The Mastery Classroom

This workshop was definitely interesting.  I felt super fortunate to be at this workshop because the facilitators were 8th grade science teachers at the middle school that feeds into my high school, and it really helps to get an idea of what they get before they come to me!  The idea of the Mastery classroom was presented, which is being used in the 8th grade science classes.  It was so interesting hearing about how the science classes in the 8th grade are run since I teach so many freshman and they are coming to me next!

The Mastery classroom is one in which each student works at their own pace.  There is very little common instruction.  Basically, the entire year is laid out in a series of learning experiences and formative and summative assessments.  The students work through learning targets, completing checklists of learning opportunites (in the science classroom it can be reading, practice, labs, etc) and then they take formative assessments along the way, which they can retake until they achieve mastery and do not move on until they have.  Then, once they have achieved mastery on all of the learning targets they take a summative asssessment.  Here are some resources that they gave us for info:

• Benjamin Bloom (kind of the father of the idea of Mastery)
• Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams--wrote a book "Flipping the Classroom" in which they talked about Mastery
• Kelly Morgan--wrote a book called "Mastery Learning in the Science Classroom"

Teaching in this model requires a TON of prep work.  I imagine it would be extremely difficult for a new teacher to do without a lot of support.  Here are some tips they gave for what has made their lives easier as they have been working through the process:

• Have checklists that match the colors of the assessments (or use a shape/design in the upper right corner)
• Keep bins with the learning opportunities organized
• Use naming that is consistent between the checklist and the learning opportunities
• Make videos of lessons (in a kind of a flipped model) to provide as learning opportunities
• Kids need to have headphones
• For students that fly through the material or if they can show on a pre-assessment that they already know it, have them work on an independent project that they present to the class
• Have a designated testing area in the room
• Provide answer keys for learning opportunities but keep them all in once place that students have to come to to use them and leave the keys there, this is also a no phone zone!
• Have students use peer checks of their notebooks to make sure they have completed the learning opportunities
• Provide "re-learning opportunities" sheets--checklists that list learning opportunities to revisit or other types of remedial learning opportunities for students to go through before they re-test
• Create a test corrections and reflection for students to complete before they re-test in which they list the question they missed, the correct answer, where they found the correct answer, and why they missed it.   Here is a list of the reflection choices they gave the students:  

1. I read the question incorrectly.
2. I misread the answer I selected.
3. I did not read all of the available choices.
4. I did not study this particular topic enough.
5. I need to put more detail into my answer.

6. I did not understand what the question was asking.
7. Other…(If you choose this selection, you must include a detailed written response explaining why you answered the question incorrectly.)

For videos, they mentioned that students prefer if it is your voice on the video and they also like to see your face.  The software they used is called Camtasia, but it apparently costs money!  There is free version called Camstudio.  Here are some other possibililtes:  Tiny Take, SnagIt, Jing, Screencast-o-matic.  They suggested recording a vocal track with each of your powerpoint slides and then making it into a video in Movie Maker, which I thought was pretty brilliant!