Welcome.

I'm Ryan, an ESL instructor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (a former Spanish teacher, too), where I provide general and academic English language education to refugees, immigrants, and international students. I think we do a pretty good job. While we can't take all the credit, our 25-course sequence saw an over 400% increase in student enrollment from 2008-2016. Great news, but this surge pushed us on our heels a bit. The implication became immediate: an unacceptable number students were not meeting our proficiency benchmarks as they progressed, putting students in a precarious situation of having passed the previous class without the necessary language abilities.

Suspicious that "traditional" grading structure of points and percentages was in part the culprit, I began to reflect on how I was grading my own students. I found myself becoming disenchanted with the notion of a single average numeric grade supposedly representing a student's language ability, and I feared some were slipping through the cracks for this very reason. So, I set out on an exciting years-long journey to find a competency-based alternative for my classroom. I experimented. Overhauled my entire grading structure. Agonized along way. And rejoiced. During my journey, I had two premonitions: (1) there seemed to be a significant gap between my needs and available resources, and (2) what I was doing could not only benefit Kirkwood ESL instructors but perhaps a wide range of language educators. After I pitched my idea to Kirkwood, they funded my work through an Endowed Faculty Chair award. The task: to design a competency-based model of language learning and an onboarding process for instructors.

And here it is, one year later. My project. A website, which I've aptly named ProficiencyBuilder and corporately styled (sorry, I could not resist the opportunity for artistic expression). An online resource of over 150 pages - 100% free - designed to help world language instructors or administrators to boost students' target language proficiency by implementing a competency-based approach to the classroom. So, without further ado, meet ProficiencyBuilder.