Elliot Washor's TGIF 11.14.2025

Are you with me now? A. J. Ryder

Chats without Bots

“Can I eat this? How far can I throw that? They are motivated by emotions such as desire, curiosity, and frustration. Children are always trying to do something just beyond that ability. Their learning is efficient because it’s embodied, adaptive, deliberate, and continuous. Maybe truly understanding the world requires participating in it.” 

Ya Think? Just maybe? And, because understanding requires participation in the world, “AI’s experience is impoverished.”

My time at the C-BEN’s Competency-based Assessment Exchange Conference in Phoenix surprised me. My bar is usually low for conferences in that if I make one new friend and learn one new thing, I feel it was a successful conference. I was here to present our IBPLC’s k-12 articulation of competency assessments with Susan Bell who is Executive Director of Mastery Transcript which a short while back was ‘acquired’ by ETS. Turns out the night before the panel, we sat next to each other at a small dinner put on by KnowledgeWorks and FullScale. That time together laid the groundwork for our panel discussion and was a really valuable catch-up time. We will be following up on ways to learn from one another and to see if there are ways to connect around college admissions. Another person I met at the conference was Ruth McGilvery from Vancouver. It seems like I have a knack for meeting Canadians wherever I go. Ruth’s work in competency-based assessment spans decades. Her most recent work involves team-based mentoring where a mentee is mentored by three people at once – a real-world mentor, an academic mentor and one who knows the student well in settings that include and go beyond school and vocation. I found this both a novel and very thorough approach to mentoring. Ruth and I will be connecting.

This conference was set up for people to chat without bots. Tables were set up with flags for different topics that you could walk in and out of whenever there were breaks and meals. It was a great way to mingle at a conference of 750. A key takeaway word I started hearing was embedded. Someone referred to our assessment work as embedded and authentic meaning that it was not a summative version of competency but was embedded in the day to day in and out of school. After that I started to see the word embedded all over the place. 

A more critical takeaway from the conference was the feeling I got that most conversations around the work of competency-based assessment made me believe that it is compromise-based assessments meaning they are not truly performance driven but rather rely on written performances that leads us back into the secure and to many the comfortable realm of what already exists that sorts and ranks students and staff.

In and away

While at the conference, I took a call with Eliot Levine who has done loads of work researching competency-based assessments as well as being an advisor at The Met for four years and before that the author of One Kid at a Time: BIG LESSONS from a small school about The Met. This book did loads to put us on the map. As usual, Eliot asked some difficult questions around a new round of research on our work. We always go back and forth in the best ways because we know one another for so long and can take pause and challenge what we really are getting at. Andrew’s notion of amping up research on our work in this moment is a great idea and bringing in Eliot was brilliant. 

Last week, we got notified we won a California Secondary School Redesign – (CSSR) award for a total of $800,000 over two years. This is going to help us with our bigger picture San Diego work because the SD Met is named as the chief demonstration school that will showcase the IBPLC and internships along with Met Sacramento and New Village Girls Academy. We had a great team and a great time putting the grant together.  

One more thing….

At the conference this guy was playing a harp guitar. I knew what it was but I had never seen anyone play one. Turns out, he has a pretty amazing story. Turns out that William Eaton not only plays these harp guitars but is a world famous luthier, he makes ‘em. Bill graduated from Stanford business school and this became his business.” He lived in the desert for years in a Citroen learning what he could eat to stay alive and all the while making and playing music. He made his first guitar in 1971 at 20 and kept on going. Two dozen albums later and playing in all sorts of bands, there he was making this incredible music in the background for some but for me it became foregrounded the whole conference. That’s competency-based performance – commitment to the craft.

Last musing before bed about sleep a tenant of BPLiving

On sleep – “Your high dimensional through space gets dimpled by the replayed memories, you wake up with a slightly new way of seeing.” Does AI sleep? ‘nuff said.

Next week, I spend my time in Winnipeg with Taylor working in about a dozen schools all becoming BPL 

Plenty, plenty, bye,bye -