ACE Leadership High School was built with a clear belief
about student learning. Part of this belief, or philosophy, is that students
will work towards graduation through demonstrating mastery of skills and
concepts. When hiring teachers, we don’t ask them to come with the same belief
but they must be able to embrace it as a foundation of the school. Because our
teachers are truly dedicated to this philosophy, they want to ensure they are
do things the right way. Hence, they are always sharing their thoughts,
questions and practice which allow us to stay fresh as a school and keep
learning about our practice.
Yesterday in our professional development session our
teachers were asking sophisticated, important and deep questions about how we
assess students and how we attach credits to projects. We were in our second
session of project development for trimester three and I was telling the
teachers they needed to “land” their ideas and begin their project overview
documents including creating the learning outcome guides for the project. This
documentation includes what content was going to be covered and what credits
were going to be attached to the project and it was due to me before they left
for the day. A very high expectation but nothing they couldn’t handle.
Before getting started, one teacher asked a great question
that needs more exploration than the answer I gave on this day. The question
was regarding the difference between mastery, awarding credits and how much
credit to award, defining proficiency and reporting a passing grade. Yes, it
was big. This question spanned school policy, philosophy, founding ideas of the
school and individual professional experiences. The beautiful thing about ACE
Leadership teachers is that they understand the philosophy behind mastery. They
understand that our students must demonstrate that they have learned the
intended skill and that they understand the intended concept to earn credit.
There is no confusion around this and that is a great place to be. However,
everyone is at a different place in terms of practicing mastery. This was the
first time the distinction had been made between belief and practice and a
demonstration of how sophisticated ACE Leadership teachers are. To believe and
understand something is different than being able to realize it in the
classroom with students. What I mean is that for an entire school to be fully
interdisciplinary, project driven and all learning assessed based on mastery,
everyone has to be on the same page and have the same expectations for the
practice of mastery.
The practice of mastery at ACE Leadership is not described
in a flow chart. There is no one answer, one strategy for being successful at
helping students demonstrate that they have mastered something. This practice
is much more nuanced than that. Don’t expect outline of a bunch of concrete
best practices. That’s not going to happen and this is the way it should be. If
we deeply understand what we mean by mastery, then we can apply it to each
student as an individual learner. ACE Leadership teachers are professionals and
they know their content as well as their learners. Acknowledging this fact and
allowing the teachers to work together to determine how to practice mastery is the best practice.
With that said, let me describe what I am talking about.
There are times when a student is working on an outcome like being able to
graph coordinates using an equation that she generated for example. She has produced
evidence that she can do it, but the project teacher adds another opportunity
to demonstrate mastery through an Exit Slip at the end of a project block. It
is not that the teacher distrusts the students’ work rather she wants to ensure
that the skill has been learned beyond the initial learning experiences. This need
could have resulted from observing the student struggling to produce all pieces
of evidence or that the initial evidence was not clearly and consistently
meeting expectations. I trust that the teacher can speak to the learning of the
student and she will determine how much evidence is needed in general but also
personalize that evidence for students when needed. The situation could have
gone the other way and after one piece of evidence the teacher determined that
the student was ready to move onto the next skill. The important part to
remember when practicing mastery in the classroom is that mastery is not about seat time.
On that day and still today my answer is this: You are
professionals and you know your content. You are not alone in determining the
expectation of mastery and mastery is not about seat time.
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