I am late to the game, but clearly there's a ton happening in North Dakota with personalized and competency-based learning! Thank you Cory Steiner for the connection to Anna Sell, Superintendent of Oakes School District 41 for conversation #41. I was particularly impressed by Anna's faith in teacher expertise and agency when adopting high-quality instructional materials.

"A unique aspect of our leadership is that many of our administrators, including myself, are former teachers from within Oakes. This shared experience fosters a deep understanding of the needs and perspectives of our educators. Our 'Be Legendary' board governance model and our guardrails approach contrasts with a more prescriptive 'do it this way' mentality. While we closely monitor data and feedback, we trust our teachers' professional judgment and only intervene with more structure if the data indicates a need.

We are committed to data-driven decision-making, frequently monitoring student progress through assessments like the NDSA (North Dakota’s pilot test) and STAR Reading to inform our instructional shifts. For instance, when STAR data suggested strong student performance that was not reflected in the NDSA pilot results, we recognized a potential alignment issue. This led us to adopt the CKLA curriculum in ELA, aiming to see a clear progression in student understanding and corresponding data.

We have been on a multi-year journey toward Personalized Competency-Based Learning for our students, which began with initial support from KnowledgeWorks. We’ve also collaborated with 2Revolutions and Luke Bush from Northern Cass School District 97, leveraging his expertise with the Empower platform to support our proficiency scales.

Historically, Oakes relied on teachers to curate their own resources based on standards. While this fostered teacher autonomy, it posed challenges for onboarding new educators. Our elementary principal secured a state grant for High-Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM), which our teachers are actively integrating into their practice. We empower our teachers with significant agency within the adopted curriculum. In teams, they decide on unit sequencing and instructional approaches, bringing their expertise to the implementation of HQIM.

We have a dedicated full-time technology specialist, and several administrators are actively engaged in AI, presenting at education conferences. We have sent a team of teachers and our tech specialist to a 2-day AI workshop and they are now leading professional development sessions for our district teams.

We’re exploring AI's potential to create an interdisciplinary semester-long course blending science and ELA standards. The primary challenge lies in effectively integrating AI with students and addressing teacher concerns about its potential for misuse. This requires a shift in our own mindsets and behaviors as adults. We also connect with the North Dakota Council of Educational Leaders to stay informed and share best practices across the state and region."