Virtual sessions will take place on Zoom between 11:00 am – 4:00 pm ET each day. Additional design and feedback sessions from 9:30-10:50 am ET and 4:00-5:20 pm ET will be available by appointment.

A studio is a learning experience that combines competency-based education with project/problem-based learning. Every studio starts with a problem frame and ends with a culminating performance-based assessment and an implementation. Studios vary in length, usually lasting between 6-12 weeks.

Studios consist of milestones and stepping stones that are independent but interrelated experiences that lead up to the culminating performance-based assessment. We believe the learning becomes even more meaningful if students are examining real world problems and relevant, interdisciplinary content with the opportunity to implement their learning for an authentic purpose or audience.

The strength of the studio model lies in the backwards design process. We use our competencies as the starting point for this backwards design. This ensures that students have the opportunity to demonstrate their learning of the competencies through rigorous performance-based assessment while investigating and solving real world problems that are relevant to the learners. So having competencies is essential to the studio design process.

We align both competencies and standards in our studio design, but competencies are the driving force behind the design. If you are interested in trying out studio design, you can use competencies from the Building 21 Competency Framework as they are open to everyone!

Many of the schools we work with are just starting on their CBE journey and are learning to design high-quality and engaging performance-based assessments aligned to competencies. We think it is important to support designers on this journey and will be supporting both smaller performance task design and full studio design.

Yes, we welcome all K-12 educators/designers in competency-based schools to attend the Studio Design Institute. It is a great opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other throughout the 4 day design process.

The schools we work with take a hybrid approach to teaching math. They align performance-based assessments to our Math.1 Mathematical Modeling competency while also tracking standards/skills lists for math. Math teachers will have the opportunity to work with other math teachers during the 4 days to develop performance assessments aligned to the Math.1 (or similar) competency. Math can also be integrated into interdisciplinary studio designs.

Yes! Part of how we will facilitate our design sessions is to create design groups focusing on similar studios. So we could have interdisciplinary teams or content teams or a little of both! We will personalize the studio design groups to meet the needs of the designers.