? Welcome! Share a hello.

Ben Leddy
Ben Leddy
Fourth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

Hi! This is Ben from the LMS team, and I want to welcome you to our newest discussion forum for Competency Based Education.

Whether you're already using CBE in Blackbaud, or you're just starting to explore, you've come to right place. This is your space to:

  • Share best practices and resources for using CBE
  • Ask and answer questions around using CBE in Blackbaud Education Management
  • Participate in requests for feedback to strengthen CBE in Blackbaud Education Management

I've had the privilege of connecting one-on-one with many CBE school community members, and over and over, I hear folks interested in seeing how other schools are making use of CBE. I hope this forum provides a space for connection and collaboration!

To start things off: please share a brief hello! ? Consider the following:

  • Your name
  • Your school
  • Where your school community is with CBE
  • One thing you'd like to either share or learn in this community space
Tagged:

Comments

  • Jess Moxsky
    Jess Moxsky
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    Hello!

    I'm Jess Moxley, the Information Systems Specialist at Flintridge Preparatory School. We are just beginning to look into CBE as we have a few teachers who are interested in using it for their classes, but I'm hoping to learn from other schools about early implementation of CBE and common issues to look out for!

  • Derek Morton
    Derek Morton
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1

    Hi there,

    This is Derek Morton from Sheridan School in Washington D.C. I last took a hard look at Blackbaud CBE during the 2018-2019 school year and I'm very interested in learning about how the capability has matured since then.

  • Morgan Kunze
    Morgan Kunze
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Hooray, I'm so delighted that this community is coalescing! I'm Morgan from Northwest Academy (6-12) in Portland, OR. We are in year two with Blackbaud CBE. The promise of a robust proficiency-grading module is one of the main reasons we selected Blackbaud as our SIS/LMS.

    We are still really in the learning phase with this. We have tons of questions, both in terms of tech and policy/pedagogy: how does the decaying average work? Should teachers be allowed to edit their own skills lists? How can the division head get a birds-eye view of students' learning progression across the whole middle school? And more and more…

    Really eager to hear from others about your successes and challenges. Thanks @BenLeddy for starting the conversation!

  • Sean Carmichael
    Sean Carmichael
    Fourth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Hi,

    My name is Sean Carmichael and I'm from Ross School in East Hampton, NY.

    We did implementation over the summer and are using CBE.


    We'd like our admin to be able to pull a report on our students to try to identify any students who are struggling. The “Generate mastery export” nearly gets there but without the weights that are defined for the outcomes in each assessment, it's not giving us an accurate picture. Can the weight be added to that export?

    Of course, ideally, there would be a built-in report to show admins how well students are doing without having to do it in Excel.

  • Ben Leddy
    Ben Leddy
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Sean Carmichael – Thanks for posting! To clarify, are you referring to the whole-school mastery export or class-by-class export?

  • Annie Sykes
    Annie Sykes
    Fifth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Hi, my name is Annie Sykes from St. Andrew's in Austin, TX. Our middle school is in its first year using CBE settings, and it's been a mixed bag. The students are really benefitting from the learning progression and being able to focus more on skill mastery than “getting an A.” But it's been tough on the teachers. Entering grades and feedback takes MUCH longer, and there is a lot of glitchiness in the gradebooks that sometimes causes teachers to lose the grades they've just entered.

    I'd love to know:

    • Are teachers mostly giving mastery + total score assignments vs. one or the other?
    • How are your final term grades being calculated?
    • Other best practices!

    Thank you!

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Ben Leddy Jr and Group,

    I'm working to setup our Competency Based Education (CBE) gradebooks within the LMS, and I had two fundamental questions that I don't think was covered in the trainings or knowledgebase…

    1. 1. The LMS has a hierarchy of Categories > Skills > Sub-Skills. In reviewing the skills that my teachers would like to assess, it appears to be a hierarchy of two levels, and they are only assessing on the second level. With this in mind, is it better to establish their two levels in the LMS as Categories > Skills (and not turn on sub-skills), or is it better to establish their two levels in the LMS as Skills > Sub-Skills (and not make use of categories)? Does one or the other preferred for the workflow for teachers? better for parents/students? Does one or the other provide better reporting?
    2. 2. Is it correct that it is not possible to use rubrics in the gradebook while using CBE? It seems each time I try to create an assignment that uses mastery skills or the hybrid of mastery skills along with points, the rubric tool is grayed out. It only appears available if I use points only with no CBE. Is this intentional? My teachers have developed a rubric that defines what performance equates to a 1-4 rating in each skill for a given assignment. The intent is that different teachers assessing the same skill on different assignments in different classes are rating that skill consistently. Is there a better way to achieve this goal. Ideally, they would like to associate a rubric to each skill, or at least have that option.

    Thanks for any help from someone with more experience with CBE in the LMS.

  • Morgan Kunze
    Morgan Kunze
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi Geoffrey! So glad you're joining this community, I would love to see lots more peer users in here asking and answering questions! I think that Ben Leddy has left BB, alas, so I'm not sure who the lead is on CBE development and changes now.

    I'm not an expert at all but here's what I know:

    (1) I believe that the sub-skills are the only thing available for teachers to evaluate within an assignment. At our school we've made the categories roughly equivalent to academic departments, and use them just for filtering and housekeeping on the admin side. The (super)skills are only available to teachers as filters as far as I can tell. So I think an ideal hierarchy would be something like (Category)Language Arts>(Skill)Writing>(Sub-Skills)Organized notes, Formatting, Critcal Analysis et al. The teacher will only see the skill sets associated with their course, but if they have a long list of sub-skills under Reading, Writing, Research et al they could use the Writing skill to filter down to a specific group of sub-skills.

    (2) I think you are spot on about the rubrics, it's either CBE or rubric evaluation. It's not terrific, but if you can set up your skills ratings in the Mastery Settings to mirror your shared rubric, then you can roughly re-create what you've been doing with rubrics.

    Our teachers are using a total patchwork of traditional scored assignments, CBE with paper rubrics, scored assignments with rubrics, etc. It's a bit messy.

    One other consideration as you go through setup is to remember that the CBE ratings do not translate to the report card at all; teachers will need to refer to the learning progression for each student to generate a term grade based on CBE-only gradebooks.

    Hopefully you get some other replies as well - I'd love to hear what others are experiencing!

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    Many thanks for your help, @Morgan Kunze! @Michael Morrissette, might you have any insight on how I should proceed?

  • Michael Morrissette
    Michael Morrissette Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi Geoffrey -

    Sorry for just getting back to you, I've been out of the office for the last couple of days. I'm excited to hear that you're beginning to explore CBE more! It's something that is on my radar to look into potential enhancements for and you touched on one of the items that I want to figure out in the coming months.

    Ultimately, Morgan summarized the answers very well. Currently, the subskills are for use on assignments and rubrics cannot currently be tied to CBE. The rubric piece is something that I want to specifically explore as I know it's a widely used tool for CBE-related evaluations.

    For the Rubric ask specifically, I know we have an Idea in our Idea Bank for that. I saw that you already left a comment on it, but just in case anyone else wants to vote, I'll include the link below.

    I would love to chat a little more in-depth about how your school is planning on using CBE and what you're looking to get out of the module. If you'd like to set up a time to chat, feel free to email me at michael.morrissette@blackbaud.com and we can work on coordinating schedules!

    Rubrics to be used in CBE Idea:

    -Mike

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