According to Dean of WGU’s Teachers College Marti Garlett, the manner in which WGU built its competency-based system for teacher education began with a search for a database that could detail all of the accepted teacher standards that existed throughout the United States. However, the search was never achieved, because such a thorough database did not exist. So the next logical step was for WGU to create its own.

WGU located all of the state teaching standards and all of the national teaching standards and put them into a database that now contains more than 15,000 standards from around the country. The standards were then coded back to the framework of a program called "PATHWISE: Introduction to a Framework for Teaching" which was originally developed for the Educational Testing Service by Charlotte Danielson, author of a best-selling book from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, titled "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching." In short, PATHWISE is a software tool that gives education coaches, mentors, and supervisors the ability to make professional development activities more focused, more personal, and more instructive.

A team of subject-matter experts "meticulously gave each one of those standards a code," says Garlett. "These subject-matter experts came from all over the country, and they represented classroom teachers who could be considered master teachers."

Another team of researchers looked at scientifically based measures of what types of teaching methodologies and pedagogies allow students to achieve, she continues. "Our primary set of researchers we brought in understood that correlation." The researchers basically made sure that everything was coded properly, so application and theory could match.

Once everything was coded back to the framework, the researchers and subject-matter experts, which totaled about 35 people, were brought to Salt Lake City, where WGU is headquartered, for a three-day workshop "where we derived competencies from the standards that were attached to the framework.

"If the competency said a graduate will do so and so, then how do you know if a graduate can do so and so?" asks Garlett. "We then developed a set of measurable objectives for each one of those competencies. And then we took those measurable objectives and we built our assessments on that. That is how we came up with our program."

Garlett adds that "the U.S. Department of Education tells us that they don’t know of any other database like ours in the world. Other databases exist that have student standards in them so that teachers can figure out how to write a lesson plan to the student standards, but our database recommends teacher standards that come from NCATE and the national board as well as all of the states."