inspiring. I can imagine you are excited to see you yourself come from the lone voice in the wilderness to all of these partners joining in to help you do what you already have been trying to tell us we need to do for a long time. So that's really exciting. But what if you have an educator and administrator or district leader who feels stuck? They're inside of their district and maybe they've read your books and maybe they understand that change is needed on a large scale and get all that fire in from stakeholders. What if they feel stuck? What would you say to them if they wanted to initiate change?

Dr. Reigeluth: Well, basically they need to recruit more people to the mission. Certainly getting a copy of my book Visions in Action. And sharing it with leaders of all the stakeholder groups in your school district would be helpful. Using guidance in that book, they can begin to improve their school districts readiness for paradigm change. And they can reach out for more help from one of the kinds of organizations that I just mentioned. Outside help is really essential. Finally, they could visit some schools that have transformed. Seeing the new paradigm in action can really have a profound effect on people's motivation to change, and I list some such schools in my Vision and Action book for people to visit.

Thembi: That makes a lot of sense. I really like what you're saying about taking a field trip to see schools that are doing the work because in in so many ways, how do you imagine that something's possible without seeing a road map and seeing it in action. So that's a really, really strong influence, I think, on change. So wow. You talked about change in command and a couple of different instances of the work that you've done and how that change in command impacted your work. So talk a little bit about how systems that have a change in command can try to continue the work.

Dr. Reigeluth: Yeah. One of the things that I had built into my process was working closely with the school board, as well as with administrators, teachers, students and so forth, and parents. Now the. I had worked hard with the Superintendent to try to get the school board to commit to. Having a criterion for selection of a new Superintendent being that they would continue with the paradigm change effort, which in this case was called the Journey toward Excellence, and unfortunately, we were not the Superintendent and I were not able to get sufficient commitment to that. 

So, I think what is most important for trying to overcome this problem of the revolving door for superintendents and principals in school districts, is to convince the school board that any new Superintendent must be willing to continue with the effort, and also for the Superintendent to commit that any replacements of principles will be with people who are willing to continue the paradigm change effort. I think that's really the only way that I'm aware of at this point to try to deal with that problem.

Thembi: A big challenge that you mentioned in this work is funding. You talked about the recent emergence of various nonprofits, including ones that you were pushing and nudging as well in the direction of supporting schools in this process, which says to me that that inherently the funding isn't there for schools to progress. And so what I'd like to know from you is you mentioned the national, you mentioned the Department of Education. At the federal level, in terms of what they're doing for this, in your opinion, do you see more federal funding as a possible equalizer in this work as a possible booster to this kind of change in schools?

Dr. Reigeluth: Yes, indeed I do. I think that is very important because the federal government has much more access to resources that can support this kind of change than do the state governments and the school districts individually. I'd like to make clear that although the transition process, retooling and educational system from being teacher-centered with all its features to being learner-centered with all of its features is an expensive retooling process. Kind of like retooling a factory or whatever. But once that transition has been made, there is strong evidence that the learner-centered system will be less expensive to operate than was the teacher centered system. So it's a worthwhile investment to make. And but it is very expensive that the transformation process is very difficult, very time consuming and therefore expensive. So I think it is, that unless the federal government steps in to provide funding, the transformation is going to take much longer to occur throughout the country.

Thembi: Okay, so you talked about the book you're working on…you've got that. What else is next for you? What kinds of exciting projects are you working on?

Dr. Reigeluth: Yeah, well, that book, most of my focus is really now on advancing the holistic 4D model. But I enthusiastically pursue any opportunities that arise to facilitate paradigm change in schools or even colleges.

I'm also encouraging a nonprofit group that I've encountered to create a technology platform using the detailed design specifications that my research team and I developed at Indiana University to support the learner centered paradigm of education. That tool, which is called PIES for Personalized Integrated Educational System, I think, could have a huge impact on making it easier for school systems to transform. So I I'd love to see that work continue.

Thembi: Okay, wow…this has been an excellent conversation. I've learned a lot. I know the listeners have learned a lot. And I just want to say, Dr. Reigeluth that I'm just so excited for what's next for you, for what's next with our education. I feel like with you around, we've got we're in good hands We're going to be moving forward to big, big, big change. So I just want to thank you for coming on today and I hope you come back, and we can talk some more.

Dr. Reigeluth: Indeed, I would be delighted to. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you today and I hope that this can help people to see a way forward to making students’ lives better.

Thembi:  Thank you so much.

KeyBARD is produced, written, and hosted by Thembi Duncan. Theme music by Sycho Sid. Visit us on Instagram @Keybard_IG.

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Thembi Duncan

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Dr. Charles Reigeluth

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