Levers and Logic Models: A Framework to Guide Research and Design of High-Quality Competency-Based Education Systems

Gaining clarity about what we—as a movement—mean when we say learner-centered “competency-based education” (CBE) or “open-walled” is at the heart of Education Reimagined’s strategy. Without a shared lexicon that learner-centered pioneers can use to speak across models, collaboration and cooperation are severely limited.

Thankfully, other organizations, like CompetencyWorks, share this commitment to clarity of language. In CompetencyWorks’ Levers and Logic Models, they have created a robust “logic model to catalyze a shared understanding of competency-based education.” With this shared understanding, we can better communicate and share practices across learning environments without muddying the waters by using our unique, model-specific languages all the time. Throughout this paper, CompetencyWorks lays out the significance of logic models, how they define competency-based education, a high-level overview of the entire logic model framework, and descriptions of the levers used to design competency-based education.