Keeping Track in a Mastery Based Class

After wrestling for years with different systems for keeping track of student progress and interventions for struggling students within an asynchronous course, I finally arrived at a solution that works for me. Learning Management Systems that I have used don't appear to offer helpful internal structures for self paced learning, so I had to develop my own tools. Before diving into the nitty gritty, here's the gist: I set up a suggested pacing calendar that represented the slowest pace allowed in the course. Once the suggested pacing calendar was created, I made a Google tracking Spreadsheet with all of my students in one place, then used the Import Range formula to automatically update progress in personalized spreadsheets shared with students (and parents and/or tutors as needed.) Within these spreadsheets were predetermined check-in times which also served as triggers for contacting parents or advisors.

The course calendar was the slowest pace allowed in the course. Since the course was self-paced within reason, I no longer distinguished between class and homework. I only shared my expectation for what work needed to be completed by the end of each lesson. The standing homework was to complete whatever did not get done during class. I did not check where students were at the end of each class, unless they needed that support; I was only concerned about their progress at the end of each 8 day cycle (my school has an 8-day schedule) but I recognize a weekly or even shorter cycle might be more helpful for other schools, divisions, etc.

Suggested Pacing Calendar

Students were highly encouraged to show me their work after completing each assignment in order to prevent bottlenecks on Day 8 check-ins. Whenever a student satisfactorily completed an assignment, I updated the master copy of the pacing calendar spreadsheet shown below. Note: in the past, I asked students to update their own progress but found that the students who most needed this type of support were also unreliable in updating their own tracking sheet.

Here's some useful information to help read the spreadsheet:

• The left column has names of students in each section and the top row has the name of the assignments.
  
• The cells in green with an "X" indicates a student has completed the assignment, while cells highlighted red with "no" are missing or incomplete assignments. (Note: a slightly different system could have grades rather than the binary "Yes/No" system described above.)
• The black columns represent a check-in time at the end of every 8 day cycle. 
  

Master Spreadsheet

If a student did not have all green cells at the designated check in time, then on a second tab shown below, I colored the cell red to indicate "behind" the suggested pacing within the course. I blind copied students who were behind after each cycle with a warning email.  For students who I knew there were other significant issues, I sent individualized emails and copied their advisors. For students who were behind two cycles in a role, I sent home an Academic Notification to parents. In our school, these interventions are sent for a number of reasons, including failing an exam or missing several assignments. As the year progressed, I lifted these notification rules for some students; Eventually by the 4th quarter, I did not have to do the check-ins for most students.  

Cycle Check-in Tab

After using this system for a few weeks, students wanted me to post or share access to my master spreadsheet because it helped them keep track of their own progress. Since I did not want students to have access to their peer's data, I used the Import Range formula to link my master spreadsheet to individual student spreadsheets. Shown below is an example of one student's spreadsheet. By using the Import Range formula, I was able to copy a particular segment of my master spreadsheet and place it in an individual student's spreadsheet. Whenever I edited the master spreadsheet, the individual student's spreadsheet also updated. 

Individual Sheet

An added benefit of individualized spreadsheets was being able to share it with parents, advisor, learning specialist, and/or tutor. If I wanted certain students to skip an assignment, it was easy to update the spreadsheet with that information as well. If there were optional enrichment assignments or particular assignments for different groups of students, this system also accommodated for that as well.

Recent Course Updates and Future Plans

It’s been awhile since I wrote an article to my blog. I’m unsure if it was due to lack of inspiration, distraction, complacency or some combination of different reasons. My class has continued to evolve and I made important changes to the course. I hope to continue to improve my course and reflect about it online.

Since the last blog post, these are the changes I’ve made to the course:

• SBG improvements: science process standards that span between units as part of my SBG focus
• Flirtation with gamification: leader-board and other graphics showing the number of level 4s and mastery projects completed by individuals and classes.
• More voice & choice: robust offerings of optional units and mastery projects.
• Differentiation in content delivery: iBook that accompanies most of the videos.
• Lab report improvements: Less focus on formal lab report writing and greater emphasis on flexible formatted lab write ups.
• More flexible hot seats: students decided how to show they understood the standards rather than answering questions from me.  

Upcoming this year:

• Personalized learning continuum: as I continue to work on voice & choice and differentiation, there will be entire learning cycles that all students will be able to choose. Rather than only offering this choice to students who finish the course earlier than others, there will be two stopping points where all students will have to select a learning cycle from a menu of topics.
• Claim Evidence Reasoning: as I moved away from the traditional format of lab reports, I was proud to see improvements in overall quality, yet many students needed more direction. I will use the technique of Argument Driven Inquiry, also known as Claim-Evidence-Reasoning for lab assignments. As a department, we agreed to adopt Claim-Evidence-Reasoning for lab reports because it helps to focus the students on the important elements of experiment analysis.

I am happy to report that the journey started as part of my shift to flipped learning has opened avenues for the course that I would not have predicted. These changes have led to a more engaging, rigorous and authentic experience for students.

Introducing Mastery Learning Cycles to the World: a post FlipCon14 presentation reflection

I had the privilege to present at FlipCon14 about Mastery Learning Cycles (MLC.) I originally discussed MLC in a blog post last year, where I described it as a "mashup" of Mastery learning and Explore-Flip-Apply (EFA) models. In my mind, this hybrid solves the problem of allowing students to learn at their own pace and still promoting thoughtful inquiry through structured learning cycles, rather than a checklist of activities to plow through. The packed classroom and dozens of virtual attendees who watched the live presentation online probably affirm other teachers have interest in mastery and/or EFA (session notes.)

The Flipped Learning Network "flipped" the conference, which meant I had to assign pre-work. Since most veteran flipped teachers are familiar with mastery learning, I assigned a blog post about EFA written by Ramsey Musallam (@ramusallam) and asked teachers to create a learning cycle. The plan was to spend some time during the presentation to front-load this model and the rest of the session having teachers share their cycles. Even though lack of homework completion prevented execution of this plan, I was able to offer a resource for those who wanted to extend their learning after the session. 

The feedback in person and on twitter were positive - perhaps even more so than I expected. I think I did a nice job engaging the audience at the beginning with a karate belt tying activity that demonstrated the power of flipped learning and mastery learning. 

Tweeted by +TheAlgebros 

I also had some opportunities for teachers to talk to each other with discussion prompts. My slides were clear, text-light but image-heavy and did a good job outlining the strengths and limitations of the mastery and EFA models. It may have taken too much time to get through EFA and mastery but the front loading helped outline the strengths of MLC. Perhaps the strongest part of the presentation was sharing my particular learning cycles with student work. I spoke in detail about the simple inheritance MLC by demonstrating how each activity offered a rich learning experience for students. I also talked briefly about the evolution learning cycle just to demonstrate some variation, like labs at the beginning during the Explore phase and differentiation during the Apply phase. 

If I do the presentation again, I'll hope to have some examples of MLC in different disciplines and utilize more opportunities for interaction like polls and more frequent turn & talk prompts. I'll make sure to repeat comments and questions from the live audience for the virtual attendees. I also need to remember to share the link to the feedback form. 

Now that the presentation is over, I have the summer to revise some of my MLCs and look forward to other teachers adopting and sharing their MLCs. 

Related articles

• Mastery Learning Cycles: a Mash Up of Mastery Learning & Explore-Flip-Apply