Career Competency

Career Competency Tracking

Our fourth tower was built in response to career readiness initiatives. Specifically, regional networks of districts joined together with their local industry partners to identify three “North Star” competencies, including things like Responsibility, Adaptability, Communication, Integrity, and Problem Solving. We then partnered with Marzano Research in order to determine how to best measure those competencies based on a literature review and practitioner feedback. Their research allowed us to define learning objectives for each area as well as rubrics that would help teachers determine whether students had passed the mastery threshold.

We also benefit from the power of so many collective voices in our collaborative. As a result, we received a donation from the non-profit MasteryTrack, which allows us to use their software to support easy data capture of the competencies.

Teacher Views & Data Capture

Student Views

What’s next? Post-Secondary Success

How can we tell if the competency development is actually supporting students in their careers and in higher education? Are the students getting jobs? Do those jobs pay well? Are they going to colleges and excelling when they get there? We have compiled a set of use cases to capture a wide variety of questions and are partnering with BriteHive, who has set up a data trust to pool information from the Colorado Department of Higher Education, the Colorado Workforce Development Council, and the Colorado Department of Human Services. We are excited about the possibility of working together with these state agencies to meaningfully and consistently answer these important questions.

Once we have information about how students are doing after graduation, we can then use the other information we capture about the activities we are doing in the K-12 system to figure out which are most effective at supporting our students. We recognize that this is a multi-year effort, but we believe the effort is worth the benefits for our students.

If you are interested in being a part of a grant that will help shape this work, please contact us.