MTC Events

In the final Fall Friday session, we provided feedback on the Symposium and shared what we have in store for member engagement experiences in the coming months.

Periodically, we love to gather our college counselors for a review of all that's been happening as schools continue to send the Mastery Transcript®.

Edgar Montes led this session, designed specifically for college counseling staff, to learn about the pilot year of sending the Transcript, the resulting updates and changes that have been implemented- enhancing the experience of building the Transcript for students, and how Higher Education interacted with the Transcript this past year.

We invited member schools to join us and share their efforts toward tackling systems and structures that perpetuate racism and other injustices within their schools.

Many members are hard at work in creating the momentum and real change necessary to eradicate racial injustice from their school environments — and we eagerly highlighted these successes within mastery learning environments.

Conversations centered around these questions and more:
— How does a mastery learning philosophy and approach lead to greater equity and justice in schools?
— Who needs to be involved in the work?
— What strategies have been most effective at starting and sustaining real change?

How might online/hybrid learning support mastery and personalization in schools?

Global Online Academy (GOA) guided participants through a design process that showed them how to apply principles of high-quality online learning to support competency-based learning. Participants practiced strategies GOA has honed over a decade of designing passion-based, learner-centered online courses, strategies that support the three pillars of competency-based learning: agency, equity, and transfer.

To realize the aims of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, schools will need to move toward a competency-based system for developing 21st Century Skills, focusing on academic content outcomes, increasing the use of project-based learning, collecting evidence of authentic performance within and across disciplines, allowing greater personalization of learning, and developing a grading/transcript approach for documenting all of the above.

Drawing on two recent books, Leading Modern Learning: A Blueprint for Vision-Driven Schools, 2nd ed. (Solution Tree, 2019) and Designing Authentic Performance Tasks and Projects: Tools for Meaningful Learning and Assessment (ASCD, 2020), Jay McTighe presented ideas for creating the kind of aligned Curriculum and Assessment System called for by the MTC.

New school members who have joined us since June — and anyone else who wanted to convene and welcome them — were invited to connect on all things mastery, learn about member offerings, and network with like-minded peers committed to transforming learning for good.

Mastery learning provides a vehicle for equity and agency through education. HOW we implement it is the key.

At a time of extreme isolation, social distancing, and racial injustice, educators are achieving high levels of engagement and personalized learning with a teaching methodology that has been successfully implemented in hundreds of K12 classrooms, in person and now online.

This session, from Doris Korda of the Korda Institute of Teaching, highlighted core elements of this method that is rooted in cognitive science and results in student empowerment and deep learning of 21st century skills and academic content while students solve real problems for local organizations.

Grading and reporting systems do more than communicate each students' progress — they can also help create the culture in a school or even undermine the culture a school is trying to build.

In this session, led by Great Schools Partnership, we reviewed the eight central tenets that guide effective and equitable grading systems. We also explored sample policies and grading guidelines from schools that have used these tenets to successfully re-design the systems they use to score student work and report student grades in an effort to lead to more equitable outcomes.

As schools transition to using the Mastery Transcript®, these principles support schools in taking the initial steps towards a more cohesive and complete communication of student skills, knowledge, and dispositions.

It is our obligation as educators to prepare our students for a world full of complexity, uncertainty, and unrelenting and constantly evolving streams of information. In order to do this, we must build (or rebuild) our systems of learning to be flexible and transferable.

During this interactive workshop, led by Rinkema and Williams, members experienced what a standards-based lesson can feel like when the focus is on transferable skills. We modeled a simple system that not only transfers from content to content and throughout grade levels, but also sets up our learners for life outside of and after school.

In the initial shift to distance learning last spring, we heard educators across the country asking a similar question, “Now that students are at home, how do I know they are not googling the answers to the test?” Our response, which has only deepened as school remains virtual in many places across the country, is “perhaps you want to rethink the test...”

Defenses of learning are an incredibly meaningful way for teachers and students alike to know what students know. This is true when we have the joy of being in person with each other, and it is also true in a virtual context.

Envision Learning Partners asked participants to consider the conditions they currently face as educators, create design principles that can guide their thinking, and even brainstorm a version of a defense of learning they can try out right now.