Competency Based Challenge at Mark Day School: Part One

Our 2022 Strategic Plan intentionally leads with teaching and learning. We established two overarching goals: “Nurture habits and mindsets that students need to be agents of their own learning. Advance everyday use of assessment data to challenge every student and improve teaching practices.” 

Why? As we wrote at the time, at Mark Day School, teachers work alongside students to help them discover who they are, the passions that drive them, and the myriad possibilities that exist for them. We know that from an early age, students are curious and capable of building the skills to navigate an increasingly complex world. Mark Day was founded to challenge students; we will continue to shape that challenge to serve students in pursuing and applying their own learning in a world marked by complexity, volatility, and change.

Those foundational principles, developed prior to OpenAI’s November 2022 roll-out of ChatGPT 3.5, have only become more resonant. Not only is the landscape of education in a period of rapid transformation, but so are the vast majority of other fields: business, finance, public service, medicine, healthcare, agriculture, and more.

One of the steps that we are pursuing through careful, comprehensive, and systematic faculty-wide professional development is adopting our own version of competency based education. True to our mission, we are designing it to be competency based challenge, an approach to learning in which clearly defined skills and understandings become the foundation for meaningful intellectual challenge and pursuit.

In a program based on competency based challenge, students learn to recognize their strengths, identify areas for growth, understand how skills transfer across contexts, and make informed decisions about next steps. This approach helps students answer not only “Where am I?” but “Where do I want to go next?” As always at Mark Day School, challenge is intentional; 

it is not something that happens to students, but rather something students learn to seek and build on. We mean what we say in the mission about nurturing students to “embrace challenge with courage and joy.” Teachers support students as they work in the zone of proximal development--in other words, just beyond their current ability--encounter learning experiences that stretch their thinking, revise their work in response to feedback, and persist through productive struggle. 

In this environment, one critical area of work well underway is aligning assessment with the goal of advancing students as agents and drivers of their learning. In particular, we are focused on three key aspects of assessment: 

• Assessment of learning: Teachers use evidence of student learning to measure achievement against outcomes and standards, usually at the end of a unit or project.
• Assessment for learning: Teachers utilize evidence about students’ knowledge, understanding, and skills throughout a unit or project to inform their teaching and guide what happens along the way in the classroom.
• Assessment as learning: Students act as their own assessors, reflect on their own learning, ask questions, and use a range of strategies to determine what they know and where they can grow. 

Research and our experience have led us here, with the fundamental goal of helping students increasingly become the architects of their own learning. It has long been a strength of Mark Day School, and we need to look no further than our own alumni to understand why:

“Before I came to Mark Day in 6th grade, I gave up on a lot of things if I did not succeed right away. What I learned was the power of ‘yet.’ I discovered that roadblocks are not permanent--instead, they are a way to see things differently, a chance to grow.”

“Whenever I start a new class, I make it a point to get to know my teachers and to help them get to know me. When I got to high school, I remember being very surprised at how hesitant my peers were to seek out their teachers. That helped me to appreciate even more the lessons in self-advocacy I learned at Mark Day.”

“At Mark Day I learned to bulldoze through obstacles and figure things out on my own, and at the same time I learned that I was surrounded by teachers and peers who were always ready to help.”

“Mark Day School taught me what I needed to learn—my times tables, proper grammar, what a mitochondria was—exceptionally important, foundational knowledge that is a primary purpose of elementary school. Beyond the WHAT, Mark Day also taught me HOW to learn. How to break a problem down, how to craft a study guide, how to talk to teachers. Those two pieces alone, what and how, separate this place from plenty of other schools. But beyond the what, beyond the how, Mark Day School also taught me WHY we learn, or more precisely, it helped spark a spirit of curiosity that motivated my academic experience for the rest of my life.”

Every time I have the opportunity to spend time with our alums from across the generations of the school, I am struck anew by how reflective they are about their own paths as learners and what they learned to do in their time at Mark Day. Though these insights were shared with us just over the past month or so, they reflect experiences that range from the early 2000s up through 2025. As unique as each of our graduates is, they share learning experiences that unite them and that reveal through lines in the teaching and learning that mark this place. 

We are building on an historic strength of Mark Day School at a crucial moment in time. We are counting on more, not less, disruption in the world. More, not less, uncertainty. And to us, more, not less, opportunity. And so we double down on building students who are wired for adaptability, wired to understand themselves as learners, wired to pursue the spark of curiosity, wired to build genuine partnerships within and between communities. We could not be more excited about the future.