Assessing in Mastery Learning: What we Have Learned
This is my third year of doing mastery learning and the more I teach this way the more I like it. Many of our followers have asked for advice from Aaron and I. What have we learned so that they don’t have to make the same mistakes that we have made. Today I want to talk about how we have changed up our assessment s.
This year in our Chemistry classes we have changed a bit how we assess our students. In the past we would check every single assignment that students assigned. We would then put that in the grade book. This year we looked at objectives and instead of a student trying to “get work” done they are now focused in on the objectives that might have several learning activities. This chunking of our activities into objectives.
Below are the old and the new checklists: Note how the old system is very busy and the new one is not very busy.
Clearly: the second chart makes it easier for students to see what it is they need to know and be able to do. Thus far this has fostered a greater amount of learning.
We have even changed the way that we talk to students. Instead of: did you get that assignment done? It is now, “What objective are you struggling with today and how can I help.” This has created a more collaborative learning environment for all students and I am seeing greater gains in learning already.
Tomorrow marks the first day of my 25th year teaching. Have I gotten that old? . I am blessed to have been in a profession that I love for such a long time. The energy I get from teenagers must keep me young.
I want to share two thoughts with you: They probably should be two separate blogs. One amazing video and some things I want to do differently as I move into this year of learning.
Amazing Video:
Students today are looking for an interactive experience in school where they don’t have to “dumb down” and “turn off” when they come to school. Unfortunately too often our schools do just that. Check out this video clip that demonstrates how our students want to interact with content.
How My Class Will Look Different This Year 1. VoiceThread.com: This past weekend I have been in Canada speaking at a technology conference (Touch-N-Go http://touchngo.sd.bc.ca/). There I was introduced to Voice Thread (http://voicethread.com/). Voice Thread has a unique way for folks to interact with content. We want to test uploading some of our podcasts to Voice-Thread and see how the students interact with this medium. We already have some great video podcasts, but to have the ability for them to be interacted on this level could add a whole new level of interactivity. We even anticipate others from around the world interacting with the videos online. Potentially our students will be watching these videos with students from around the world.
2. Multiple Means of Assessment: One of the hallmarks of our program is that every student has to complete each unit of study by achieving at least 75% on each exit assessment. We were introduced to a teaching methodology out of Harvard University called Universal Design in Learning (UDL) and one of the things that it asserts that all students need is the opportunity to be assessed in multiple ways. So this year we are going to provide opportunities for our students who want to demonstrate mastery through some method other than the exams. We are simply going to produce the list of objectives for each unit and have students show us how they know this content. They will be able to do this via any method that they choose. We are thinking along the lines of student produced videos, making up their own exams, or frankly any creative method that works best for each student. We will see how this open ended assessment strategy works.
3. More Engaging Activities For the past few years we have been so focused on making high quality videos that we have not given as much attention to making our activities more engaging for students. At this past conference one of the teachers told us she liked our teaching methodology (the reverse classroom) but she was wondering what she would do with the kids during her class if she didn’t lecture to them. Her moment of honesty was telling. We have things for our kids to do in class, but they can always be better and more engaging. I am hoping to team up with some of the other teachers in our building, and in my greater PLN community, to come up with better activities that will better connect students to the content.
4. Student Choice: Speaking of activities: We would like to have more than one activity that can get to the same objectives. Students really enjoy having control of their own learning. What if we gave them more than one type of activity that gets at the same objectives? That way, students who learn differently will be able to learn the way they learn best. This will be quite a process to make this happen—and maybe a logistical nightmare. I am thinking that this will start after the first unit. As I sit here on the airplane headed home I don’t see this happening for unit 1 when kids arrive Wednesday morning.
Class Visits and Further Trainings:
Last year Aaron and I had about one hundred educators visit our classroom. Know that each of you are encouraged to come and visit our blended 21st Century classroom. Feel free to contact me about setting up a time for you to come and visit. We try and have larger groups on set days so that we don’t go crazy. There is also some power in having more people observing what is going on.
Aaron and I have two engagements coming up.
1. September 15th: ISTE Webinar: Go to http://iste.org/ to sign up.
2. September 23-24th: Bib County Schools, Near Macon GA. We will be spending two days training their staff in the blended classroom and 21st Century Learning. If any of the folks on the east coast are interested in attending I can contact them and see if other folks would be allowed to come.
Last Thoughts:
If you have made it this far in the blog then congratulations. I hope you see my excitement as I move into the new year with my students. For the second year in a row I will have my daughter in class and last year it was good to see what I was putting students through with my program. She can be brutally honest so I am happy to have someone testing out our crazy ideas.
I have purposely not spent much of the past week worrying about school or thinking too much about education. It has been the week for home projects and time with my kids. I have:
1. Gotten five cords of wood with my two lovely daughters.
2. Spent a day with my girls at the YMCA
3. A wonderful hike with the same girls.
4. Celebrated two of our family birthdays (My son turned 17 and my wife, well she is one year older)
5. Began a relatively large deck project. The railing on my deck has been in need of a replacement for quite some time so I have decided to put TREX down.
6. And then for the past two days I have had to deal with a flooded garage. It is quite disconcerting to go in your garage and find 1 ½ feet of water in it. I think Noah’s flood hit us and it overwhelmed our culvert in our mountain community and all of the road water and dirt and rock and silt made its way into our garage. Not once, but twice. Hopefully I have remedied this problem for the future thanks to a friend with big muscles.
The big project on the horizon educationally is to begin a website that categories all of the best vodcasts out there for education. The start of this project is to upload all of our videos to youtube. Then we will develop a webpage that will categorize all of the best educational videos out there. The page will simply be links to good videos. We are working on how to most effectively categorize the videos, but I think it will help a lot of both teachers and students out. Our youtube channel is: http://www.youtube.com/user/Learning4Mastery but our main page will be http://learningformastery.com .
I would appreciate any feedback you might have on how to categorize each topic. As of right now we are thinking of having a page for each discipline: One for Chemistry, Algebra, Calculus, Astronomy, etc. But the beauty of the web is that we could even categorize them in lots of different ways.
All for now:
I just attended a keynote at ISTE 2010 in Denver and Shawn Koh from Singapore was on a panel. He wowed the audience with some great quotes.
“I went to school in Singapore but grew up on the internet.”
Shawn is indicative of the students that we are teaching today. They are so digitally connected and they are literally growing up on the internet. That is a very profound statement from a 20 year old college student. We as educators need to embrace this and set up schools that help these students learn.
Another quote from Shawn when asked: What do you wish you had learned in school: “I wish I had learned how to learn.”
Shawn took classes and focused in on what was being taught, but he never learned how to learn. We need to actively teach our students how to learn and not be so married to our content. I think we can use the vehicle of our content, but if we ignore the learning process we have grossly shortchanged our students.
This just in: Aaron Sams just won the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching. Aaron has tirelessly worked to become a better teacher. Much of his application had to do with mastery learning and video podcasting. It is great to see others acknowledge him for such amazing work.
This week I am not doing any mastery classes or trainings, so I have some time to reflect on last week. In fact right now I am on my way to the Hy-Vee triathlon with my wife and a friend. We are going to be selling our triathlon clothing (My wife runs an online triathlon clothing store –http://tristuff4less.com/, and I will be competing in the race this Sunday June 12th. Thus I will chat about our amazing visit to South Dakota last week.
While in South Dakota, Aaron and I had the chance to train a cadre of teacher in the Sioux Falls School District. These 40 folks won a grant to implement mastery learning in their math and science classes. Frankly Aaron and I are humbled. Their experiment started out with them coming out to Colorado to both see our class and then attend one of our workshops. Since then they have gone full bore into the mastery/video podcasting model.
In their grant they are going to pay their 40 teachers to develop the program. They didn’t get too much “stuff” except for some copies of Camtasia to make the podcasts. As we pondered this, we realized that this is just what is needed. The key to setting up a mastery classroom is to have time to develop all the components. You need:
1. To have a library of podcasts
2. A way to assess students in a way that is not too cumbersome on the teachers. The students need to be assessed multiple times if they don’t achieve mastery.
I know this full well since this past year I embarked on doing this with our freshmen Earth/Space class that we teach at our high school. Since Aaron was not teaching this course, I did this solo. I made an untold number of podcasts and utilized moodle to make up so many questions to help assess student learning. It was a hard year of work, but I felt that my freshmen group (about 100 kids) learned more than any group I have ever taught. When all was said and done, I had only two students fail the course and most of them were quite successful in mastering the content.
Anyways: Kudos to South Dakota: They are going to reward the teachers for all of the extra hard work it is to set up a mastery course. And Aaron and I are excited to see what will happen to all those kids in all of those classes.
America’s schools today face many challenges. Preparing our students to compete in a global economy, bridging the achievement gap, bringing classrooms into 21st Century Learning, and keeping quality teachers in the classroom are complex issues with no easy solutions.
I recently read some research about quality teaching. (US News and World Report, September 2009) The article stated that it is better for a student to be in a “bad” school with a good teacher than to have a bad teacher in a “good” school. Many years ago I had the privilege of listening to Kati Haycock speak on the subject of increasing student achievement. She said that when she goes into schools, what is most distressing is that the best teachers are teaching the fewest kids. Conversely, the newest teachers teach the lowest level of students and have the largest class sizes. This inequality in our schools is hurting the population of students that need the greatest assistance. It not only hurts our students but also discourages young teachers. A few years ago at my previous school, a friend of mine left because he was told that he would never teach an upper-level class at our high school. This bright young man with great potential realized that our school was too entrenched in the seniority system, so he went elsewhere.
Failure to ask the question, “What is best for the students?” causes schools to be mired in mediocrity. Often, schools do what is expedient and do what they have “always done.” The saying “we never did it that way before” is too often used in today’s schools. This attitude has a devastating effect on student achievement. First, students underperform because inexperienced teachers who lack the tools necessary to motivate students are often the ones assigned to teach our reluctant learners. These are the students who most need access to our best and brightest educators. Additionally, when we fail to put students first, we discourage bright young men and women from entering into the teaching profession. If a prospective teacher feels that he will forever be placed teaching struggling students or is not given adequate resources to make a difference, he will either never enter the profession or leave education entirely after a short time.
The good news is that we can and should change the paradigm of education and bring those quality teachers to all of our schools. With the advent of 21st Century tools, it is now possible to have some of the best teaching in the country happening in multiple places at one time. Educators can record their lessons on the most difficult subjects and make these lessons available for students all over the country. As this becomes a reality, the role of the classroom teacher will change. He or she will go from being the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. The classroom teacher will spend his days interacting with students and pushing them to excel instead of spending time managing poor student behavior or presenting a scintillating lecture. Another advantage is that if the individual teacher is strong in some content, he or she can rely on a gifted distance teacher so his/her students will have access to that content.
When I have spoken around the country about what we are doing with the “Reverse Classroom,” some of the greatest interest has come from rural and urban schools who have a hard time finding teachers to teach some of the more difficult science and math courses. Those schools see the “Reverse Classroom” as a way for all of their students to have access to quality, high-level teaching that will open doors for their students.
Assessing in Mastery Learning: What we Have Learned
