Mastery Within the Confines of a Curriculum

If you haven't yet, you should watch Sal Khan's TED Talk about mastery.

His point resonates so deeply at the core of what education could and should be. Unfortunately, the environment needed to make mastery a reality in most schools isn't in place. Whether it is the confines of the grading program you use or a requirement to put in a certain number of grades per week, the pacing guide or curriculum you use with a requirement of staying within a few lesson of your team, or simply the lack of time to try new things that nearly all teachers feel on a day-to-day basis due to all the other things teachers are expected to do, mastery-based learning feels impossible sometimes.

(For some good reading on why change is so difficult in schools, check out this article about the twelve barriers to innovation in education from TeachThought.)

However, we have two options in response to this feeling:

• Throw up our hands and become the grumpy teacher who's always complaining about how terrible everything is.

• Or we can try to make it work. 

So, until the education gets its stuff together and realizes that no two students learn the same thing at the same pace and that having kids do the same assignment is not the same as ensuring those two kids learn the same thing, I'm working on a solution in my classroom. 

The premise is this: Students will identify what level they are working at through diagnostic assessments and previous performance and then choose from tiered assignments to address their specific need. That probably sounds super confusing, so I will show you what I mean. 

My students are currently working on a narrative unit. At the start of the unit, students got their mastery trackers. Here's what those look like:

Click here to see the actual document.

One of the things I've really been thinking about is how I design the different levels of my rubrics. I am really pushing myself to create rubrics that logically show the progression towards an in-depth understanding of the skill. My goal is that my rubrics actually progress through Bloom's Taxonomy, where the lower levels focus on students learning the content, the middle levels focus on strategic thinking, and the upper levels focus on creation. More specifically, I spent time really thinking about the building blocks and crafting rubrics that progress through those building blocks. 

From there, students take a diagnostic assessment to determine their current levels as they start the unit. This time around, I highlighted in gray the levels they already had mastered and then highlighted in yellow their current level. This document is one students will use throughout the unit to track their progress. 

Now comes the fun part. With every student working at different levels for the different objectives, how could I craft an assignment that would meet every students' needs? Well, that's where tiered assessments come in. Here's what that looks like.

Click here to see the full document.

Now, by using a tiered assessment, I can still have students reading and discussing a text as a class, but when they sit down to work on an assessment, they are working at an appropriate level for where they are currently at. 

The reason why I am liking this approach so far is that instead of saying, you got a 2 out of 5 on the rubric, I get to tell students that they successfully completed level 1 and get to move onto level 2. It's a completely different conversation with the student. 

Then, next time when we do another assessment on the same target, they've moved up in their mastery tracker and get to attempt the next level. If they didn't move up, they get another shot at the same skill. 

The other bonus to this is that so often people complain that mastery means students have as much time as they want on an assignment and they get to redo it as often as they want. This completely misses the mark for what mastery is all about. We aren't trying to master assignments; we're trying to master skills. By using this approach, I can hold students accountable to turning in work on time and avoid regrading the same assignment over and over, but I also am able to provide students the necessary opportunities they need on multiple assignments to practice with a skill until they master it. 

Let me be clear: this is absolutely a work in progress. I'm not even 100% sure what this will look like in the grade book (and to be fully transparent, I hate the concepts of grade books and grades anyways, so I don't really care what that part looks like). 

But I've already had enough conversations with students where I get to celebrate success versus communicating defeat to know that this shift is worth it for them.