A SNAPSHOT OF
ACT 77 IMPLEMENTATION

“…It relies on Superheroes…”

Research Conducted By:
Mary Simons (Conversations From the Open Road)
Dr. Sasha Antohin (Vermont Folklife)

Part I: Introduction

The authors of this paper are motivated by the following questions: how can we shape an educational environment where learning is relevant, engaging, and meaningful to students and to the needs of their communities? How can learning outside the school building be encouraged and better integrated into and reflected in a student’s holistic educational experience and reporting metrics?

Background

The model for K-12 education systems has historically been one of teacher-student, top-down passive transfer of content-based knowledge. Vermont’s curriculum and standard, mirroring the American educational paradigm in general, has typically been disconnected from the context of the local communities and contemporary context in which the students live. The limitations of these legacy approaches to education have been well documented, and nationally much work has been done to shift toward active models of student engagement that better connect to lived experience outside the classroom. Educators, students, citizens, and scholars have argued for decades that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to ensure that the time young people spend in school is time well spent, and that can lead to meaningful and successful life after high school. The challenges of our present day—the ubiquity of the internet, the continued rollout of AI-driven platforms, the overwhelming mental health struggles of our young people, the intersecting crises plaguing our communities, and the rapidly evolving landscape of employment opportunities—beg us to disrupt our inherited methodologies and perspectives to engage with new approaches to education.

Most people across the political, economic, and cultural spectrum agree that K-12 schools should prepare young people for the monumental challenges of the contemporary world, but few agree on how. Similarly, Vermont educators, students, administrators, and their broader communities have been grappling with this profound conundrum.

As community-based learning providers, we know our young people are creative, critically-minded, interested in, and hungry for meaningful engagement with their communities and society at large in ways that the traditional educational paradigm fails to recognize and cultivate. The locus of learning is no longer in our classrooms.

Vermont students from a range of economic, geographic, and cultural backgrounds already pursue diverse learning opportunities—as “passion projects” on their own and/or with community organizations. Many Vermont youth also hold fruitful work experiences and internships that are encouraged and even facilitated by school professionals. Time after time, these experiences are not credited as the heart of learning, and, if at all, are relegated to ‘electives’. Our educational system mistakenly continues to prioritize time spent in classrooms and with textbooks as the primary “evidence of learning.”

Act 77 History & Project Overview

In 2013 the Vermont legislature passed Act 77, requiring a Personal Learning Plan and Flexible Pathways for all Vermont students. The law codified a shift to personalization via greater flexibility in how a student may complete high school: from course options, learning modalities and assessments. This ethnographic study explores the on-the-ground implementation of the Act 77 educational mandate through 22 in-depth interviews with Vermont educators and administrators. Year 2 of this study (2023-2024) will explore the same question through the experiences of youth, resulting in a youth-produced podcast series.

As community-based learning providers and ethnographers, we (Mary Simons & VT Folklife staff) offer a unique window into the potential of non-traditional, personalized learning formats to transform a student’s educational experience and assessment. We have been privy to the past decade of Act 77’s implementation in Vermont high schools—though primarily through anecdotal reactions from education professionals, students and parents, that more often than not have highlighted the crevasse between the aspirations of this legislation and its reality. Our vested interest as community partners and concerned citizens, along with our peripheral engagement in and witness to secondary education for more than two decades, led us to explore the reasons for this disconnect between aspirations and reality.

Prior to this study, our informal conversations with other folks in the educational community highlighted similar concerns and a general interest in how we might realize the goals of personalization, with rigor and relevance, in our secondary schools. This evaluative study is supported (financially and otherwise) by other community-based organizations and alternative education practitioners who are similarly interested in finding ways to open the doors to when, where, how learning happens; to meet students where they are; and to facilitate the learning process through their interests, passions, histories and futures.

In the years following the passage of Act 77, VT’s Agency of Education required districts to construct an assessment system that included Proficiency-Based-Graduation-Requirements (PBGRs). The PBGR framework is integral to the pedagogical shift that Act 77 ushered in. PBGRs are intended to be the mechanism that enables Flexible Pathways to be integrated into the core curriculum. As we argue below, if PBGRs are done with fidelity, this transparent assessment framework holds the potential for a student to navigate and determine their educational experience according to their interests, passions and learning style–thereby cultivating student agency and autonomy.

When Act 77 passed in 2013 some schools already had structures and policies that honored alternative and personalized approaches to earning credits; a handful of schools already had ‘personalized learning hubs,’ and others held this as a curricular priority. Many schools had been developing student portfolios and various pathways to learning; values for proficiencies-based teaching and transferable skills were being generally adopted. In other schools, however, processes, frameworks, understanding and commitment had to be built from scratch.

Vermont boasts one of the highest graduation completion rates in the country, but also one of the highest higher education dropout rates. This disconnect suggests that high school graduation needs to better serve and prepare the state’s over 80,000 students for 21st century skills and real-world application.

This paper attempts to summarize what we learned about the status of how personalized learning practices, as expressed by PLPs, Flexible Pathways and Proficiency-Based-Graduation-Requirements, are implemented on the ground at more than a dozen high schools in Vermont. It is designed to be a conversation starter for all stakeholders–from education administrators, students, school boards, parents and community members–about the gaps and commonalities in the implementation, and more generally, how a cohesive, relevant educational experience might look like and function.

Methodology

In 2022, we interviewed high school staff responsible for Act 77 from at least one high school in each of the fourteen counties across the state. We asked 22 coordinators, advisors, counselors, principals and other relevant personnel to contribute to this study. The same questionnaire was used with all participants. Our interviews were over an hour with each practitioner, and often we followed-up for another hour conversation months later. The interviews covered themes such as categories and definitions of Act 77, its processes, procedures, and assessments, and the support mechanisms in place to help realize this policy’s intention at their particular school. The objective was to describe the variation in schools’ implementation across a set of key areas, as outlined in Act 77: Personalized Learning Plans, Flexible Pathways, and Proficiency Based Grading and Proficiency Based Graduation Requirements. Our inquiry represents the first effort to explore perspectives on Act 77 – its challenges and successes – through direct engagement with Vermont educators. We hope this landscape survey helps to contextualize a field that is heavy on policy guidance and lighter on reporting the realities of implementation.

We grounded our interviewing in the methods and ethics of collaborative ethnography. Ethnographic research provides an analytical lens focused on exploring how people communicate values and meaning. In the context of education research, it provides a way to examine how educators and students negotiate policy, implementation and professional practice. Using this approach, we worked to unpack standardized practices of Vermont schooling and to center the ways staff used terms specific to their school’s capacity and local setting. Collaborative ethnographic methods center the interpretation of findings on the people who are the subject of research exercise, rather than solely on the perspectives and interests of the researchers. In this way all the people who took part in our project had a direct role in shaping the conclusions presented here.

These interviews offered an opportunity for respondents to elaborate on policies outlined in their student handbook and website that may not be up to date and illustrative of the ‘on the ground’ experience of these policies. We have tried to explain this work, define the terms and educational practices, for both the professionals who are implementing this mandate, and also community members who are much more removed from this work.

The review of the research material and our interviews followed selective coding procedures and focused on gaining insights about the three Act 77 components (though, again, PBGRs were not originally included in Act 77). The very different structures, processes and support within each district to implement these components required significant work to create useful categories for cross-evaluation and in order to synthesize trends. Frameworks and guidance developed by the University of Vermont Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education and Vermont Agency of Education also informed categories of analysis.

Acknowledgements

We express tremendous gratitude to the educators who took time out of their busy schedules to share with us their experiences of Act 77.
We have kept participant schools and professionals anonymous for this initial synthesis.

Part II: Findings

Many interviewees cited the unprecedented academic and cultural disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the reason for lagging systems and ‘buy-in.’ Although we haven’t included these particular quotes in this document, such comments are ubiquitous in any evaluative study in 2023.

What is Act 77?

All of the practitioners offered an articulate and reasoned understanding of the intention behind Act 77, and all believed in and were committed to these goals.

I think the opportunity is to just continually think about how students are experiencing their own education in ways that are meaningful, that are engaging, and that prepare them for any postsecondary activity that they choose to focus on. Whether it's career specific or it's post-secondary training in a particular area or professional field, or it's just a two year, four year degree, whatever, right? So I think that's at the core, is how do we continue to create, in this case, policy—law—that encourages and mandates schools to look at ways that students are interacting with their learning that is aspirationally focused, personally meaningful, and is connecting the specific skills, knowledge, understandings and dispositions to the holistic element of their learning. Biology, world history, chemistry, whatever that is. I mean, at its core: college and career readiness, right? That’s a huge part of it.

So I am always reminded of that comic where the test giver is asking all of these diverse jungle animals, from a monkey to an elephant to an alligator to a parrot to take this test and they're staring at a rope to climb up. And so just thinking that out of all of those animals or students that are represented, it serves one—this idea of a standardized test. And I think that that is also a metaphor for learning in a traditional classroom. I think a critique of schools in general is that our world is rapidly changing, but if you look at the physical space of a building it remains unchanged, almost unchanged since its origination.

Speaker 1: My understanding is that the intention of the legislation is to acknowledge that not all students belong in the classroom. That many students can demonstrate proficiencies and passion projects and skills in non-traditional ways, and that the very industrialized school system is doing a disservice to a pretty hearty percentage of the population by forcing us on the conveyor belt of education. And flexible pathways and Act 77 is meant to create endless opportunities for students to access learning environments that are different or more accessible for them, given whatever circumstances they have going on, and to re-engage sometimes, students who have disengaged from the traditional learning environment. Yeah, I would say that that's kind of its intention.

Speaker 2: I would totally agree with what [name withheld] said, but I would also add that I think the real intent behind the law was to help increase graduation rates. I think that was a big driving force behind it. And to introduce kids to different paths they might not necessarily even think of, for example, first gen college kids, the dual enrollment courses. “Hey, try this out. I know it wasn’t on your radar—let’s test it, see if it works for you.”

The Flexible Pathways initiative, from my understanding, comes from a place of engagement–student engagement—and there has been a longstanding concern and issue around equity of access to education in the state of Vermont and across the country. And this was a way to bolster, I guess–I don't know if that's the right word—but, help create structures for schools to allow for different options in student pathways to graduation.

I think at its best it shifts the purpose of teaching and learning from teaching stuff to kids, to teaching kids. My sense is that it's an attempt statewide to do a couple of things. One is to bring some coherence to actually a lot of innovation that was already happening. I just want to name the fact that like this did catalyze some new initiatives and some new thinking and practices, but by no means did Act 77—it wasn't the starting gun, right? People were doing some really interesting work but in a typically Vermont way, which is pretty decentralized. And so, you know, I think a piece of this is the state's attempt to build coherence. But the other is to acknowledge that the way that we have standardized learning, both for students and for teachers and in systems, doesn't necessarily serve the best interests of students. And it's an opportunity both to try to coherently destandardize a lot of what education looks like and how it's delivered.

I feel very proud that as a Vermonter, that this was one of the things offered to our students in the public school setting. Because it offers, in my view, almost an individualized educational plan that has advocacy and control with the student and parents and caregivers all involved in trying to set up what could be opportunities and windows for that student.

All of the educational professionals we interviewed spoke of the divergence between the aspirations and the realities of the implementation, often using a critique of what is currently happening alongside what they intend or hope might be. Interrogating this space between where we are and where we envision this work to go is the fruit of this study. Below we provide much of the quotes that express this tension—perhaps serving as an outline of the work ahead.

The Personalized Learning Plan (PLP)

We found that PLPs were typically a document, website and/or mixed media portfolio that tracks and prompts reflection on a student’s learning goals and achievements, as well as a repository of a student’s ‘best work.’ In some schools PLPs house work that also illustrates room for growth. Some schools used the PLP for students to explore their growth in Transferable Skills, and still other schools no longer, if ever they did, require a PLP.

The majority of schools launched some version of a website to manage the PLPs –GoogleSites/Docs and Naviance (a college and career readiness software that provides planning and assessment tools for students) are common learning management systems used for PLPs. The standard content includes: An “About Me” section, a space for career exploration, for tracking academic progress, and to identify future goals (see Vermont Agency of Education PLP Conceptual Framework for Students).

It's a Google site. So all our students, [grades] seven through ten, with a few exceptions, have a PLP site. And it has the basic components as identified by the AOE [Agency of Education]. They certainly could be better, but all students have the “Home Page,” the “About Me.” Most of them have their learner profile and their interests, and they have images of things that are important to them and their values. Pretty much all of them have a career interest page with results from career cluster activities or research. They have either one or several pages documenting their progress in core classes or elective classes. They have a page identifying goals, some of them have actual SMART goals and some documented progress/updates to their SMART goals. Many of the eighth graders have a “High School Plan” page where they identify classes or programs that they want to do in high school.

Right now [the PLP] is a Google folder. It used to be in Naviance, that's where we started. Right now it's a Google folder with various kinds of lessons and pieces that the students have worked through.

Speaker 1: A Google site is what they decided on. Not a graduation requirement yet—heading that way. Portfolio work is starting back up this year. Next year we will start phasing it in as a graduation requirement.

Interviewer: And the way you’re conceiving of it is a portfolio of…

Speaker 1: Evidence of learning.

Speaker 1: The PLPs are grounded in our transferable skills, so they are not grounded in content specific proficiencies. They're really the primary place where students are interacting with those transferable skills in an academic way. Some teachers use those GXs [Graduate Expectations] in their classroom work, but a lot do not. A lot use really only that content-level proficiency, if they're even speaking the language of proficiencies with their students.

Speaker 2: And then the work of PLP completion is a work of translation, if that makes sense. It's like, “I wrote this really great essay in English. I guess I'll put it in my ‘Effective Communication’ folder.” And that translation work, again, for students for whom school works and have great abstract thinking skills and confidence and autonomy, many can do that on their own. Otherwise, you know, advisory has been a place where we've tried to support students in that. Other teachers take a moment in their classroom each quarter to say, “All right, pull out your PLP and let's find a thing that works.”

It's a Google doc with a basic structure that has been modified over the last five, six, seven years through a variety of different ways, including with some student voice. Essentially we have at least middle school/high school leveled activities—and in some cases, grade level activities—that take place that work toward completion and revision and updating of the PLP itself.

We haven't even used the PLP reference in forever. We do student-led conferences and students make portfolios and set goals, and that serves as the PLP. But we don't call it a PLP.

Most schools (10 out of our sample size of 13) had PLP development and maintenance as part of their advisory time and had students track evidence of learning on a web-based site. Most schools reported that there was wide variation in the supporting practices to the PLP because of the wide variation in staff ‘buy-in’ of this work, and because of the wide variation in advisors’ interpersonal skills and their student-teacher relationships. Many schools reported that classroom teachers are giving, or starting to give, time to submitting evidence of ‘best work’ to the PLP.

Speaker 1: From the schools that I met with a number of years ago, the successful ones just had this culture in their schools that said, “We’re doing this, and we all see the benefit of doing this, and we’re all going to do it.”

Speaker 2: Um, I don't think we do a good job selling it to our community because right now we're focusing on trying to sell it to ourselves. So, that's where we're at and that's our focus. So we can create that culture shift, winning more people, getting them on board, getting them to see the value of what's happening. And right now, [student PLP ] presentations have been the most effective way of doing that.

I will say, you know, every student has an advisor, which is their classroom advisor. They meet with that person twice a week in a group for half an hour. There is curriculum associated with helping them with their PLPs that those advisors are expected to implement multiple times throughout the year, over the course of four years. The actual execution of that varies widely from adviser to adviser, just as the actual relationships with students in that room varies widely from adviser to adviser. So we have advisers who know and love their students; those kids become their kids, they support those kids all the way to the end with many different things, right? And we have folks who kind of barely know the names of the kids in their advisory. I think when students have strong relationships with an advisor who knows them as a whole person and knows that they're building a computer at home, or that they're going home and watching five siblings, which could count as some of their personal development, then that teacher can help them to bring that into their PLP. But if they don't have that—and it's kind of luck at this point—if they have a teacher who knows them really well and that teacher happens to be their advisor when they're talking about PLP. Because oftentimes the advisor is not the teacher who knows them really well.

When I think about what we need, I need everybody to step up and say: this is valuable and essential and that it's going to have—it's going to bear fruit down the road. We might not see it because these kids are going to grow up away from us and go away. But you know, we're going to create adults who are fantastic people. And so I think in time, of course, we hear from every school system that the one coveted thing they need is time for all of these different things and that the plate of educators is so full we really have to look—what can you possibly get rid of to make this work better? I don't—I can't name anything to get rid of. I mean, there's just so many essential elements.

All schools reported that, in some ways, the PLPs lacked meaning and ownership by both the students and most of the educators. Rather than a useful practice and tool, the PLP instead had a tendency to become a ‘box-to-check’ to show compliance. In response, schools have implemented successive iterations in order to find more commitment and meaning for the PLPs.

In one school, only half of the student population even had PLPs, in two schools there was no active PLP process. In still one other high school, PLPs have become no longer a particular ‘product’, but rather a series of evolving experiences with each student, supported by student-educator relationships and guidance. This is, in part, to help a student learn and articulate their interests and goals, and also to ensure they are exposed to Flexible Pathway opportunities, which, in their articulation, is fulfilling the ‘spirit of the PLP’ if not actualizing a documented plan. This school emphasized and prioritized relationships over the formal, universalized documentation.

Speaker 1: We have had a lot of dialogue around PLP’s, in general, and really have steered away from it because I'm not somebody who believes in just having kids do something just to do it, right? That is disingenuous. It creates a divide between the relationships between adults and students, because we're forcing them to do something that they don't see the purpose and relevance in.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so before we had a really clear PLP process. And what we found is kids were just like, “This is a total box check.” Not to the student, not to the teacher, not to the conversation. But a lot of students just felt like, “I have to put things in this website or this document or this plan. And I just want to do what I want to do and I want to be supported by the school.” So we're in transition. I can’t say that as a school we believe this, but there's a large number of people involved in this work who really believe that [the] personalized learning plan process doesn't need to be a single portal of information, whether it's a document or blog or website. And rather, PLPs are actualized through well-supported processes where we're constantly looking at the ability of all students, in particular students who have been historically marginalized. Do they have access to building their self-awareness? To increasing their agency? To increasing their understanding of future options? Just any number of the things that are happening in schools. And so it's really much more of a holistic experience that we're viewing it as.

Something that we’ll consider for next year’s 9th graders is that…instead of having a teacher-led conference, that students…cause, to add stuff to the PLP there kind of needs to be a reason unless the teacher is just like, “Hey, just put this in here.” So I think that there needs to be something compelling, like a student-led conference.… We need to create the authentic circumstances for the relevance of the PLP before we get compliance.

I think in a perfect world, all of this stuff, the hope is to get students from being on a conveyor belt where it's a very adult-led experience to a student-led learning experience where the kids can say, “Here's what my interest is, here's how I can identify what my strengths and my challenges are and here's how I want to get there.” But the school system is not built to really teach them that reflective process and to be OK with your failings, you know that whole idea of failing forward.

For juniors and seniors who are looking at more of like, the independent learning opportunities, the portfolio, which is the place where we consider and ask students to store their own personalized learning plan–a PLP—is a place where in an ideal world, if it was executed as well as it could be, they would be keeping track. You know, not the wonderful people who are totally overtaxed in student services with every college recommendation and every student schedule. But like the students would be more in control of their own narrative that's like, “My senior year this is how I'm earning my last PE credit. I'm going to do mountain biking ILO [Independent Learning Opportunity] and I'm going to have way more than 30 hours mountain biking, and so I should be getting PE credit for that. And with some thoughtful journaling and reflection, here's how I'm showing you I am meeting those standards, not in a traditional PE class, but because I’m getting on my mountain bike every weekend.”

So my hope for the PLP, which is certainly not what it is now, would be that that is the source that's driving these different opportunities and different kinds of pathways to graduation, but also to the future for a kid. So, in eighth grade, they're preparing for ninth grade transition. Their PLP is really looked at in terms of their interests, what they want to do later in life, maybe areas of struggle, but also strengths in terms of what type of learning is best for them. And that would really drive [their educational experience]: “OK, here are what our options are as you come into high school. This sounds like it's an option, or an opportunity that might really fit into what you're looking for in terms of future, but also in terms of your learning style.” And that really being the driving force and coming back to that all the time. That is currently not the case at all.

Speaker 1: I think the rollout of the PLP can get kind of like school-ified and institutionalized. It’s like a good idea and the vision of being able to say, “Oh, you do this great thing in the community, why don't you count that as an educational experience and receive credit for it?” But it became this sort of “Document and Reflect” [exercise] and I think those things are important, but it's a heavy lift to try and compel a student to do that. For some reason, and I'm not quite sure why, kids don't want to do that. And so it becomes something “I have to do,” not something “I want to do.” And then it ruins the PLP. It’s like, you want them to own this body of evidence and experience and knowledge. They've done all these great things in the world, but as soon as you ask them to reflect on that for school, it's like…

Interviewer: It's deadening, I know!

Speaker 1: It’s deadening, yeah.

One way that schools have attempted to draw meaning, and create an authentic use for the PLP is by tying it to final presentations to internal (within the school community) and external (with community members) audiences at the end of certain school years, and/or for seniors as part of their graduation requirements. We are using the definition for ‘authentic’ that is shared in pedagogical circles, which refers to an educational experience that has an application and/or audience beyond just a class assignment for the teacher. Another way that schools are attempting to make PLPs a useful tool for students is for them to be the central guide in their student-led conferences.

Well, we call them [PLPs] “portfolios,” and we have a portfolio defense at the end of eighth grade and at the end of tenth grade. And we also have a graduation capstone here called Senior Project. By 12th grade year, or by the end of junior year, they have a pre-approval process to pursue any topic of personal interest—30 hours of experiential learning. It’s called our Senior Project, but I would argue those routines we have in place at 8th and 10th grade absolutely equip students to handle the pressure of an 8-10 minute public defense of their learning.

And the other two places we have built into our schedule for students to do that are October and March “student-led conferences.” And that is the model…we moved away from parent-teacher conferences. Students lead their own conferences with an advisor and parent. Yeah, in 7th grade they’re talking twice, publicly in student-led conferences. In 8th grade, both of those conferences pre-date their 8th grade portfolio defense and then that cycle kind of continues. Over 4 more conferences they have a lot of information to talk about by their 10th grade portfolio.

And we've identified Exploration years and Exhibition years. We've built in like, “Hey, we're going to do a really informal exhibition, you know, just peer to peer in the sophomore year and the eighth grade year.” So, you know, it's kind of like giving kids a couple of opportunities to informally present parts of their PLP to kind of get them ready for the big show, which isn't a show yet. The interviews that we have with the kids at the end, I do, I really want the community to see those, because these kids have a really strong portfolio showing that they've done some really good work. When they talk about it, they get it, they understand it. It's impressive; they're ready to graduate.

This year was the first year that all of the seniors needed to actually present their PLP to a panel of teachers. And I think they could invite a community member also if they wanted.

Yet, a few schools still connect PLPs to the requirements and conventions of post-secondary educational and work opportunities, modeling it after ‘Slide Decks’ and resumés used to apply to jobs; one school uses the format of the ‘‘Common Application’ (used to apply to many colleges) for part of their PLP.

Speaker 1: There's a place for a resumé and a cover letter or their college essay. And we've modeled the co-curriculars and activities that students would be involved in [in a way] that is very similar to the Common Application format, just thinking that students would have that documented and could use it during that process. So, you know, we're trying to make it as relevant as possible for students so that they can really see it as: this is a useful process—the reflection piece and, you know, just having some metacognition and understanding the importance of that.

Speaker 2: And then also having school counselors remind them: “You have this document, remember, as you're filling out college essays or applications, it's here for you.”

All PLP Coordinators aspired to having the PLP be a meaningful practice and tool that is integrated into, and reflecting the whole educational experience of the student. Many conceived that the PLP might offer the unifying device for a young person’s growth, rather than (another) repository of in-class work.

If the portfolio could do more work, if it was even more omnipresent as part of our narrative about what we do here, then instead of going to the grading portal—like, students could be updating a space and shaping the narrative on their own. Like we wouldn't have to wait for test scores and turn everyone's life upside down for three weeks of SBAC [standardized test mandated by VT Agency of Education] scheduling only to not perform and like have a shitty review of our entire town because of test scores after two years spent in hybrid and unusual schedules during COVID. In an ideal world, if it was executed as well as it could be, the students would be keeping track. The students would be more in control of their own narrative.

And then finally, outside of school things, so many times we have students bringing things from the Career Center, we have students bringing things from 4-H or FFA [Future Farmers of America] or GIV [Governor’s Institute of Vermont]. That's the other place that is really wide open to the world. I mean, I've had students talk about travel that they've done and connect that [as transferable skills] to Global Citizenship and so forth.

Many in-school experiences are intended to personalize students’ educational experience: Senior Projects, Capstones, Y.E.S., J-Terms, electives. These are often beloved parts of the high school experience. However, they are seemingly disconnected from the everyday of ‘school’ and what is considered academic, and even framed as such–as breaks from ‘regular school’. These are often more ‘tacked on’ programs. It seems that these could be useful in bridging, explaining and showing the work that PBGRs, PLPs and FPs can do.

And you know, and I actually wonder about our Year End Studies (Y.E.S.) program. Y.E.S. is the only time of the year when they [teachers and students] are freed from content and coverage and able to plan backwards from these transferable skills. So it should be this incredibly robust and beautiful collection of evidence and experience for kids that they can use. Not every kid has the same experience in Y.E.S. Some students are having more conventional experiences, and some are having deeply transformative experiential experiences, but I rarely see Year End Studies evidence in PLPs. And if a student learned a lot or grew a lot I feel like that should count.

Flexible Pathways

The Agency of Education defines Flexible Pathways as “expanded learning opportunities, including academic and experiential components that build and assess attainment of identified proficiencies.” FPs are ways to offer personalization and agency for a student to determine how, where and when they learn best.

Most teachers are constructing curriculum for personalization within classes (such as allowing students to choose how to demonstrate their learning). Although this pedagogical step is part of the foundation for a culture of personalization within a school, choice within conventional classrooms is however not the same as Flexible Pathways. Many educators and administrators spoke about having professional development for all educational professionals to support this shift towards personalization; such capacity development is essential in this work.

The thing that has made the most movement has been [an outside curriculum consultant]coming in and doing work with Universal Design for learning. I've already seen some movement—philosophical movement—and then also, not just philosophical movement, but there are people who are making changes within what they’re doing [in their classroom] based on that. And that's going to feed into understanding how I can offer a flexible pathway to a student. Because I’ve embraced that I’m doing UDL [Universal Design Learning] for all kids. I really can't diminish the fact that if you're not designing your lessons, your curriculum, in a way that offers an entry level for all students, then I'm not really sure how PLPs and how a flexible pathway can work. Because, again, you're not flexible in your thinking as an instructor. You’re going to pull out the lesson and the assessment that you used in 1987. And that's always worked for you. And in your mind it's always worked for kids. It's a mind shift that's going to take a while.

Until we offer professional learning at the secondary level for the teachers to be able to design all of that, then the PLPs do not come alive for the intent that is so aspirational.

My first year here I had an opportunity to observe 25 teachers. I just took them all on as a way for me to get into classrooms. My passion is teaching and learning. Many of these teachers have not been observed or evaluated in their 20 years here, but one or two times. And so they also have not received any type of professional development as it relates to curriculum and instruction. That just has not been either a strength of the admin, whether it's district or school; it hasn't been a priority. So when I speak to the teachers who are there, they are good teachers, but they also haven't been provided the opportunities to learn. And not to say that they can't go and learn themselves, like that's part of it, yes, but I also believe in districts and schools supporting teachers through that process of learning.

Research and practice has shown that a similar foundational step to shaping a more relevant, inherently engaging curriculum is in employing Project- or Problem-Based Learning (PBL) within the classroom. PBL is a pedagogical approach designed to give students the opportunity to develop knowledge and skills through engaging projects set around challenges and problems they may face in the real world. PBL is aligned with, and contributes to, a robust Flexible Pathways program in that it builds the bridge and curricular muscle between ‘real world application’ and education, albeit PBL occurs within the conventional classroom and usually led by a teacher. Three different schools had teachers who specifically created experiential, multi-disciplinary and project-based experiences as Flexible Pathway offerings. Teachers spoke about the challenges of incorporating these experiences with other spheres of student’s schooling.

The career center is their pathway, right? Going into a vocation or trade school is their pathway because we don't have the understanding, the resources, the knowledge, the training, professional development within the traditional classrooms to support those authentic learning experiences students are looking for. Those students go because they want something relevant and purposeful and authentic, right? They want to walk away with something tangible. And so to some degree, I think it offers them another opportunity to get to school and get through graduation. But I also wonder if it promotes inequities. I just think when we talk about flexible pathways, it just provides different points of access for students to gain learning where they're interested or where they need more enrichment or they need extension. I think CBL—Community Based Learning Opportunities—early college, like those are all wonderful experiences as well. I focus a little bit our career center piece because I'm really concerned at the increasing numbers of students who go that pathway and that we don't have data to find out why they're going. We can look at those students and say a high percentage of them are going there because they have not been successful at [our school], and that's of concern to me. But with regard to the other flexible pathway options like CBL [Challenge Based Learning], early college, dual enrollment, they just offer different access points for students who want to extend their learning or they want to get that first year of college and they're ready for that—going on and going forward. I've also seen us use online courses to support students just getting through a course. Right? So not really, truly getting learning, but just to get through the course. So there's some loopholes around that as well that have been used, I think, that actually create inequities within our school system, if allowed.

I would say that certain kids who really don't like school all of a sudden get excited about learning things that they're interested in. And you can see why this kind of programming is really important. Even just like one kid, you know, for me, like, it makes such a big difference to see how, “Oh, this kid isn’t disengaged, this kid doesn't like what they're learning. This kid does feel like what they're learning is relevant or is going to help them.” And when they feel like, you know, that is something that is true, like, you know, one of our students right now, who has a smile on his face every day anyways, but now has a bigger smile on his face, and he knows what he wants to do. Also, I wonder how to embed that kind of work in regular academic courses so that kids can leave school with research skills and with timber framing skills, you know? Because it is really important that they know how to read and write well, you know, like no matter what they're going to do after school.

We have a racial justice PBL that went from a Racial Justice Alliance group and then became a class. What else is running this year? Oh, and there's a mindfulness and movement project based learning class. So again, you can kind of predict that the mindfulness and movement is run by a PE teacher who had a little extra bandwidth to like, try something totally different. To incorporate more mindfulness and get students moving, but like not in a traditional PE setting, because that doesn't work for plenty of people.

So like, trying to find a person who’s going to wear that ILO [Independent Learning Opportunity] hat—to organize all of that. Even the work that person has to do to prepare industry professionals to work with students. So all of this too, is really reliant on professional development. Like, with teachers who are prepared, not to send students to PBL as an alternative pathway, but in an ideal world about building meaningful projects into their normal curriculum. Because I think most of the teacher prep programs, unless you have a super innovative mentor teacher, are still largely reliant upon “teaching as banking” model. You're just like, “to be a teacher means you're standing in front of your students. And all of our academic assessments for you are going to be sort of an assessment of your ability to deliver information like that.”

[I was at another school] helping them with their musical. And the only way they're [students] allowed to have a Thursday night show is if all the kids showed up to school Friday morning. For opening night to be on a Thursday the kids had to show up on a Friday because they couldn't miss class. And there's this whole division…like, we say yes to multiple Flexible Pathways. But do your Flexible Pathway within the box that we allow for. There's so much learning that happened in producing an entire musical and that's just seen as extra.

One high school’s entire curriculum, across disciplines, is driven by Project-Based Learning, which happens through interdisciplinary, trimester-long projects. At this school, PBL is becoming the main-stream pathway, rather than a FP.

Speaker 1: It [Project-Based Learning] is our pedagogy. There's a learning curve for some folks. We don’t separate teaching and learning from making and doing.

Speaker 2: There are different schools of thought around projects. [In some schools, it would be ] “So this is my PBL project.” or “I'm doing PBL now and now I'm doing school.” [For us,] the project drives the learning.

Speaker 1: And there were teachers in the elementary who were teaching with the PBL philosophy before that, but it was still more piecemeal. Now it's about cohesion and alignment of practice and language. And we really were compelled to move this direction just thinking bigger about what school should feel like for kids. And so we've tried to, in that teacher/leader kind of way, bring that, without principals who really had that experience until [the new principal] came and she had the experience and the positional authority to say, “Hey, this is what we're doing.”

And we're trying to do it the way we feel like it should be done. And I think too often the institutional way of doing something sort of becomes the tail that wags the dog. It’s easier or it’s convenient or it’s always been done this way. And, really, education and learning is a story, and we want kids to own their story and it to be evident to other people who are kind of seeing a student’s progress.

All schools offer the following menu of Flexible Pathways: school-based course offerings, virtual or blended learning opportunities, Independent Studies/Learning Opportunities; community or work-based learning opportunities, and post-secondary learning options such as early college and dual enrollment. The most common Flexible Pathways that students seek are dual enrollment and early college, and the Tech Center programs. That is probably in part because these FPs are the ‘easiest’ to fold into the classroom schedule and assessment structure. Our network of Tech Centers have been teaching students for decades and have their own source of funding, curricular accountability and credentialing. Similarly, external funding has contributed to the equitable access to all of these FPs for VT students.

Work-Based Learning and Community-Based Learning are other potential FPs. Many FP Educators and Work-Based Learning Coordinators are finding ways to recognize work experiences and internships as comparable learning experiences to content-classes, and align the assessment for these FPs with the school’s assessment procedures. Unless we relegate all of this external experience as earning elective credit, this work of ‘translation’ is a significant nut to crack to make these as valuable as traditional courses.

You know, the one experience where I think it serves all students the same way is community-based learning (CBL). Because that can meet students, all different types of students with opportunities to get out and experience what they're interested in. And there's no hierarchy of Early College, Dual-Enrollment versus CVCC [Central Vermont Career Center], right? An even playing ground is that CBL opportunity, to me, where it provides all students at all levels opportunities to come out and explore their interest in the field. There's probably other Flex Pathways that I'm not thinking about, but that's one that I feel like is the most equitable when I look at the various programs that I'm familiar with and aware of based on my three years of experience here.

Most schools have an educational professional responsible for the logistics and management of the FP program; a few schools house these opportunities in the roles of “Guidance Professionals.” Some schools have also allocated an Educational Professional, often titled a “Flexible Pathways Coordinator,” and an allotted space (both in schedule time and physical location) to provide a FP hub. These Coordinators oversee personalized Independent Studies and Opportunities for students.

Often these Flexible Pathways are an intervention device for disengaged students, or for students seeking enrichment in a particular interest. If an Independent Study is intended to earn credit and/or a specific proficiency, a licensed content teacher is also responsible, along with the FP Coordinator, to ‘sign-off’ on the work of this Independent Study. This highlights a structural consideration of who has the authority to award credit for what content knowledge proficiencies. In some schools, the time required by this licensed content teacher is not yet accounted for in the contractual agreement, and so this is an unaccounted for cost in the FP program, and currently relies on the good will of many teachers doing more work than their contract requires.

Interviewer: Someone said the other day that “It relies on superheroes.” I can't remember who said that. And you know it does! You’re going to keep going back to the same ones.

Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. We have a Math Teacher who does a fantastic job. He's running five completely different Independent Studies for kids to earn [credit for] math. So he basically has five extra preps and has to fit in to meet with those kids and all that stuff. So it's tough and it's a lot, and we're lucky that teachers are saying yes to it, to be honest.

So if they are seeking an English credit then that is the teacher of record. So we have one teacher that has one section dedicated, which is basically one block of their schedule across a school year that's dedicated to meeting with those students who are taking a Personalized Learning Study. And so that would be the case for math, science, English, arts…

The only thing that's getting in the way is you need a teacher of record. And so how do you contractually ensure that you're offering someone [a fair FTE of responsibilities] and we just don't have the bodies right now to say, “Okay, well, you're going to teach two classes and then you're going to do this flexible pathway thing for other two.” Because, especially if you're a math or science person, I need you in the classroom in front of kids, because we're so low on those people.

It is also important to consider the logistical concerns around creating CBL and WBL opportunities: identifying and maintaining the community connections, before, during and after a student’s experience. Liability for the student off-campus was a concern raised in a few conversations.

We have a kid who is [in a CBL program]—struggling learner, good with hands-on, and is super interested in knives. He wants to be a knife-maker later on. His project was based on researching the history of knives and how knives were built and what materials they were built with and how they were used from way past to the present. So I had someone locally who was a knife maker who was going to come in and work with this student, like work with him to make a letter opener. And so I had put that question out there [to administration] like”Is this okay? Is there anything I need to do, in terms of liability for this?” I never got an answer, like we're six months later, never got an answer. The semester just ended. The kid didn't get to do it. [And a request for a] Police Ride-Along, same thing. I've asked about that lately. Just zero answers, like I can’t get answers. So there's just a, there's like a stopping point in terms of—we will try to fight for an experience for a kid and we just won't get anywhere.
We won't get any answers. I do not feel comfortable putting these kids out there without getting liability answers because I don't think Central Office would necessarily have my back at this point. There’s a lot going on there.

The concern most often voiced focused on the costs of ensuring that all students have transportation to off-campus FPs.

But I think specifically, we are struggling with equal access in terms of transportation and resources and a lot of those pieces. We talked about doing regional transportation and we had talked about like Bellows Falls, Greenmount and in Springfield. Can we figure out regional car-pooling and working together and do some…like figure out how to collaborate and to get some of those resources if we don't individually have them from a school.

All FP coordinators articulated frustration with the fragmented scheduling in high schools, since this is one of the most glaring impediments to a student’s ability to work with a community organization or mentor, or independently off-campus. Nearly all voiced an aspiration of a resolution to this, and some mentioned ‘block-scheduling’ to help facilitate FPs that much more.

Proficiency-based Learning and Graduation Requirements (PBGRs)

Proficiency-Based Graduation Requirements (PBGRs) are the list of proficiencies that a district uses to determine what content knowledge and skills students need to demonstrate mastery of in order to graduate. PBGRs are designed to offer transparency of assessment criteria to support student agency in determining the educational opportunities that best serve them, allowing students to determine when, where and how they gain the practice in order to earn proficiency in the skills/proficiencies.

Proficiency-Based Learning and assessment looks at evidence of proficiency in a particular set of content knowledge and skills connected to state/industry/educational standards, rather than in the traditional grading practices, which assess in a sum value based on ‘seat-time’ participation, the subjective value of a student’s effort, the level of engagement and participation, and the completion of and valuation of class assignments.

Proficiency-Based learning recognizes that all learners are unique and that different learners progress at different paces, and therefore advance towards graduation at varying rates. Proficiency-based grading refers to a system of identifying where a student is along a continuum of learning, often with a four-point scale (e.g., beginning, developing, proficient, and expanding) rather than a percentage scale that has been used traditionally. Practices that support proficiency-based grading represent a major change in how we think about assessing and reporting on students’ learning. In a traditional system, grading is used to evaluate how much work is done and how students compare to one another, but not necessarily to show how much students have learned. In a proficiency-based system, the purpose of grading is to let all stakeholders—parents/guardians, children, educators, and community members—understand what students know and how they perform in relation to expected learning outcomes, i.e. is this student showing proficiency for a particular skill/knowledge concept. (Agency of Education)

Nearly all the educators interviewed work in schools with proficiency-based learning and instruction integrated in all content classes. Often they are part of the assessment and grading procedures. The pedagogical shift to proficiency-based teaching/learning—this shift in how and what we teach and assess—is integral to the larger move to PBGRs. However, Proficiency-based teaching is not the same as school-wide adoption of Proficiency-Based Graduation Requirements, PBGRs.

Proficiencies are either embedded within overall course grades, and/or are listed and enumerated side-by-side with course grades, resulting in a hybrid grading system.

We've put a lot of time and effort and worked as a faculty to really reframe what is essential to learn, what is a proficiency versus a standard—so something that's enduring and flexible and has applications outside of a specific assessment. Does that happen 100% of the time in the building? No. But that's how we all talk about learning, is that if we're assessing a student on something, it should be an enduring skill that has transferability and can be assessed in multiple ways. But we still have traditional…like you have the “credits are required classes.” But our standards and what students are being assessed on and what our grades look like are proficiencies. So students have a full proficiency-based transcript.

We have our identified proficiencies. I don't think they show up on the transcript level. They're there on the report card level, but everything is still very much focused on classes. You know, part of it is we’re compromising, because we're looking at this as a community effort and we still have some community pushback about proficiencies in general, as every school does. But we've stuck with it and I think having classes is still that, you know…What looks familiar to people who went to school before is like, “these are the classes you take” and you just have a score of a 1 through 4 instead of a letter grade.

What we're working on now, but is still very traditional, is that many of the graduation requirements are just a class. Like English 9 is a graduation requirement. It's not like “this proficiency is a graduation requirement,” but it kind of is, because English 9 is these proficiencies. But there’s no way to show proficiency in those areas unless you take English 9, the way it stands right now.

Most educators we interviewed were at schools using a hybrid model that includes both PBGRs and traditional course grades/credits. In these contexts PBGRs serve as one of two “gates” for graduation, with conventional course grades serving as the second.

Several years ago, four schools shifted to using only PBGR for assessment. Since that time two of these schools have shifted to either a hybrid model (requiring both course grades and the list of PBGRs) or returning to the tradition of only course content graduation requirements and credits (i.e. 3 years of English etc).

Speaker 1: On the transcript for every course, there are two grades: there's the content grade and then there is the transferable skill grade. And we're at a place now where we're kind of doing dual systems of reporting. We're doing by course proficiency, and then our dream is to go to straight proficiency so that course grades would disappear. But that's down the road. We're in this transition mode.

What we don't want to do is regular old Carnegie Units, which is seat time in a classroom. So, in biology class–if you sit there and you get through it and you pass enough tests to do enough homework, right, you get a credit for it. Well, no: we actually just want to say for this learning target, you’re at a 2. For this learning target, you’re at a 3. So over all for your proficiency you get a 3.5 in biology for content and then here's your evidence of transferable skills. No course credits. That's what we want to get rid of is no more course credits. Just Life Science Proficiency Score, right? Earth Science Proficiency Score.

So, for my biology class, for example, they get a Life Science proficiency score, and then they also get a Habits of Work/Transferable Skills score. So I'm assessing writing and collaboration in my biology class, and I'm reporting out on those transferable skills. And then I'm also reporting out on their knowledge of life science. Now their GPA right now is determined by only the Life Science score, the “Academic Mastery” score is what we call each course score.

But I would say that there is this acknowledgment that we need to be focusing more on transferable skills than on content. We know that content is growing exponentially by the moment—so we have to focus more on how do you learn to deal with all of that…

Interviewer: Communicate, collaborate, think! Yeah, exactly.

What we do have is all of our courses are proficiency-based. So all of our science courses are based on NGSS [Next Generation Science Standards] standards. Our Global Citizenship courses are all based in C3 [College, Career, and Civic Life Framework] standards. We have a 1 through 4 proficiency scale. And so all of that is kind of based in the philosophy of proficiency-based learning. But what we don't have is just the list of 80 standards that every student must meet [to graduate]. Part of it was a major shift to proficiency-based [learning], you know, for the community to understand and support it. And part of it was the hybrid shift, was like, okay, we're going to build a bridge, we're going to go hybrid to fulfill our requirement by the Agency of Education to go proficiency-based learning. So yup, check that box. But we're going keep parts of the old system as well, both for just PR [Public Relations], but also kind of per your point, to also maintain some latitude that students can still explore without having to like…”I want to explore this, but I need to make sure that it's connected back to this one specific thing.”

We're still very connected to the Carnegie credit system here. So every class is a half credit or a full credit, and we have some synonymous “seat time” hours. However, that is in complete conjecture to proficiency-based learning. It's not supposed to be about seat time, it's supposed to be about demonstrating mastery. But we're stuck in this quantifiable place, I think. We're working with organizations to figure out what does a transcript need to look like in a proficiency world? There's a lot of anxiety about what does this mean for our college-bound students? And are they going to be at a disadvantage because we're changing our system? I mean, no, they’re not. Colleges have spoken to that excessively already. It's that, I think: trying to get away from a quantifiable thing to more of a qualitative place is a hurdle we haven’t quite figured out how to jump.

I assess my English students with PBGRs, but they are getting an English credit. And I think, still the most traditional pathway are those Carnegie units where a student is eligible for graduation when they have four year-long credits of English, four credits of Social Studies, and I think it’s 3 and 3 for math and science.

I think credits serve parents because parents are familiar because they graduated in that system. And so it feels familiar to them. It's something that they can understand, unlike this shift to proficiencies. Until that thinking really changes, and parents who have expectations for having college-bound students are reinforcing that messaging that schools are trying to break away from but are still totally beholden to.

I think if we were to shift towards fewer transferable-skills-based “Super Standards” like Communication, then yes, your science teacher could assess your ability to communicate in a lab report. And your history teacher could assess your ability to communicate the document-based question comparing two historical dates. And the GW Plastics Mentor Teacher could assess your ability to communicate in the professional setting among industry professionals like on a phone call, like customer service…

Only 2 schools we interviewed have only PBGRs for their graduation requirements.

Speaker 1: So we made an important decision to say we're not going about checking off 218 indicators. That's not the way to go. We created Graduation Standards that are very similar to the transferable skills, but they're with our branding and language. And then in order to achieve that—that GX they’re called—it would take place in a project studio, which is an interdisciplinary course that's a trimester long and is project based. So the performance tasks, say they're in a music and English song-writing class: they have to hit all the Music proficiencies and ELA [English and Language Arts] content proficiencies in order to earn that GX in Communication. And then that GX is what shows up on the Mastery Transcript. So it's really saying: in order to demonstrate, you need to show us how you're demonstrating your content proficiency through the lens of that graduation standard.

So here's your performance task, we’re in the classroom, we’re working on this experiment. So the our learning target is: I can design and carry out an experiment. Once you've showed us that, and you've created a larger deliverable, that deliverable may connected to a GX that's about Critical Thinking. Our transcript just has GXs.

Speaker 2: And there’s a tension, I think, with the granularity. We've kind of been back and forth. How granular does reporting need to be? What's the purpose of reporting? You're reporting a moment in time when it's really like…it's part of the story but not the end of the story. So it's really difficult. Like reporting should inform a student and family: “How am I doing at this moment and am I on the right path to achieve this proficiency, in high school, this GX?” And so we've moved to Transferable Skills for those and not reported on the granularity of each specific target or indicator. Those are reported on the Report Card level at the end of a marking period, you know, like a little more traditionally. But still, we tried to distill down…we don't have 215 indicators. We try to distill those down into usable chunks and I would say it's not perfect. It's still a work in progress. And there is tension. We kind of go back and forth about it. And it's done differently everywhere.

Speaker: Yeah, we are one of the schools that is going ‘whole-hog’ proficiency-based. The only thing that we do, and it's because of colleges, which has sort of screwed our philosophy up, is that colleges still want—for scholarship-based, merit-based stuff—they still want some sort of grade.

Interviewer: So does a student know when they're signing up for chemistry that they'll be working on these three indicators or something like that?

Speaker: In the handbook. But do kids get it? I don't think so, because I don't think that kids really understand the system other than they know these 215 things that I have to do. But they don't look at it. Very few TAs go over this stuff with the kids. The teachers don't say, “Hey, this is what you're going to be learning in four years.”

Because each district is responsible for creating their own assessment system for graduation, there is no unified, state-wide list of PBGRs. Schools have struggled, and spent much time and labor, to determine an organizational framework and reasonable number of proficiencies for students to achieve/earn in order to graduate. For an example of contrasts between schools, there might be 100 additional PBGRs at one site compared to the requirements set at another. At this point, most of the educational professionals we spoke with did not know how many PBGRs their schools had for students, and most explained that this was still being determined and reconfigured.

Transferable skills are particular proficiencies/skills that cross disciplines; these are often referred to as 21st Century skills: communication, self-direction, creative and practical problem solving, responsible and engaged citizenship, informed and integrated thinking. For the most part, transferable skills are not considered as rigorous and important as knowledge/content-area proficiencies, and seen as “soft skills,” and so are not as uniformly valued and assessed as other proficiencies or course content grades.

At many schools, Transferable Skills are not even assessed, but are rather just encouraged in students, similar to ‘Habits of Learning’ or Social-Emotional-Behavior guidelines. In some schools, Transferable Skills (also called Learning Expectations) are used to frame end-of-the-year presentations, Capstones and Senior Projects.

In some schools, PLPs were in part used to address growth in Transferable Skills. In others, Transferable Skills are explicitly assessed, but embedded within class grades.

In one school, Transferable Skills are used to create consistency and integration across curriculum and to organize and streamline the list of proficiencies.

Specifically, the educators at this particular school defined their PBGRs as "learning expectations" and structured them into 6 categories: Communication & Creative Expression, Integrative Thinking, Literacy, Personal & Global Engagement, Problem Solving, Self-Direction. Within these 6 categories, students have the opportunity to practice a set of skills, defined as "indicators." For example, under “Problem Solving”, a student has 10 different ways to achieve mastery, such as "create or identify strategies to solve a problem, adjusting approach as needed" or "develop and use focused, significant, and probing questions to drive my inquiry." At this school, students are assessed using 73 indicators over the course of their high school career.

Part III: Emerging Themes

As already stated, Act 77 has the potential to be transformative, but affecting this transformation requires a significant shift in our education paradigm and culture. Saliently, it requires our often inward-facing school communities to expand out to the broader communities in which their students live, and connect with the individuals and organizations that already provide, or can potentially provide, community-based learning opportunities. Many professionals spoke to us about this.

Ultimately, school, I think, can be a hub of a variety of learning experiences that we want to move into. And I think the pandemic offered a lot of promise in terms of like, let's disrupt…you had something to force people to disrupt their thinking. And unfortunately, it's like driving in mud season. We're just right back in the ruts and we're not acknowledging the need to really make a shift in how school structure works. We're just comfortable with the idea of it being an institution and a place where kids go for six plus hours a day. And now schools have a variety of other things they're required to do: feeding kids more, there's more trauma counseling services needed, which I completely support and endorse. But the mission has changed and we're not talking about that. In a lot of places, it's less about education and academics and more just about health and human services and trying to help kids get a footing in how to be a human.

Speaker 1: You know, we've all grown up and been socialized in the same system. And I think, you know, on the teaching side, one of the pieces is how we define rigor, you know? Like, we have professionals who still see certain courses as more rigorous and higher status—teachers won’t want to give those up either. And so, redefining rigor broadly, and opening up access and honoring different ways of knowing and ways of learning, there are going to be sacrifices all around, including within the ranks of teachers.

Speaker 2: One of the things that I see, going back to that idea of rigor: I see lots of teachers not knowing how to have an experiential course, which also feels rigorous, because their definition of rigor is so narrow. We haven't necessarily helped folks with that conundrum, because I don't think that we always know. Because the thing that's really tricky is at the high school level, people do become content experts and so it can be difficult to use those levers in every single content area. And then folks also just get these huge “expert” blind spots about, like, this is what it means to be successful as a math student. And therefore, this is the only way to be successful as a math student.

Structural Limitations for Systems Change

As a whole, we found it inspiring and reassuring that all of the practitioners and administrators we interviewed articulated their understanding and commitment for the rationale of Act 77. Most interviewees, however, either directly reflected or intimated that their work feels like it is being done in a silo—-that it is less visible and supported as they want or need given the scope of the charge. The work to implement these components happens in distinct pockets in the schools, and isolated in particular job descriptions and physical spaces in school buildings, with little collaborative planning time. Also of note is the common experience of lagging leadership and/or ‘buy-in’ from the stakeholders such as the Agency of Education, Supervisory Union administration, school building administration and professionals, students, parents and community.

Similarly, we often heard murky answers—answers that alluded to a Byzantine complexity that interviewees found it difficult to clearly articulate—about the specifics of the actual implementation of these three components within their school; we heard confusion about what PBGRs are or/and how their particular school is using PBGRs; whether or not students knew and understood this change; what the value of PLPs were, how they were being used, and/or why PLPs were being mandated. These issues seem to highlight the very structural limitations of how our schools are designed and function.

Our K-12 educational system–large, hierarchical, and compartmentalized–seems at odds with the functional and structural change that the work of Act 77 demands. As this study attempts to illustrate, Act 77 (and consequent inclusion of PBGRs) is intended to help usher in a pedagogical and cultural shift: a systems-level-change. These pedagogical components are not intended to be additional, ‘tacked on’ tasks and programs to the traditional educational paradigm.. As identified by Annabel Beerel in Leadership and Change Management (2008), in order for systems change to occur, all members of the system need to see how their work relates to and supports the work of others, as well as the governing goals and outcomes. Because our educational system is hierarchical and consistent, strong ‘hands-on’ leadership is required to help usher transformative realignment. As a result, turnover of educational leaders and practitioners deeply damages the implementation and success of substantive, fundamental change within schools. As an example, over the past school year five of the thirteen practitioners we interviewed left the school where we originally interviewed them, two practitioners were assigned additional/different jobs and responsibilities, and one position was eliminated.

We also often heard practitioners speak about a sense that their work was not seen, understood, or even valued by their administration, school community, and most certainly by the broader local community. Quality leadership is needed to engender this unified understanding and commitment.

The group of advisors that was leading that cohort, two of them have since moved, and they were a real driving force and I don't think it was picked up and it wasn't a focus. It hasn’t been a focus of the administration. There hasn't been like a “This is important, here's how we're going to do it. Here's the system that's in place and now you guys need to do it.” So it quickly goes through the cracks. I would hope that we go into action soon, but that's more directed by, I would say, administration and central office. And where they want to put resources.

And then [after time passed] our Superintendent got word from somewhere, I'm not sure where-if it was like the superintendents when they gather, or if it was AOE [Agency of Education] based—that this document or this thing was coming and there was a lot of confusion around what it was. There was a belief, leadership-wise, that this was going to be…that what the schools were going to get in Vermont was going to be kind of very detailed proficiencies that every school had to hit and everything scripted out. And a couple of us on the back end were like, “Oh, we know AOE. I'm not sure that's going to come. We should not stop doing the work we're doing now because we think this is going to be scripted.”

And so that was, I don't know, months. And now the administration—which is superintendent and principals and assistant principal—have met a couple of times looking at the EQS [Education Quality Standards], and I don't know if they're looking—I'm not sure if there's like an official final that's posted. But they were looking at the draft, as far as I know, and then talking hypotheticals based on that. Our principal has continued to say we need a work-based learning coordinator. If we are allowing all students to have access to work-based learning, we need a work-based learning coordinator. There were a lot of questions about timeline and when all the stuff needed to go into practice and be put in place. I'm not sure…a lot of things have not trickled down in terms of clarity on some of that. I would say the people that are doing the work on the ground, like myself and X, have not been pulled into that planning loop in terms of, “Here's what's needed.” I keep asking for a timeline. I'm like, “Is there a timeline?”

The need for clear, transparent and strong leadership alongside Vermont’s value in ‘Local Control’ begs us to question the boundaries of our educational system: is each district its own system, or does Vermont share an educational system? Similarly, what are the boundaries and intersections of responsibility and accountability between the VT Legislature, VT Agency of Education, State Board of Education, VT Principals Association, and local district administration. How do these entities relate with the implementation of this work? This legislation called for a state-wide change in our educational system. We heard overwhelmingly about experiences of confusion and push-back from many communities across Vermont regarding this change, mirroring the lacking ‘buy-in’ within schools. This coherent ‘messaging’ work seems to call for some cohesion and leadership.

When you're trying to do that as a district and you don't have that kind of leverage that I feel like Vermont has with school districts as far as, ‘this is what we require you to do,’ it's a little bit more challenging because you don't have something to hang your hat on with communities and with teachers who maybe want to think that that's not the right direction we need to be going. Right? It just takes a little bit of the edge off of trying to navigate communities and teachers who are okay with the status quo. But I think the idea of having some leverage to make some change happen, because that's good change that needs to happen, it just needs to be done in a really thoughtful, systematic way.

I think that was a real missed opportunity by the state to say we're shifting how we are reporting in our state based on what we know about learning.

This whole thing has been like ‘each school for itself,’ ‘design what works for you,’ including proficiency-based grading. And so we keep working, we keep fudging.

Many of the educational professionals spoke directly about the lack of accountability and support for their work. Some practitioners framed their accountability concerns generally, while others directed them at their specific administration, and others to the Agency of Education. The confusion around the ‘chain of command’ underlines potential problems within a large, hierarchical, compartmentalized institution.

I don't know how directly our board is clued into Act 77 and our progress towards it. And I don't know where the external pressure for the goals comes from. I have no real official knowledge of this at all but my understanding of what happens with the AOE [Agency of Education] is they tell us to do things and then no one checks. Because I was at [a State Educators professional development event] and we met with several other schools and a bunch of other schools were just like, “Oh yeah, we gave up on PLPs.” So like, apparently openly you can just say “We don't do that.” And like a number of other schools have told me, they're like, “Oh yeah, we don't really do proficiencies.” Like they have letter grades and proficiency scores and like talking to friends at other schools, they're just like, “Oh yeah, we kind of don't really do that.”

This legislative mandate required a monumental lift for our education professionals. With educators already overburdened, implementation of the mandate without capacity development, a budgeted priority, compensation, and literally just time to do the work has proven ineffective at best, and at worst has led to burnout and attrition. We found that the key factors that need to be addressed to facilitate implementation include structural barriers (e.g. licensing structures, union contracts) and cultural issues embedded in the redefinition of the teaching profession Act 77 ultimately entails.

It is an extreme amount of work that's not for everyone. You have to find the right fit. It has to be the right person in the role. So for our district and for school districts going into this or trying to implement it, for success to happen, there has to be the right people. And we want to integrate this into our school in many different ways, but this is above and beyond what we used to do. So for teachers, this is putting more on them, and there's nothing that's being taken away. So they're kind of like, how, how do we keep adding more? And we all—we love what we do, we want to feel good about it. We want to help our students. We want to do the best job possible. So how do you balance everything and do a good job with it so that it's actually benefiting students? So I think that that's kind of the biggest piece that I'm concerned with. You know, like with PLP exhibitions: my dream is for groups, like maybe three or four advisors, they actually do the exhibitions. But again, how can we do that when they still have their regular job, right? And advisory isn't supposed to be a prep and there's not enough time in there anyway. So I guess how do we grow it? Knowing the limits of our system.

Speaker: We've been pretty okay with the union for the most part. But this year they're really starting to push back for whatever reason, and I can't pinpoint why, but yeah. We've had multiple meetings this year on it. It might be because we are using flexible pathways, because we're short staffed and they don't think we're going to hire those people. And no matter what we say to them, they don't believe us, I guess. As they keep meeting with us and we keep hammering the same topic, like “Hey, yeah there's no health teacher, we're going to get a health teacher. That position's not going away. We want a health teacher.”

There are other ways to expand flexible pathways that include honoring learning that takes place outside of school. And finding ways—whether it's independent studies or whether it's through transferable skills in the PLP—there are a lot of different models and ways to hold and honor learning that aren’t delivered by teachers. And I think the state probably is overdue for a reckoning with all parties at the table to say, how do we see this as a moment to shift what's possible for teachers so that we're not stuck in the kind of fixed pie debates about contact hours and ratios that [my colleague] brought up. But if the definition of teachers and teaching and learning expanded to include coaching and mentoring and goal setting and like a whole host of 21st century teaching practices, I think it would expand the opportunity for what students do outside of school to count. And I think that's playing the long game.

Several practitioners shared their perspectives on the incompatibility of common instructional technology platforms (such as Jump Rope and PowerSchool) with the philosophical-pedagogical shift that proficiency teaching/learning entails. These systems are designed to manage traditional grading, and so are a misfit for proficiency-based assessment.

Even though we give qualitative grades, and I’m not going to call them grades. Maybe I'll call them assessments. And [the levels are:]‘Getting Started’, ‘Progressing’, ‘Proficient’,and ‘Proficient with Distinction’ or ‘Distinguished.’ And those scores by the management system that we use—they're put into numbers, so that they become a course score. But we don’t give those course scores.

Speaker 1: The vision of what multiple flexible pathways is a great vision, it really is. But you also have to back it up with what that means and what that could mean. And I think when you're bringing out software like Naviance to develop PLPs, it's dead in the water. And a lot of larger schools use Naviance so they can check boxes.

Speaker 2: You know when the kids are most motivated? Have you heard of MTC, the Mastery Transcript Consortium? It's growing and it's a digital transcript and it basically serves as a portfolio and documents…it showcases the student’s very best work and the students curate that from day one, like from 9th grade all the way through 12th grade. So it becomes increasingly more meaningful as they go through that time. And they have a reflection on it, and it's work that they are showing—it has an audience. It's for college or post-secondary work. And they begin to really care about that.

Due to the organizational structures of our education system, teachers and educational professionals enact policies and priorities passed on to them by supervisors, which are passed down from their Supervisory Union administration and/or state-level administration. In K-12 education, there is a perpetual cascade of mandates and policy changes. Most are well-intentioned and reasoned, however, over time these mandates pile on and rarely are mandates and responsibilities removed. In this way, some policies are not as adhered to as others because of a fatigue that sets in. This phenomenon is more compounded in the experience of the student, since they have even less control over this changing landscape. Hints at these competing demands on teachers and students’ time and attention seems another significant factor in the chasm between aspiration and reality for this work.

I think just like with any change, they [teachers and students] were like, “Oh, this is just going to kind of come and go.”

Paradox of Local Control and Deepening Inequitable Trends

Local oversight of spending and education has been a key component of Vermont civic life since the establishment of public schooling in the state. In regard to Act 77, decision making across the patchwork of Vermont school districts has brought about enormous variation in implementation of its components. Inequity in the nature of Act 77 implementation across districts emerged as a key concern through our research.

A glaring example of how differences in Act 77 implementation can be problematic, and how they can foster and institutionalize inequity, comes in the vast variability between districts in the substance of their Proficiency Based Graduation Requirements. What the list of PBGRs is for a particular school, whether a school even uses PBGRs or traditional course credits, or the nature of other requirements are all locally determined. Beyond just the content of PBGRs, we noticed a wide variation in the language used by districts to describe Act 77 work. Additionally, for students moving between districts, these differences can greatly impact graduation timelines and cause confusion and frustration. Similarly, because implementation of the legislation is unfunded, this work of Act 77 perpetuates broad societal inequities, in other words, students who have the skills to advocate for themselves and/or who have parents who have the resources to advocate for them will be able to push the levers of Act 77 to their advantage.

Speaker 1: We're talking about the domains, right? In Vermont, we just love to label things. So many different things, right? So if we're saying that the PBGRs are domains like Reading, Writing and Speaking for English. If that's the case, then we have about 50 some-odd, because those are the domains. Prioritized standards feed into those domains. Prioritized standards are the ones that at a local level are interpreted by those summer working groups that I talked about. And so nothing is not a standard. If it's not a prioritized standard then it's a supporting standard. But the educators pick what those are. And I don't have in my mind right now globally, like by 12th grade, how many prioritize standards our students have?

Speaker 2: Truth be told, I'll say it like this: like the student’s success from a dedicated part of the student’s success is not within the classroom or in the school even it's at home. And as a parent, like, you know…I understand that. I understand how to navigate this system. In Vermont there is no freaking system for me.

I'm the equity coordinator, right? My job, for lack of a better term, is trying to make sure that our students—-that we have the most inclusive, diverse and equitable environment for all of our students. As an equity coordinator, local control is the worst thing I could ever hear because again, it's really just saying “states rights.”

I think in terms of like, equity and inclusion, like you have to teach people how to properly navigate and advocate for themselves within a system that already exists. But then again, you're also using the assumption that your school system has the capacity, or the resources, to allow you to do that, too. Not every school system has the resources. I mean, for God's sake, we have a poverty rate of 33%, officially.

Our inability to partner our problems with economics, or problems with such a thing, is our downfall. And like, you know, if you want to call me a whatever word it is…but that is our downfall. That’s why we can’t solve these problems. Instead of looking at it from a systemic, economic, resource-based approach, we look at it as like, “Oh, we just need to become more innovative!”

In general, we posed these questions: “How has this legislation addressed the gap in education?” and “How has this legislation started to encourage processes that promote equitable outcomes?”

The intent was to narrow the gap, the equity gap, the academic achievement gap. And it did the opposite because every single school was left to their own devices on how to do it. And I think, because it's so student centered and systems are so different across the state, it depends on the student. Like if this kid is super self-directed, early college, great. And that kid's probably on track to go to early college anyway and I don't think that was the intent behind the law. I think from my conversations with people around the state and in classes, it was to help first gen kids get into school and hook, line and sinker them.

I think the challenge is that we still have a system where resources and access and capital are unfairly distributed. And so, you know, no piece of legislation is going to change that. If we're honoring different ways of knowing and different ways of learning, you will still have certain demographic groups, certain class sectors, certain segments of any community who are better able to take advantage of those things.

Need for Integration and Interlocking Framework

We often heard that the PLPs lacked meaning; that learning is still achieved for the majority of students within the conventional classes; that PBGRs, if existing at all, are still couched within the traditional grading framework; and that the purpose behind the shift to PBGRs is not understood by students, most staff, and the larger community. Ultimately, there doesn’t seem to be an understanding of how the constellation of PLPs, PBGRs and Flexible Pathways are intended to shift to cultivate personalization and agency for our students. As designed, the PLPs are to be the unifying tool for communication, reflection and future-shaping for the student’s educational experience; PBGRs are the governing goals for and currency in a student’s education and Flexible Pathways are the range of opportunities that a student may seek and/or shape, independently or with a cohort, to practice and earn proficiencies. Although passed later than Act 77, the implementation of PBGRs can cultivate agency for the student, and a way to actualize this trend toward personalization. In this way, implementation of PBGRs is critical in helping to justify and create meaning for both PLPs and a robust Flexible Pathways system. Many professionals explained how the integration of these three components would contextualize the reasons behind them and make them more meaningful to students and their caretakers.

It occurs to us from this initial phase of research, that all three components need to be operational, robust and reference the other parts in creating a positive feedback loop between them for this pedagogical shift to prove effective and relevant. Unfortunately, this ecosystem has yet to be actualized in most schools, for very legitimate and layered reasons.

Until you see the multiple ways a kid can get somewhere [to earn a PBGR], then the PLP is just this thing that sits there, which is fine. But is it really helping the kid do what I talked about when we first started? Yeah. Where I see myself as “Oh, I love animals.” You look at the multiple things that I can do [to earn a particular PBGR, according to my interest].

Speaker: And so, you know, if the system was set up for teachers to say, “Okay, how do you want to learn this?” Right? It's not, It's still set up for kids to take classes, right? So the personalized plan really means nothing. You sit with those students and you sort of fill it out. But it means nothing because it's… [not tied to Flexible Pathways as vehicles for the PBGR].

Interviewer: There’s no use for it. It’s not a tool.

I think that where we are, where we need to come together with more of a common understanding as Vermonters is: So here's the standard, let's just focus on one standard. What are some…let's share with each other some ways that students could show that they've met those standards because people are super uncomfortable when you just say, “Well, there's many different ways.”

Until we can make that jump and people can see how to do it, then they're not…I mean, they don't see how to do it yet, as a whole. There's a lot of those teachers that do, in both high schools, but it hasn't hit a tipping point. And that's why we're in year three, or first year of three, of having them gain an understanding of how to do that piece.

The PLP should guide where a student goes, like what pathway they build. But we currently don't have a lot of options. So if a student knows something about themselves, like there's so many places at [this school] where there's not a choice. So it seems kind of silly to have a PLP because it's like, well I have to take English 9 no matter what because the way most of our classes exist is there's not flexibility within the class and there's not a flexibility to choose.

So the PLP’s aren't really relevant without Flexible Pathways, but we have some pathways. So we're trying to build the capacity for both simultaneously. Ideally I want to have some things in place for the following year where that can take the place of any class in high school, and having a focus on the true proficiency, but be a project of the student’s choosing. And also building our field trips and out of the building experiences. And so what they're building now is the network of community partners that will be the resources that students can connect with to do meaningful projects and interviews and shadows and to explore their pathways outside of the building.

As we conclude this review of our study on the implementation of Act 77, two important questions remain: First, for whom are Flexible Pathways intended—those in need of academic intervention specifically, those looking for personal enrichment or all students in Vermont schools? If we see Flexible Pathways solely as an intervention tool for less engaged students, then the FP program will be seen as a ‘last resort’ and remain marginalized. If we treat them solely as a vehicle for high performing students, are we perpetuating the structures of privilege that already underlie our educational system? If we view Flexible Pathways as an opportunity for all students to personalize their educational experience in ways that cultivate agency, engage their interests and passions, and connect them to their wider communities, then policies, procedures and culture must reflect this broader educational goal.

Second: How can we incentivize participation in FPs for the target population? FPs will remain on the margins as long as the measure and currency awarded for participation in them are perceived as carrying low value. For example, awarding an ‘elective credit’ for the FP rather than treating it as a core requirement diminishes its significance for students–and for educators. Unless FPs are fully integrated as equal, valid approaches to proficiency acquisition alongside traditional coursework, most students will likely not seek FPs to earn their PBGRs because this is the more difficult path to take. In this way, the FP program will remain on the margins of the educational experience, and the effort and potential for these experiences to cultivate personalization and agency in all of our students will remain untapped.

The values and structures that shape how, where, and what students learn underlie both questions. Are we ready and willing to open up or change these structures? How thorough, integrated, and comprehensive can the work of PLPs, PBGRs and FPs be for our students’ educational experience?

Part IV: Next Steps

We hope this survey of how VT secondary schools are implementing this potentially transformative legislation helps move forward the inspiring, innovative work of reconceptualizing Vermont’s educational landscape. In this next phase of our research, we will::

Reach back to the original cohort of practitioners who are represented in this paper, asking for feedback. We will include this in our Follow-Up section.
Reach out to VT Legislators, Agency of Education and other folks holding positions within the educational ‘chain of command’ and ask for their contribution to this valuable and ongoing discussion.
Share our report with local school boards and the public for review and further input.
Draw all stakeholders into an understanding and ownership of the work of implementing Act 77 in our schools.
Collaborate on a podcast with two UVM students, Anna Hoppe and Kadence Willis, both alumni of Vermont’s public school system. This podcast will follow particular questions and/or case studies to enrich discussion and broaden awareness of the challenges and successes of Act 77 implementation.

A SNAPSHOT OF
ACT 77 IMPLEMENTATION

“…It relies on Superheroes…”

Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction

Background

Act 77 History & Overview

Methodology

Part II: Findings

What is Act 77?

The Personalized Learning Plan (PLP)

Flexible Pathways

Proficiency-based Learning and Graduation Requirements (PBGRs)

Part III: Emerging Themes

Structural Limitations for Systems Change

Paradox of ‘Local Control’ and Deepening Inequitable Trends

Integration and Interlocking Framework

Part IV: Next Steps

Part I: Introduction

Background

Act 77 History & Project Overview

Methodology

Acknowledgements

Part II: Findings

What is Act 77?

The Personalized Learning Plan (PLP)

Flexible Pathways

Proficiency-based Learning and Graduation Requirements (PBGRs)

Part III: Emerging Themes

Structural Limitations for Systems Change

Paradox of Local Control and Deepening Inequitable Trends

Need for Integration and Interlocking Framework

Part IV: Next Steps

QUICK LINKS

A SNAPSHOT OF ACT 77 IMPLEMENTATION

“…It relies on Superheroes…”

Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction

Background

Act 77 History & Project Overview

Methodology

Acknowledgements

Part II: Findings

What is Act 77?

The Personalized Learning Plan (PLP)

Flexible Pathways

Proficiency-based Learning and Graduation Requirements (PBGRs)

Part III: Emerging Themes

Structural Limitations for Systems Change

Paradox of Local Control and Deepening Inequitable Trends

Need for Integration and Interlocking Framework

Part IV: Next Steps

QUICK LINKS

A SNAPSHOT OF
ACT 77 IMPLEMENTATION