Competency-based learning progression

By: Meg Stentz

At the Competency Collaborative, we are always saying we have 75 schools who do competency 75 ways. And that’s partially true! Each school infuses their own values into their competency system, with some prioritizing shared language and others prioritizing specificity of learning. And it used to be that the trajectory for our schools was fairly similar…they’d develop outcomes, then rubrics, formalizing shared language around the way, and eventually they’d tackle grading and student reflection along the way. The pandemic shook that model up! We saw schools move immediately to competency-based grading. Because we have such strong models of what school wide outcomes look like, we saw schools adapt and adopt school wide competencies from the outset.

So in our 8th year of work, we asked our practitioners to reflect on their journeys so far. Here’s what they had to say about the shifts they made, the questions they had, and the sticking points along the way.

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What about YOUR competency based journey? What shifts have you made? What questions do you have? What sticking points did you encounter?

CC Summer Institute Day 1: Reigniting Students’ Purpose for Learning

By Deb Gordon & Meg Stentz

Competency Collaborative’s annual capacity-building Summer Institute kicked off in July. More than 100 NYC educators gathered together for three days to dig deep into the theme of Reigniting Student Motivation. In case you missed it, check out some of the big themes from each day. 

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CC Summer Institute Day 1: Reigniting Students’ Purpose for Learning 

We’ve heard it all year: after returning from remote learning, students’ are disengaged in traditional school. The reasons are myriad, and as adults we’ve felt them too. Some mornings it’s overwhelming just to put on hard pants again. Leaving the house sometimes still feels tinged with danger: so many germs on the train! And after two+ years of living under the stress of Covid, with friends and family falling sick at regular intervals, the day in and out of work can seem less important. We all know this, and have felt it deeply. And so, with the summer to regroup, again, what do we do this year to reignite students’ purpose for learning? 

First, a check in with what we know motivates us and what motivates students. 

Here’s our community’s sense of what motivates them, and what motivates their students: 

A poll from CC Summer Institute shows what motivates “you” (participants) to learn, vs. on the right, what motivates your students to learn.

FUN jumps out right away! Fun! Our community lifted up how opposed that feels to the pressure many are feeling to make up for the “learning loss” that happened during remote learning. Of course, the narrative of learning loss perpetuates the myth that students did not learn during the pandemic, it undermines their resilience and their stamina. It devalues the time teachers spent checking in on the wellbeing of their students, sometimes in favor of a prescribed curriculum. It erases the meaningful and engaging lessons teachers were still able to prepare across space and time. But anyway. Our community calls here for a return to fun! 

Second, let’s remind ourselves what the research says supports students’ purpose for learning.

First and foremost, students value learning when the learning is relevant to them and their lives! It seems obvious, and yet, how often do we teach lessons because they’re in the scope and sequence, but we ourselves find them boring? It’s not easy to push back against curriculum and traditions of schooling, but it’s what our students need from us. They need and deserve education that matters deeply to them, and supports them in crafting the life they want to lead. 

Young people come to us having already received abundant messages—both implicit and explicit—about who belongs in school and for whom education is relevant. Our job is to create learning environments and experiences that invite all students’ complete selves, with their myriad racial, cultural, and personal identities. For many of our students, this involves deliberately counteracting negative messages they have received that undermine their sense of belonging, relevance, and connection to school. 

We must also remain mindful of the pandemic’s uneven impact on individual families and communities, particularly marginalized communities. Some of our students are facing difficulties that involve much more than a perspective shift, and finding relevance in what one is learning in school may pose extra challenges. Everyone is motivated to learn something; if students are not engaging in deep learning and motivation appears to be the issue—as opposed to external obstacles—we need to support them in finding a reason to show up fully. We need to find out what it takes for them to want to be here with us, excited to learn. 

With all this in mind, what would it look like, in a classroom, to put what we know about motivation and purpose for learning into practice? 

The Competency Collaborative recommends these strategies to reignite students’ purpose for learning. 

1. Learning outcomes reflect relevant, transferable skills. 

Durable, transferable outcomes are inherently more motivating to students. It’s much more clear to a young person how they might use the skill of “Argue” in their real life than the skill  of CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.6-8.1.A: Introduce claim(s) about a topic or issue, acknowledge and distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and organize the reasons and evidence logically.

2. Students see themselves in the curriculum. 

How can students understand the utility of the curriculum in their lives and how can curriculum support students’ understanding of their own racial, cultural, and other intersecting personal identities? What would it mean for students to be building the skills they want to create the future they envision for themselves? For one poignant example, check out this blog post about Brooklyn International High School’s Theater of the Oppressed. 

3. Students engage in authentic tasks. 

Applying knowledge and skills to real-world questions sparks curiosity and creativity. And when projects are oriented towards community—both in how students work together as a learning community as well as by addressing what matters in their broader communities, it fosters and leverages students’ desire to connect and make a difference. 

It is heartwarming to know humans are most motivated when our learning is connected to a purpose larger than ourselves, one that contributes to community, however that is defined by the learner. We want to know that what we are learning is relevant and useful—both in our lives and the lives of others. And we want learning to be fun! These, after all, are the reasons we entered into education, because we care about young people and about creating a more just and loving world. When we remember the passion in ourselves and tap into the passion and joy in our students, they are inspired to show up fully and be here with us, learning together.                

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Want to know more about student motivation? Check out What we know about Purpose and Relevance, from the Student Experience Research Network.

Ask CC: How do we grade language learners in english class?

What does equitable grading look like for language learners? How do we make sure we’re not penalizing students whose English is not yet proficient? What might a culturally responsive competency based approach be?

These are the questions that one devoted educator wrote to us with recently. We have versions of this conversation all the time, so wanted to share it here.

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Hi, Competency Collaborative,

I hope you’re doing well! I’m reaching out because I know you work closely with schools who serve multi-language learners (MLLs). My school is building towards our first year of competency-based education (CBE) next year, and many of our BIG questions come from the ELA department, especially regarding our MLL students. We are worried about how assessing MLL students in ELA will work. Beyond providing support and accommodations, how does CBE support MLL students? 

What have you learned from other schools with large MLL populations? 

~Love our language learners

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Hi, love our language learners, 

What I’m hearing is that you want to avoid the phenomenon so common in schooling, where language learners are graded on conventions (spelling, grammar, vocab, even fluency) at every turn. So important. There are two ways we can use CBE to push back against this. As we at CC always say, competency-based learning isn’t inherently culturally responsive; it’s up to use to make it that way. Here’s where you might start…

Student & teacher work together at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria, a CC Living Lab school.

 Clearly articulated learning outcomes. Part of the work of competency learning is to separate out the various skills that students need in each subject, of which conventions is just one! Here's an example of English outcomes from one beloved CC International school: 

E.1 Determine the focus
E.2 Thesis Statement
E.3 Organize ideas
E.4 Analyze & Support
E.5 Voice
E.6 Connections
E.7 Conventions
E.8 Presentation
E.9 Speak/listen

 A MLL student might have to work hard at E.7 Conventions at first, but making connections is a skill that can be practiced in any language. 

 A first step for your ELA department would be to have their learning outcomes clearly defined, that’s the CBE piece, and then pay attention to how those outcomes might play out for various students, that’s the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining piece. When it comes to language learners, if conventions or fluency are showing up in every outcome, it's likely those outcomes are still measuring something that looks more like compliance and less like deeper thinking. The sample outcomes above are largely accessible to language learners! They capture the deeper goals of ELA, and give space to give actionable feedback to students who are learning English.

 Focused feedback & assessment. Once your ELA department has done the work of creating learning outcomes, it’s still important to pay attention to how they’re being assessed. It would be possible to assess any of these outcomes in ways that require reading and writing fluency, which is conflating two things, right? If I'm trying to understand a student's ability to present a viewpoint / thesis statement (E.2 in beloved CC school’s outcomes) that doesn't require the student to speak or write in English. That could easily be assessed through a conversation in the student's native language. 

 If the outcome of focus is creating a thesis statement, the feedback and assessment should focus on that learning outcome. This narrows both the student’s and teacher’s focus, so that the feedback becomes more meaningful and actionable. (This is also key when you start thinking about reassessment – having a clear focus makes retakes and revisions more manageable!) This intentionality focuses instruction, and helps students see their growth. There’s something here, too, about pushing back against perfectionism. This approach leaves room for work to shine in one area, and need improvement in another. That duality creates more human learning environments, I think. 

While we’re talking about it, a few other big ideas to hold in mind in this conversation about language learners in ELA. 

Smiling students at Flushing International HS, a CC Living Lab School.

It might be useful to track English skills for MLLs without grading them.  I suspect that a student who is still learning English is having that show up already in their grades in other places. The goal is to walk the balance of not grading students for factors beyond their control, and giving students meaningful feedback about their areas of strength and places for improvement. 

In this conversation, as you're likely aware, I think it's crucially important to be really wary of the history of schooling for assimilation. What does it mean to say that English is required to do well in a course? That a student who is still learning English, through no fault of their own, cannot succeed? What history is that aligning with? What does that say about what is valued in a graduate? What skills and knowledge of that child are being overlooked in favor of the hyper focus on language? 

This could be a place where a bit of a data audit is useful, too, if your grading system allows for data to be made sense of in that way (by outcome, by demographic).  

Thanks for taking up these questions with such care, and for seeking the answers in community. 

In solidarity, 
Competency Collaborative

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What would you add to this conversation? What questions should educators consider to guide decisions like this one?

Culturally Responsive Performance Task: Power, Identity & Equity on Stage

By Meg Stentz, Competency Collaborative Associate Director

What can CRSE look like in daily instruction? Where is CRSE in your list of priorities, with already demanding pacing calendars, and surges of Covid that drive up student and staff absences? Education feels like a game of beat the clock, and it’s all too easy to let the most important, but least mandated, pieces fall away. Here’s one example of centering the most important pieces of students’ lives – identity, power, community, while instilling the skills and criticality that will support young people in their lives. 

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Last month I was invited to a student performance at Brooklyn International High School (BIHS), a Competency Collaborative Living Lab school. BIHS, like all Internationals Network schools, serves recently arrived immigrants. Students at BIHS come from many countries, with varying levels of English and varied experience with attending school in their origin countries. Throughout their time at BIHS, they learn not only the entire high school curriculum, but the English language as well. 

Student actors depict a teacher discriminating against an undocumented student in class.

As a member school in the Internationals Network, BIHS understands that traditional schooling was not designed to meet the needs of their students. They take seriously the task of meeting these young people where they are. The curriculum at BIHS is interdisciplinary and project-based. Students learn by doing – in many modalities, in every class. 

The performance I was invited to was partway through a unit by awesome educators Shahzia & Sheila focusing on PIE: Power, Identity, Equity. Students performed a Theater of the Oppressed – a performance model created by Augusto Boal where actors do a brief scene, centered around oppression, and then members of the audience have the opportunity to tap-in as one of the characters and to perform the scene differently. The goal is to come to a different, powerful, equitable resolution. The scenes focused on immmigration, police brutality, gentrification, workers’ rights, and racism – often scenes involved threads of several of these issues, and most often the protagonist was undocumented.

As an audience member, not only was I tasked with brainstorming how the scene could go differently, and the option to bring that difference to life, but these savvy BIHS teachers asked audience members to take notes: What injustices did we see? What could the protagonist do differently? What connections do we have to the theme? Importantly, responses from the audience –students, teachers, community members – went to the group who performed the scene. 

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“Life of an Undocumented Immigrant

Jose and his family are planning to come to the US. After their arrival Jose and his wife Maria start to search for a house. Their daughter is trying to adapt to the American style since she knew English since she was in Mexico. The landlord enters their home and trouble begins. ”

— -BIHS students' skit synopsis

“The Woes of Gentrification

A brother and sister are talking outside of the building where they live and run a coffee shop. They learn they are being pushed out because of the rent, and then they learn a Starbucks is moving next door.”

— BIHS students' skit synopsis

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Our notes became part of the research for a paper they were writing on their PIE topic. 

There’s so much to love about that simple move – 

• Of course, it keeps the students in the audience engaged. It asks them to do their own critical thinking, and problem solving. It ups the cognitive load in what could have been a passive activity. 

• Shifting the performance to the middle of the unit, rather than the end, makes this an assessment for learning, rather than of learning. The performance was always going to have the awesome benefit of being an authentic product for a real audience, but its placement in the unit transforms it into really meaningful active practice, real skill building. From a competency perspective, that’s brilliant.

• My favorite way this changes the game, though? By making the audience’s notes an artifact for informing research papers, it posits community members and classmates as experts in their own lived experience. It democratizes knowledge, and reifies the expertise of those closest to the issues of the PIE unit. It places community experience side by side with other ways of knowing, and validates both.

Centering students’ knowing 

What does it look like to center that idea – that students are the experts, that their knowledge matters – in every classroom? That’s the work of CRSE. 

CRSE scholarship has different ways of talking about valuing students’ and families’ ways of knowing. It’s useful to me to pair the terms from the literature with the curricular example above from BIHS. 

Student actors portray the fallout of discrimination: a student in distress.

• Funds of knowledge. The idea behind funds of knowledge comes from Lev Vygotsky’s ideas about child development. He taught education the power of activating prior knowledge, positing that an alignment with students’ lives outside of school would support student learning. Of course, this has implications for minoritized learners. Luis Moll prompts educators to acknowledge and tap into the existing funds of knowledge for the students in their classrooms, particularly when there is a cultural mismatch between students and teacher or curriculum. Learn more about  leveraging funds of knowledge here.

• Community cultural wealth. Researchers steeped in whiteness have long overlooked the assets of minoritized communities, with research that focuses on disparities in wealth and narrowly defined cultural capital. Dr. Tara Yosso’s model of community cultural wealth provides a holistic look at the assets that families of color possess. She defines other forms of capital, beyond money, that include: aspirational capital, familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, resistant capital, linguistic capital, and cultural capital. Students and families of color contribute to and draw upon each of these forms of capital in navigating their educational experiences. Learn more about each type of capital here. 

Theater of the Oppressed powerfully taps into both students’ funds of knowledge, and the community cultural wealth of the audience.  Students bring what they know about living as immigrants, living in neighborhoods that are gentrifying, into the classroom with them and use it to write and perform scenes about power, identity, and equity. At the same time, the audience’s community cultural wealth is valued when they’re called upon to lift up solutions to the problems of the protagonist. In the performances where audience members tapped in students flexed their navigational capital, refusing to open their doors to ICE without a warrant present. They leaned into familial capital, calling for help from family members rather than the police when faced with situations of abuse. They used resistant capital to stand up to parents and teachers who had narrow ideas of what DACA-protected immigrants could be. 

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Shahzia (left) & Sheila (right)

Gigantic thank you to the students and staff of Brooklyn International HS, for the warm welcome, for sharing so much of your brilliance with those around you, and for grounding all your work in a love for community. In particular, gratitude to Shahzia Pirani-Mellstrom and Sheila Aminmadani, the BIHS educators who facilitated this event. Shahzia and Sheila support team Be the Change, the senior class, at Brooklyn International HS. They each teach PIE (Power, Identity, Equity), a humanities class that combines English and Social Studies.

Explore the concepts of funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth in community at your school. NYU MetroCenter’s NYC Culturally Responsive Working Group offers this brilliant resource: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/ejroc/session-6-crse-and-relationships-families-and-communities. This comes from a 10-session resource for schools looking to grow their Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education practices. Explore the entire guide here.

Introducing Competency Collaborative

We recently changed our name to Competency Collaborative from Mastery Collaborative.

Why the name change? 

At its heart, our community’s work is about disrupting harmful power dynamics in school. We seek collectively to change spaces and systems of oppression to those of joy, freedom, love and liberation. We are moving away from the term mastery because of its connotation of dominance, and the connection of the word “master” to the history of enslavement. 

Shifting our language is a journey. Please join us! We suggest talking about competency-based education, rather than mastery-based education. We are using words such as proficiency and competency to replace the word mastery—and more broadly reflecting always about language and other messaging and substance that can make a space more or less liberatory.

Shifting our domain, emails, Twitter, etc. is also a journey! We are going at the pace of our own capacity and appreciate your grace through the transition.

How do we reduce stress on students? Students weigh in.

For two days last month, MC Youth Advisors gathered together with adult allies from their schools to envision what powerful youth/adult partnership could look like. MC Youth Advisors work with members of their school’s MC team to support and shape one piece of the MC team’s work. 

Students from South Bronx Academy of Applied Media

This is our second year having MC youth advisors. One big takeaway from last year? Adults always ask how students are, but then they don’t follow up so it seems like they don’t care. They might ask for students’ opinions, but then nothing really changes. It seems like adults are listening, but they never quite hear. 

One big takeaway from last year? Adults always ask how students are, but then they don’t follow up so it seems like they don’t care.

We adults have to do better at showing our students we hear them! We have to follow up, share the whole picture from our perspective, and put our heads together to do better by our young people. 

At our first MCYA huddle of the year, one adult practiced seeking feedback from the young people.

One adult asked, how can we reduce stress for young people, especially in courses that culminate in Regents exams? Here’s the advice students gave her…

Be empathetic! 

K: Students know it’s important. Be understanding, and don’t make it an argument. 

Students from Urban Assembly School of Math & Science for Young Women

D: Teachers always say they understand we're stressed out, but then they give us a big assignment. I also know that teachers communicate with each other, but it's still that we get a big packet of work in one class and a big test in another. 

J: Not mentioning the regents test so much! That would kind of make it seem like less of a big deal.

Slow down.

E: Try going at a slower pace, and if you can't do that you need to have catch up days. 

J: I would say to give time for breaks in between lessons. I believe that students will learn best if they have a time to unload all of that pressure. I also think that teachers should try to be more understanding.

A: Try to pace the lessons where they don’t feel overwhelmed. Try group work more so that the minds of the kids can also be activley running, so that is building them up to be ready for more.

Most importantly, create a safe space.

C: Make the class a safe space to ask questions, instead of somewhere where they have to pretend they get it all. Don't make it more pressure. This is a process, and no one has it all down. Remind the kids constantly that we're all in this together, and we have plenty of time. 

D: Let kids ask questions, even if it's little ones, to show that it's okay to ask questions. 

Z: It depends on the relationship students and teachers have. I'm in a Regents class now, and the work they give us is hard, but the more comfortable you get with the teacher the easier it is to ask questions. 

There you have it, grown ups. The young people have told us what they need — let’s keep working to make it happen, and to show them we hear them, too.

Critical Consciousness in Elementary School

The Mastery Collaborative community grounds our understand of Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings three pillars of Cultural Responsive-Sustaining Education, which she called Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Dr. GLB tells us that students must develop the socio-political consciousness to challenge the status quo.

What does critical consciousness look like in Elementary School? One example is this now-famous journal entry from King, a Chicago 8-year-old—and his reaction to his teacher's commentary. Listen as Master Teacher and MC CRSE Mentor Lonice Eversley talks us through the missed (by his teacher) and realized (by King) opportunities in this exchange.

• 10 minute video on critical consciousness in Elementary

• Full hour-long session on critical consciousness

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Want more of Lonice’s wisdom? Check out her other blog posts:

How do I even do this? Surviving the Transition to Online Teaching

Talking about Race & Mastery with Lonice.

Lonice Eversley is a master teacher at Careers in Sports High School in the South Bronx, NYC. She’s an MC mentor in CRSE.

CRSE: Recasting Critical Consciousness as The Turn Up

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, grandmother of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, now Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CRSE) laid out three pillars of responsive education:

1. Students must experience academic success

2. Students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence. 

3. Students must develop a critical (aka sociopolitical) consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order. 

In a recent professional learning session, master-teacher Lonice Eversley reframes Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings’ idea of critical consciousness as The Turn Up. This recasting is itself culturally responsive: Lonice’s idea to ground theory in the moment and in culture helps us make connections and deepen our understanding of Dr. GLB’s work.

Below, find an excerpt of Lonice’s full session on Critical Consciousness as The Turn Up, or access the video here.

Interested in the rest of the session? Check out out our brand new professional learning archive.

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If you, like us, can’t get enough of Lonice check out her other blog posts:

How do I even do this? Surviving the Transition to Online Teaching

Talking about Race & Mastery with Lonice.

Lonice Eversley is a master teacher at Careers in Sports High School in the South Bronx, NYC. She’s an MC mentor in CRSE.

Zooming Towards Equity: Tips for Building Responsive Communities

by Magen Rodriguez

One year into blended and remote online learning, one teacher at Brooklyn Collaborative HS, an MC school, offers some lessons learned and her own ideas for creating a sense of community online. Building connections with students is one piece of culturally responsive-sustaining education, or CRSE. Interested in learning more about how CRSE & mastery go together? Check out our previous blog. If you’re ready to build your CRSE expertise further, check out MC’s CRSE Growth Plan.

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The title is a catchy oxymoron. We all want to zoom toward equity and get it right but it takes time, work, and trials. Becoming an equitable practitioner is a conscious choice. Currently, teacher training programs and teacher performance standards don’t require educators to be equitable! Being equitable requires intentional teaching moves to be culturally responsive. When building responsive communities in the age of virtual teaching, it is a teacher’s goal to bridge the gaps of understanding, communication, and normalcy even when the classroom is on a screen. When the world of virtual instruction swept the globe, Zoom became the platform of choice for many schools, districts, and institutions. Now, as educators have grown fairly confident with digital tools, blue-light blocking glasses, profile pictures, and quick reaction clicks, there is a call for equitable practices on Zoom. Below you will find some ideas you can try with your students as you develop more conscious practices:

“Which character do you identify with today & why?”

1. Find and use meme check-in grids. The meme gods have lent their special powers of humor to teaching as meme grids are being designed and arranged into ranking grids of emotions and connections. These super-quick grids can grace your slide decks as students join your classes and/or you take attendance. Layer the activity with the chat by having kids explain why they chose that image. Take it one step further and have kids share out loud. Building levels of comfort and offering kids the space to share is powerful. It also builds camaraderie through moments of storytelling. Oh, and don’t forget, adults should be joining in too! A former supervisor once taught me -- “I do. We do. You do.” This starts with sharing our own feelings, an important way to be consciously human with one another. Remember to help students share the air space so everyone can get to know one another more.
   

2. Play games WITH students. Kahoot! and Bamboozle are on fire--they offer so many fun interactive games! If you have paraprofessionals, co-teachers, or other staff on your Zooms, ask them to engage with you and the students! Students love competition, and they particularly like to beat adults. Fellow educators and students alike can learn a ton with games facilitated by voices. The voices generate energy but also dialogue! Fellow educators and students alike can learn a ton with games. While you facilitate, take advantage of these moments to engage, talk to your students, and probe deeper. You may be shocked by what you can learn about students when you play games and offer them a place to connect. Using games regularly improves attendance rates as kids are enticed by socializing. Games are a powerful way to build community and comfort. Games don’t need to be just for fun. Build games into your assessment and skill-building practices. I can attest that kids love grammar in disguise.

3. Dig into cultural connections. On Zoom, or in the classroom,  we should acknowledge our students as complex beings with histories. Yes, even our youngest learners have histories! Culturally responsive learning is a conscious practice that goes alongside equity work. They both enhance teaching but also make our teaching more powerful and effective. (To dig deeper into culturally responsive teaching click here.) In a language class, you can ask the very basic, “What languages do you speak?” Challenge and develop your questioning skills by asking, “How does language impact your life?” Your teacher performance evals will love these big questions that incite critical thinking! In a math class, you may ask, “When will you use percentages in life?” To make more of a cultural connection, you may want to ask, “Where do you see percentages in your community?” For an English Language Arts class discussing narration, develop your questioning skills and ask, “How are you the protagonist in your own life’s story?” These questions should be designed to offer kids opportunities to reflect and storytell through their learning.

4. Be okay with student cameras off. I know this is a bit controversial because some schools and districts have implemented hardcore mandates that require students to have cameras on to participate in virtual instruction. Though the rationale is logical, it is also very traditional and rooted in authoritarian pedagogy. Thinking we have to see faces to know students are there is an issue. With Zoom-fatigue, it makes a teacher feel really awkward, but we need to focus on what’s best for young people. We have to literally break down our walls in the new age of teaching. The reasons students might not turn on their cameras are many and often valid. Ask yourself, how else can I engage and check-in with students regularly? You might prepare a series of social-emotional or content-specific polls for students to engage with throughout your lesson, or encourage voice and chat engagement with name wheels or waterfall responses.

5. Ask your students for feedback regularly. We are all learning. It is perfectly okay to tell and remind students that we are all in this life-altering experience together. To build humanity and empathy, it’s imperative we take time to check-in and learn from one another in the process. This can be through quick polls that ask to select the most or the least helpful activity of the week. It can be in a Google Form that asks kids to recommend new activities or platforms for learning. We, adults, need to admit that technology comes as second nature to some of our kids. Who better to learn from than the experts themselves? We should listen and adjust our curriculums for our ever-changing student populations and classrooms as we would in brick and mortar.

As virtual learning begins to seem a much longer haul than we all expected, it’s time to make choices and updates to our teaching practices. With so much time for reflection and so much revelation being cast in front of our globalizing eyes, equitable Zoom practices can enhance the experiences of both teaching and learning.

In the name of virtual collaboration, please share your tips and practices.

With a passion for education and focus on social change, Magen Rodriguez is a certified Language Teacher with the NYC Department of Education teaching grades K-12. She tirelessly seeks opportunities as a teacher-leader and advocate for equity and culturally responsive education.

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Looking for more on mindsets & motivation during remote learning? Check out MC’s guidance here:

• Blog: Mindsets & motivation during remote learning

• MC Citywide guidance: bit.ly/BelongingMindsetRemoteLearning

• Webinar: Mindsets & motivation during pandemic teaching

Teacher Tales: Making Mastery work in a Math Classroom

This post originally appeared in Competency Works on February 19th.

This is the third post in a four-part series by Ashley Ferrara about her ongoing journey to develop a mastery-based approach to teaching mathematics. She is a teacher and interim acting assistant principal at the Academy for Software Engineering in New York City, a member school of the Mastery Collaborative.

In parts 1 & 2, Ashley broke down her Algebra I curriculum into yearlong and unit-specific skills. But then, she had a lightbulb moment. Read on below…

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Welcome back! I hope the last post left you with more questions and a few aspirations for wherever you may be on your mastery journey. I was discussing my mastery skills and rubrics that aimed to cover every bit of content on the state exam. This resulted in incredibly long assessments! I no longer recommend that approach, but it illustrated a key step in my mastery-based mathematics journey. Now I want to discuss the lightbulb moment that happened next.

The Lightbulb: Function families are part of the repeating mathematics of my Algebra 1 curriculum.

This lightbulb did not come easily and was a result of a great deal of frustration around our curriculum and the anxiety over feeling like I needed to test everything. I had prided myself on being a teacher who did not teach to the test, yet I was staring at mastery skills and rubrics that were created out of a need to cover everything on the state exam. I was a walking contradiction, and it was exhausting.

Mastery is intended to help bring out the “big rocks” of a curriculum, and I had let my anxiety over “covering it all” turn some pebbles into a bunch of boulders. But mastery-based learning is a long game, full of iteration, and this was a pivotal point where my co-teacher Stephanie Iovan and I identified yet another repeating pattern in our curriculum—functions—and created the mastery skill and rubric below.

Let’s break down how Mastery Skill 11 can “absorb” many of my unit-specific (and function-specific) mastery skills. I’ll also address how I do not feel that this would harm my ability to know where students are at with function-specific content, because that was a big concern of mine when I made this leap.

First, I think the strongest part of the Mastery Skill 11 rubric was “I can identify the function family given a representation (table, graph, and/or scenario).” The major evolution here is that we combined the representations. Previously, we had treated each representation separately, both in the mastery rubric and in class (this was discussed in my second blog post). We taught each one explicitly, with its own tips and tricks, and then moved onto the next. Instead of teaching about linear functions holistically, one day we were asking students to memorize “how to figure out if a table is linear,” the next day they had to memorize “how to tell if a graph is exponential,” and so on. Additionally, I realized that my classwork, homework, and assessments were strongly signaling students about which function family to use, whereas the New York state exam rarely did.

In not teaching function families and their different representations interchangeably, I was not giving my students the opportunity to deeply understand the different function families. The unit title told students what type of function they needed to use for their answer. The state exam did not provide this luxury, and neither do most problems in real life.

Mastery Skill 11 allowed us to shift our instruction, because it allowed us to shift our assessments. Teachers often hear about “starting with the end in mind,” and my end (i.e., my mastery skills and rubrics) had always been function-family-specific. Naturally, my teaching had mirrored that. But Mastery Skill 11 enabled me to present a table, graph, or scenario and allow students the space to share what they were noticing and wondering, and to define functions based on commonalities they observed, rather than the ones I had pointed out to them. This was powerful.

Given that the lightbulb moment came mid-semester, the most significant shift happened in our mastery skills for the following school year, which you can see here: SY18-19 Year-Long Algebra Mastery Skills. Over the span of a few years, we had gone from 16 specific, standards-based, state-exam-driven skills down to six skills that were mostly year-long and showcased how mathematics repeats itself.

Here is an example of those year-long skills in action on an assessment. To boot, this assessment wasn’t created by me—it was taken directly from a prior state exam, and the mastery skills still worked! This was a huge moment for me, because for years I had felt like my state exam requirements were at odds with my mastery journey, yet here they had finally worked cohesively! Another massive bonus was the demise of the impossibly long assessments I had administered in the past.

Notably, two of our six mastery skills—the ones focused on quadratic equations and quadratic functions—were content-specific rather than year-long. My co-teacher and I made this decision because, even though our instruction and assessment had evolved, the high-stakes state exam had not gone away. In recent years, students had needed to get about 32 percent of the exam correct to earn a passing score, and questions about quadratic functions had comprised about a quarter of the exam content. As much as we embraced mastery-based learning, there were real-world considerations we needed to keep in mind to ensure success for our students. Moreover, we used many aspects of mastery-based learning in our work on quadratic functions, which we recognize as an important set of functions to understand regardless of the exam.

Your homework assignment from this blog post is to reflect on this question: ten years from now, what skill or skills do you want your students to still have from your class? We’ll dive into my own response to this question in my next, and final, blog post on strategies for mastery-based learning in a mathematics program.

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Ashley Ferrara is a founding faculty member at the Academy for Software Engineering (AFSE), a public high school in New York City. She joined AFSE nine years ago and was an Early Career Fellow and Master Teacher with Math for America for seven of those years. After earning a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Connecticut and working with a big-four accounting firm, she earned master’s degrees in mathematics education from Teachers College, Columbia University and educational leadership and administration from Bank Street College of Education. She also graduated from the New York City Department of Education’s Leaders in Education Apprenticeship Program (LEAP).

Infusing CRSE/Mastery practices into our work with young learners

By MC Director Joy Nolan

The Mastery Collaborative community of K-12 schools across NYC seek to improve academics and school culture by moving toward effective schoolwide use of youth-centered, culturally responsive-sustaining, mastery-based shifts. This is multi-dimensional work. Understandably, we are often asked: How does it look in real life? How can we get started and keep deepening our practice?

Today we share an updated resource that introduces the basics of youth-centered approaches, culturally responsive-sustaining education (CRSE), and mastery-based learning—and then invites readers to engage in a process of exploring, reflecting, brainstorming, and designing an action plan to effect meaningful change in your work with young people that can support equity and clarity, increase support, and decrease stress for everyone—yourself included.

Making these shifts is ongoing collaborative work that deepens and opens out over time, we have all found. We engage in this journey knowing it will influence and possibly transform our mindsets, practices, and resources; our identities and our interactions with others—the young people and families we serve, our colleagues in school and beyond. Engaging deeply in this work involves a commitment over time to our own evolution, to our collective evolution, and to the young people we work with, who are both our present and our future.

This updated CRSE/Mastery Growth Plan: http://bit.ly/MCGrowthPlan is offered as a way to take the pulse of work happening in your own school or your own practice—and to create a way forward that deepens your work. We offer this to educators who seek to support love of learning (students’, your own, your colleagues’, and others’), build young people’s cognitive capacities, celebrate their cultures and identities, attend to their sense of belonging, and live toward our shared values of racial equity and justice, anti-oppression, healthy school culture, and delight in learning.

This is a “live” document that will be updated over time as we increase our awareness and expertise about how we adults can join forces to better serve the young people in our public schools.

What’s included in this updated resource?

• Pages 3-7: Basics of CRSE and Mastery-based Learning. Engage here with short resources that introduce the MC community’s dual focuses: CRSE and mastery, and how they can combine to create youth-centered, dynamically responsive, more equitable learning spaces.

• Pages 8-11: CRSE/Mastery Growth Plan. Engage here in a process of exploring, reflecting, brainstorming, and designing an action plan.

• Page 12: More learning you may wish to pursue. 

Thanks for spending time on this important work! Please reach out along the way if we can be company on the pathway, or support your work in any way. You can reach us here: team@masterycollaborative.org.

Here’s our updated MC Growth Plan Resource. Let us know how you put it to use!

Mastery & CRSE: How do they go together?

By Meg Stentz

The MC Community supports mastery-based and culturally responsive-sustaining, student-centered practices. But which practices are mastery-based? Which are culturally responsive? Are some practices both? Why do schools need this dual lens? 

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Four years ago, our community took up these questions and came away with the crowd-sourced Equity Snapshot document. We identified ways mastery learning could be more equitable. Learning targets being shared with students from the outset is more fair than keeping them secret, but this mastery-move doesn’t address students’ cultural or sociopolitical selves. Mastery learning alone is not culturally responsive and sustaining. To fully support all students, to address racial, economic, and other inequities, educators and school teams need to build capacity in culturally responsive-sustaining practices (CRSE). 

What is CRSE? There is a rich body of scholarship around this, but the MC community grounds itself in the definition set out by Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings. Dr. Ladson-Billings lays out three components of what she called culturally relevant pedagogy:

1. Students must experience academic success

2. Students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence. 

3. Students must develop a critical (aka sociopolitical) consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order. 

Dr. Ladson-Billings came to those three pillars by studying teachers who were successful educators of students of color, particularly black students. She chose to center black students because the research usually does not, and because education that supports these students will support all students in becoming independent learners. Zaretta Hammond, who studies the neuroscience of what she calls culturally responsive teaching (CRT),  finds that recognizing and valuing students’ identities facilitates a safe, supportive environment that primes the brain for optimal learning. Leveraging students’ strengths, interests and backgrounds increases student engagement, which in turn leads to academic success. 

So what’s mastery got to do with it? Mastery is one support for students experiencing academic success. Focusing students’ attention on key skills and knowledge, giving them lots of active practice, and multiple opportunities  to demonstrate their learning allows all students to be successful. 

MC schools must build cultural competence and critical thinking into their mastery systems. What does that look like? Learning targets can and should address students’ ability to communicate across differences, to analyze a historical moment from a critical race lens, even to advocate for real world solutions. (For more specifics, check out these Social Justice Standards from Teaching Tolerance.) Many teachers also find that once they’ve identified the what of the course--the key skills and knowledge-- they can be more flexible with how students get there. For example, students can learn the skill of analyzing primary documents by studying the Haitain Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, or the Arab Spring. With a clear focus on the skill of analyzing documents, the teacher can use her professional judgement to teach content that supports students in understanding their own and other cultures.

At our most recent full-community gathering, we shared the above slide to guide some reflection.  We invite you to join us in thinking about your own mastery-based, culturally responsive practices.

What do you notice about the differences and shared attributes of mastery and CRSE? 
What classroom practices are you implementing now, and where do they fall on this diagram?
What would you add to any of these columns? 

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Huge thanks to the NYU MetroCenter team (Dr. Leah Q. Peoples, Pamela D’Andrea Martinez, and Lindsey Foster) for pushing our work and thinking about differences and similarities between mastery and CRSE. To read more about their work check out their twitter @metro_research @metronyu.