WATERVILLE — Maine Cohort for Customized Learning and Thomas College’s Center for Innovation in Education will host the first one-day summit out of its four-summit series for the 2016-17 school year. The summit will provide teachers statewide an opportunity to share and collaborate in an effort to problem solve and create new methods and action steps that help address our largest implementation challenges.

The summit, “Defining Proficiency,” will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 12, at Thomas College.

“As our learning communities continue to implement proficiency-based systems, it is essential that we explore what we mean when we say that a learner is ‘proficient,'” said Maine Cohort for Customized Learning Executive Director Linda Laughlin, in a news release from the college. “In our ‘Defining Proficiency’ Summit, we will engage teams of educators in a collaborative conversation about how we are measuring proficiency. This is important given that we are trying to provide learners with multiple ways to prove they are proficient and yet, also trying to build in consistency and reliability into our systems.”

The summit will be a discussion about how we are defining proficiency in our classrooms. This session will engage teachers, administrators, and instructional support staff in a conversation about how they are determining proficiency on learning targets. Participants are asked to bring classroom artifacts demonstrating how they use critical thinking skills to consistently determine proficiency while still allowing learners to demonstrate their learning in multiple ways.

For more information, email Linda Laughlin at lindaflaughlin@gmail.com.