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You can find more information on the MBLC website or check out our Google Calendar of Events.
Fall Community Gathering [in-person]
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
9:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. PST
Location: The Conference Center at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport 17801 International Blvd, SeaTac, WA 98158
On October 7th, we will hold a full-day, in-person Gathering. This Fall Gathering will give MBLC team members a chance to connect with colleagues from across the state, share new developments in their implementation journeys, and build capacity around MBL implementation at the classroom and school level. We will hear from our new Living Lab Schools and our Impact Fellows. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Registration for this event is closed.
MBLC Fall Virtual Meeting
Tuesday, November 4, 2025
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. PST
An important forum for our shared learning and collaboration will be our MBLC Virtual Meetings, which will occur once in the fall and once in the spring. Each online meeting will begin with a webinar presentation, which will be followed by opportunities for discussion and connection in breakout rooms with educators from across the MBLC.
✅ REGISTER NOW!
Impact Fellows Meeting (note that Fellows have already been selected)
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. PST
The MBLC Impact Fellows are a group of educators from across the Mastery-Based Learning Collaborative who work to achieve educational equity in schools through leading and facilitating learning in their own schools and districts, and through the facilitation of sharing and learning among MBLC schools.
MBLC Fellows will attend four Zoom meetings from 3:30 - 5:00 PM on September 16, November 18, January 13, and February 10
Our growing event archive on the MBLC Community Site is a treasure trove of recordings and resources from past events.
OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
We welcome Innovation Heights Academy, Avanti High School, and Edgemont Junior High as our new Cohort 1 Living Lab schools!
Starting in the 2025-26 school year, the MBLC is introducing three Cohort One Living Lab schools to serve as exemplars of culturally responsive MBL practice. Modeled after New York City’s Competency Collaborative, Living Lab schools will showcase MBL in action. They will attend MBLC professional learning and receive dedicated coaching from Great Schools Partnership. Each school will also host one intervisitation and contribute tools and resources to the MBLC community. Living Lab schools are not required to be advanced implementers, but they should be ready to share their journey and invite others to learn alongside them.
Senate Bill 5189 Signed into Session Law
Senate Bill 5189, which takes steps to implement competency-based education (CBE, which is synonymous with MBL) in the state, has been signed into session law. This bill required OSPI to adopt rules to authorize full-time enrollment funding for students in CBE programs and (in consultation with SBE) to develop and recommend a process to create competencies aligned with state learning standards. SBE will be required to develop and recommend a process to identify and designate schools and districts implementing CBE. SBE will also be required to recommend a format for a CBE high school transcript as part of, or as an alternative to, the standardized high school transcript.
'READ THIS, WATCH THAT!
Here are some MBLC highlights from our coaches. Enjoy, and let us know your wish list for next time!
MBLC Schools Use Professional Learning Communities to Foster Powerful Collaboration
Kate Gardoqui
Welcome back to school, everybody!! As an MBLC coach, one of the highlights of September for me has been connecting with school leaders and leadership teams to discuss their goals and plans for the year. At each of the schools/districts that I have connected with so far, the school leaders shared inspiring visions of the work that is planned for the year and the summer efforts that have been made to make it possible.
At Lopez Island Public Schools, the MBLC team worked over the summer to craft a set of tools that would enable the faculty to utilize grading tools in consistent ways, to prepare the elementary teachers to start using badge books, to begin school-wide use of the shared outcomes defined in the Portrait of a Graduate, to utilize consistent strategies for designing mastery-based course syllabi, and to engage teachers in discussion of mastery-based classroom practice and assessment. “There was tons of shared leadership by teachers, “ said principal Martha Martin, who is an MBLC Impact Fellow. “The conversation about how to use formative and summative assessments felt like one of the most elevated teacher-led conversations I have seen as a school leader.”
In several schools, the plans for the year include using Professional Learning Communities to make space for teachers to deepen their practice in culturally responsive-sustaining, mastery-based learning. At Envision Career Academy in North Thurston Public School District, principal Brody LaRock, an MBLC Impact Fellow, is planning to use PLCs to help teachers focus on two elements of the Portrait of a Graduate that their school community designed last year. These two elements are “Communicate” and “Discern.”
In PLCs this year, Envision teachers will examine formative and summative assessment data directly related to those two elements, and engage in collaboration and feedback cycles focused on instruction relating to them. For example, the science teachers may focus on student work relating to Science and Engineering Practice #4, “Analyzing and interpreting data” or Science and Engineering Practice #8, "Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information,” which relate to these Portrait of a Graduate elements. Meanwhile, the math, English and social studies teachers may look at work in which students demonstrate the skills of constructing viable arguments or critiquing the reasoning of others.
James A Taylor High School in North Mason School District and Summit Virtual Academy in the North Thurston school district are also planning to make PLCs central to their MBLC work this year.
I’m thrilled to see MBLC schools using PLCs to work on their CRS MBL practice, because there is so much evidence that well-designed and well-utilized PLCs are essential to ongoing improvement in schools. A Teacher's Guide to VITAL Collaboration: Facilitating Evidence-Driven Inquiry in PLCs to Improve Teaching and Learning, a new book on Professional Learning Communities published this spring by Teachers College Press, explains why PLCs are such a powerful way to strengthen schools and teachers. Author Kevin Perks writes, “... in their review of studies on PLC’s Vescio et al (2008) found that participation in PLCs leads to improved teacher practices, increased teacher collaboration, and enhanced student learning.” And the collaboration that PLCs foster “can lead to greater consistency in instructional practices across classrooms, which in turn helps ensure that all students have access to high quality learning experiences.” That kind of consistency across classrooms is exactly what we are hoping to achieve in the MBLC.
In A Teacher's Guide to VITAL Collaboration, Perks describes a goal-centered and feedback-driven approach to PLCs that is particularly well-suited to Mastery-Based Learning. He defines these elements as being central to the success of PLCs:
- Setting a specific SMART goal, and then utilizing PLCs to keep the focus on it all year: (SMART Goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.)
- Ensuring that PLCs create the opportunity for teachers to engage in many small feedback loops as they focus on their goal.
- Ensuring that PLCs function to enable teachers to make their work visible to others and get helpful and actionable feedback
Throughout the year last year, I was lucky to be able to participate in and hear about the PLC work at Summit Virtual Academy, where MBLC Impact Fellows Erinn Zeitlin and Becky Lee used Professional Learning Communities to help SVA teachers make their work visible to others and get helpful and actionable feedback using the MBLC Assessment Template and Tuning Protocol. This PLC collaboration resulted in beautifully designed culturally responsive and project-based units and assessments that inspired high levels of student engagement.
When aligned with clear goals and focused closely on teacher and student work, PLCs can be a powerful driver of school change - I’m excited to see how MBLC schools will utilize them this year!
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