I love this video (from New Zealand's Instant Kiwi Lotto) for its exposure of the time paradigm and its place in grades.
Note that the student had actually already finished his work, thereby satisfying the arbitrary time limit set for this exam. Students miss deadlines for a variety of reasons, from procrastination to instability in their home lives to slowness in learning the material. While I'm not advocating a total eradication of deadlines, inside the mastery paradigm, teachers need to ensure that lateness doesn't blur the academic information conveyed by the grade book. The grade book is a place to report academic achievement in the subject area, period. In short, missing deadlines or time limits needs to be recorded and/or dealt with somewhere else.
The question arises: If we get rid of late penalties, how can we prevent students from taking advantage of us? We'll deal with that in a later post...in the meantime, enjoy the video.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Thursday, March 20, 2008
The Flaky Flowerchild and the Curmudgeonly Coach - Part 2
Usually in a call for reform, the innovator has little concern for individuals. And were it not for today's heavily unionized teaching profession, the innovator would throw certain individuals off the bus--those individuals ill-suited to the desired change. To the extent that it's possible, this approach has ethical merit, especially in cases of extreme teacher incompetency or malpractice.
Our Flaky Flowerchild and Curmudgeonly Coach are no strangers to the chopping block, as are all who reside at the fringes of any spectrum of ideas. And, as I said in my previous post, they are two major foes of mastery teaching and learning, so why not just send 'em packing?
Why not? Because each of them contains a seed of what mastery teaching and learning is all about. Both of them have one part of the truth and, as we saw in my first post, justice is defined as "conformity to truth."
What we have in the Flaky Flowerchild and Curmudgeonly Coach is the thesis and antithesis of pedagogical styles. Rather than eliminating one or both of these extremes, we might instead seek a synthesis, one that involves all that is best from both ends of the spectrum. According to Hegel, this dialectical process results in a higher level of truth.
One virtue these two opposites have in common is zeal. The opposite vice of zeal is lukewarmness, which is even worse than the considerable conflict that zeal from opposite ends of a continuum can cause. In the case of the Flaky Flowerchild it's a zeal for compassion. In the case of the Curmudgeonly Coach it's a zeal for rigor. Mastery learning requires both, and to a greater degree than is expressed in either teacher's style.
Our Flaky Flowerchild and Curmudgeonly Coach are no strangers to the chopping block, as are all who reside at the fringes of any spectrum of ideas. And, as I said in my previous post, they are two major foes of mastery teaching and learning, so why not just send 'em packing?
Why not? Because each of them contains a seed of what mastery teaching and learning is all about. Both of them have one part of the truth and, as we saw in my first post, justice is defined as "conformity to truth."
What we have in the Flaky Flowerchild and Curmudgeonly Coach is the thesis and antithesis of pedagogical styles. Rather than eliminating one or both of these extremes, we might instead seek a synthesis, one that involves all that is best from both ends of the spectrum. According to Hegel, this dialectical process results in a higher level of truth.
One virtue these two opposites have in common is zeal. The opposite vice of zeal is lukewarmness, which is even worse than the considerable conflict that zeal from opposite ends of a continuum can cause. In the case of the Flaky Flowerchild it's a zeal for compassion. In the case of the Curmudgeonly Coach it's a zeal for rigor. Mastery learning requires both, and to a greater degree than is expressed in either teacher's style.
The Flaky Flowerchild and The Curmudgeonly Coach - Part 1
In this post, I introduce two foes of mastery learning: The Flaky Flowerchild and The Curmudgeonly Coach.
The Flaky Flowerchild is the ostensibly compassionate teacher who creates "loopholes" for kids, who tries "humanize" the rigid strictures of the institution, in part, through her grading. If pressed to create learning objectives for her classes, a lot of them would begin "The student will develop an appreciation for..." or "The student will think deeply about..." In other words, her entire curriculum is utterly unmeasurable, and, when it comes time to measure (i.e. the end of the term), she is usually willing to "have an open mind" about what a student has or has not accomplished in the class. The problem with the Flaky Flowerchild is that we have no idea what goes on in the bright, peace-loving confines of her classroom. Countless students emerge from her courses vaguely affirmed in their personhood but woefully unprepared in the subject areas she teaches. Her "compassion" is actually a form of injustice.
The Curmudgeonly Coach, on the other hand, doesn't budge for anyone. Come grades time, you'll hear him saying things like "A 59.4% is a 'E' and that's what he's gonna get!" and "For some of these kids, failure's the best thing that'll ever happen to 'em." He holds the line with an almost Kantian sense of rigor, as if the future of civilization depended on his unrelenting dedication to principle. The problem with the Curmudgeonly Coach, however, is that he is unrelentingly dedicated to the wrong things. His relentless dedication does not concern mastery, but rather the "hoops" of school--character, employability skills, attendance, and fastidiously filling out the little squares in his gradebook. He is also devoted to the blind "justice" of the 100-point scale and the mean (see a later post dealing with this topic). Alternative assessments are not even on this guy's radar. Students incapable of jumping through his hoops, eventually burn out or drop out. Good riddance. Unlike the Flaky Flowerchild, we have some idea what his "good" students can do, but we know little about the students he failed.
The Flaky Flowerchild is the ostensibly compassionate teacher who creates "loopholes" for kids, who tries "humanize" the rigid strictures of the institution, in part, through her grading. If pressed to create learning objectives for her classes, a lot of them would begin "The student will develop an appreciation for..." or "The student will think deeply about..." In other words, her entire curriculum is utterly unmeasurable, and, when it comes time to measure (i.e. the end of the term), she is usually willing to "have an open mind" about what a student has or has not accomplished in the class. The problem with the Flaky Flowerchild is that we have no idea what goes on in the bright, peace-loving confines of her classroom. Countless students emerge from her courses vaguely affirmed in their personhood but woefully unprepared in the subject areas she teaches. Her "compassion" is actually a form of injustice.
The Curmudgeonly Coach, on the other hand, doesn't budge for anyone. Come grades time, you'll hear him saying things like "A 59.4% is a 'E' and that's what he's gonna get!" and "For some of these kids, failure's the best thing that'll ever happen to 'em." He holds the line with an almost Kantian sense of rigor, as if the future of civilization depended on his unrelenting dedication to principle. The problem with the Curmudgeonly Coach, however, is that he is unrelentingly dedicated to the wrong things. His relentless dedication does not concern mastery, but rather the "hoops" of school--character, employability skills, attendance, and fastidiously filling out the little squares in his gradebook. He is also devoted to the blind "justice" of the 100-point scale and the mean (see a later post dealing with this topic). Alternative assessments are not even on this guy's radar. Students incapable of jumping through his hoops, eventually burn out or drop out. Good riddance. Unlike the Flaky Flowerchild, we have some idea what his "good" students can do, but we know little about the students he failed.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Closing loopholes and setting captives free
Central to all assessment, grading, and reporting is an idea of justice, that is, rendering to each person his or her due. Another definition of justice, from The American Heritage College Dictionary, is "conformity to truth, fact, or sound reason." With mastery learning, we are interested in the truth about a student's mastery of whatever learning objectives are associated with a certain course of study.
Traditional methods of assessment, grading, and reporting don't do a good job of discovering or describing a student's mastery of learning objectives. For instance, 58% on Chapter 7 Test tells us very little about what Billy is going to need help on once he fails the class this year. He might as well have not shown up to class for all the credit he will be given for his efforts. Next year, he will need to take the entire class again from scratch when he may actually only need to demonstrate mastery on 42% of the course's learning objectives. Of course, the arithmetic is never that cut and dry--in fact, very little in our traditional grading systems is.
Our traditional methods have two fatal flaws when it comes to promoting student success--ironically on opposite poles of the whole "loose/strict" continuum of common practice: (1) it is loose where it should be strict, and (2) it is strict where it should be loose. I will treat each of these problems separately in later posts. I will also show how, using mastery learning, we can remedy both of these flaws (both of which are offenses against the ideal of justice), effectively closing loopholes and setting captives free.
Traditional methods of assessment, grading, and reporting don't do a good job of discovering or describing a student's mastery of learning objectives. For instance, 58% on Chapter 7 Test tells us very little about what Billy is going to need help on once he fails the class this year. He might as well have not shown up to class for all the credit he will be given for his efforts. Next year, he will need to take the entire class again from scratch when he may actually only need to demonstrate mastery on 42% of the course's learning objectives. Of course, the arithmetic is never that cut and dry--in fact, very little in our traditional grading systems is.
Our traditional methods have two fatal flaws when it comes to promoting student success--ironically on opposite poles of the whole "loose/strict" continuum of common practice: (1) it is loose where it should be strict, and (2) it is strict where it should be loose. I will treat each of these problems separately in later posts. I will also show how, using mastery learning, we can remedy both of these flaws (both of which are offenses against the ideal of justice), effectively closing loopholes and setting captives free.
What's my name?
My name is Arthur Chiaravalli, a English and Mathematics teacher at Meridian High School in Haslett, Michigan (east of the capital city, Lansing).
Our school is an alternative high school, serving students who have struggled in the mainstream. We also feature fully-staffed and accredited infant and childcare. As a result, we attract many teen parents from Lansing and the surrounding areas who would otherwise face a nearly insurmountable barrier to receiving a high school diploma.
My main interest in teaching is the concept of mastery learning, and its potential to replace the outdated, idiosyncratic grading systems that punish students and tell us nothing about whether they can in fact do any of the things we want them to.
I don't want to spend a lot of time defining mastery learning or suggesting books--suffice it to say that it's the same system we use with swimming. Either you can swim or you can't. A "D-" in swimming means nothing. We may actually assume that a person receiving such a grade should not go swimming unattended yet--and certainly should not move on to more advanced classes without ample support. But, too often, this is the rubber stamp with which we pass a kid on to the next level, utterly unprepared and unaided as they face even more challenging educational experiences. Once you understand the aptness of this analogy, you are prepared to consider why a comprehensive mastery approach to teaching, learning, assessing, grading and reporting is needed in our schools, now more than ever.
Our school is an alternative high school, serving students who have struggled in the mainstream. We also feature fully-staffed and accredited infant and childcare. As a result, we attract many teen parents from Lansing and the surrounding areas who would otherwise face a nearly insurmountable barrier to receiving a high school diploma.
My main interest in teaching is the concept of mastery learning, and its potential to replace the outdated, idiosyncratic grading systems that punish students and tell us nothing about whether they can in fact do any of the things we want them to.
I don't want to spend a lot of time defining mastery learning or suggesting books--suffice it to say that it's the same system we use with swimming. Either you can swim or you can't. A "D-" in swimming means nothing. We may actually assume that a person receiving such a grade should not go swimming unattended yet--and certainly should not move on to more advanced classes without ample support. But, too often, this is the rubber stamp with which we pass a kid on to the next level, utterly unprepared and unaided as they face even more challenging educational experiences. Once you understand the aptness of this analogy, you are prepared to consider why a comprehensive mastery approach to teaching, learning, assessing, grading and reporting is needed in our schools, now more than ever.
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