NASHUA – The assessment and grading systems at the district’s high schools may look different in the coming years, as efforts develop to rewrite the district’s course competencies for high school students.

The work being done at the district’s two high schools to rewrite competencies, as well as other work to better personalize learning, was presented to the Board of Education on Monday night at a work session with high school officials.

The state Board of Education first mandated several years ago that all high school courses have competencies attached, said Superintendent Mark Conrad.

Competencies outline specific skills that students should have mastered upon completing a course. Competencies aim to empower students to analyze and apply information they learn to a variety of situations and activities.

In some districts, competencies are attached to competency-based assessment systems. Other districts, like the Gate City, are still working to create such systems. Rewriting the competencies already in place, Conrad said, is the first step in moving toward a new assessment and reporting system that embraces competencies.

Conrad said Nashua, like many other school districts, scrambled to create course competencies soon after they were mandated.

“I don’t think they were particularly well-written, and they didn’t have a transformative impact on teaching,” he said. “Since then, we really felt we needed to come back and rewrite the competencies for high quality and consistency.”

The district is in its second year of working to rewrite the course competencies.

Social studies teachers David Goldsmith, of Nashua High School North, and Neil Claffey, of Nashua High School South, spoke to the board about their process for creating social studies competencies for high school students.

The competencies are developed looking at state standards for particular subjects and then analyzing those standards to determine which skills and content areas are the most important for students to grasp.

One competency for a high school history class in the Nashua School District, for example, requires that students “analyze the recurring social tensions caused by differences in power, wealth and influence” in the United States, as well as critique successful and unsuccessful attempts to resolve these issues.

To pass a course, students are required to show that they have mastered the competencies.

High school science teachers also spoke to the board Monday night, sharing their work with the New England Network for Personalization and Performance to make course work more inquiry-based. The network is a group of high schools in the Granite State and New England, working together to provide professional development to teachers to personalize education.

The work ties in well with the high schools’ efforts to rewrite competencies, Conrad said, since students are pushed to reach new levels of learning, taking the skills they learn in class to develop and present research projects, and participate in a variety of activities.

Conrad said he is proud of the work being done at the high schools to push students and transform the way that students are being taught. He said the work will benefit all students, regardless of ability or current level of achievement.

“I think we make a mistake in education, in our system and in many systems, when you have ability groups, of sometimes teaching to the assumption that students in lower levels can’t get to a deeper depth of knowledge,” Conrad said.

Even if these students need more support, he said, using the same assignments and activities as in higher level classes tends to be more engaging and, in turn, boosts achievement.

“We’re trying to push students in all levels,” Conrad said.

Board members said they were excited to see the work being done at the high schools and looked forward to the growth of this work going forward.

Conrad said that moving forward, the focus will be on assessing students on the competencies, not only in their classes, but on their report cards.

While this system will need to be developed, Conrad said many schools who already have these assessment and grading systems in place grade students on each competency for each course on report cards.

If a student does not pass a certain competency, he or she would go through a competency recovery process, keeping the student from needing to retake an entire course because of just a few missed areas of knowledge.

“If we’re going to say that competency is something that matters, we ought to be assessing students in that way,” Conrad said.

He said the district would come back to the board with more information on this process, and discuss how to bring the ideas of competencies to lower grade levels, in the future.

Danielle Curtis can be reached at 594-6557 or dcurtis@nashuatelegraph.com. Also follow Curtis on Twitter (Telegraph_DC.)