Guest Blog: Credit that Counts for 21st Century Students

By Dr. Bryan Setser and Michelle Lourcey

Our NCVPS Credit Recovery program continues to be celebrated throughout districts in North Carolina and continues to receive national recognition for its rigor, relationship, relevance, and student-centered approach. Recently, we have presented the tenants of our Credit Recovery program to audiences for SREB, Blackboard, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Instruction. To learn more about successful North Carolina schools using our NCVPS Credit Program, check out these podcasts: http://www.ncvps.org/courses/credit/.

The current educational climate in North Carolina is producing conversations about how to balance the need for credit recovery and the efficacy of the credit recovery option. At NCVPS, we believe that credit recovery must require more of students than a finite number of hours in front of a computer, pointing and clicking at answers. We believe in the power of certified teacher instruction and the power of students producing work that displays the highest levels of critical thinking. If your students are pointing and clicking at a computer screen, they are not working at the highest levels of any learning taxonomy or paradigm.

Our approach to credit recovery is not a shared belief among all those that provide credit recovery options. Costly vendor models often do not provide alignment to the NC Standard Course of Study, prepare students for the next level of instruction, or provide a NC certified teacher to work one-on-one with the student, guiding the instruction.

The conversations we are hearing out in the districts concern not only the issues already mentioned but NCVPS’ endorsement of supplemental credit recovery vendor options. We do not endorse any vendor product; rather, we review product lines and inform districts when requested as to alignment, content quality, and context trends we see in the vendors. Therefore, we always want school districts to consider the following when they are looking at these vendor products:

Is the credit recovery program fully aligned to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study, and how much will the school need to modify the material for the students?

How do students move through the credit recovery program and how is their learning supported?

Does the credit recovery program meet the individual learning needs of the students?

Does the credit recovery program prepare students for the next level of instruction?

What happens if students do not master the material the first time – what happens next?

You can see our NCVPS answers to all five of these questions now by going to this link and scrolling down the page: http://www.ncvps.org/courses/credit/.

In a time of decreased funding and increased student/teacher/school accountability, the bottom line is this – schools need to decide what their long range goals are for their credit recovery students. Fast and easy is not in the best interest of the student and the student’s educational foundation or potential.

Because we believe strongly that school districts need to think long range for students, we will spend the next few weeks discussing these curriculum and instruction issues and corresponding solutions with e-learning. Through this E-Series, we will next tackle the question of - Is rigor present in your software provider option? Stay tuned and log on to our corresponding vidcast to these e-series discussions. It will be posted on Friday, April 23, 2010 by lunch at www.ncvps.org.