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.
Showing posts with label mastery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mastery. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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My main interest in teaching is the concept of mastery learning, and its potential to replace the outdated, idiosyncratic grading systems that punish students and tell us nothing about whether they can in fact do any of the things we want them to.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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