Personalized Mastery-Based Learning: If Not Now, When?
Once in a Lifetime Opportunity to Disrupt the Traditional Classroom Model of Teaching and Learning
In response to the effects of the recent pandemic, many schools are preparing to open using a hybrid learning model, where students split their instructional time between home (online) and school. This moment affords educators a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make systemic and pedagogic changes that would otherwise have taken years to implement.
Prior to COVID-19, schools looked very similar to how they did 100 years ago. In the traditional model of education, students are grouped by age and move through the grades and subjects as a cohort. The teacher sets the pace and students move together in lockstep, with all students being simultaneously assessed using a standardized summative assessment - whether a student is ready or not.
In this model, often one-third of students find the pace is too fast and are lost. They are “passed forward” with foundational gaps in their learning creating even bigger, compounding issues in the future. Another 30% find the pace is too slow and engagement levels are low, and for only the final third the instruction is appropriately paced to their skills.
Simply substituting Zoom meetings for live classroom instruction and the like is not a viable solution for our students, who are already disadvantaged by our resistance to change compounded by a society-changing pandemic. Without adapting the underpinning instructional model, and changing the way students learn and are assessed, the problems that have long been perpetrated by a system very slow to change will only be exacerbated.
Personalized Mastery-Based Learning: A Solution for the Moment
Personalized mastery-based learning is an evidence-based educational approach made for this moment. Benjamin Bloom and his disciples demonstrated that learning models that incorporate personalized, mastery-based and blended learning improve student engagement, accelerate learning, and increase retention. The methodology gives students agency in how and what they learn and helps them engage in their learning while building confidence as they self-advocate for their claims of competency. The approach naturally develops the skills dispositions our youth need for college, career, and lifelong learning.
The mastery-based model instills a “growth mindset”. Carol Dweck, author of “Mindset”, proposes that through mastery-based learning we can grow our brain's capacity to learn and solve problems. The student experience models lifelong learning mindsets. Students have voice and choice while they are instructionally guided but also taking ownership in their mastery of competencies that are required in a manner suited to their learning styles. Learners develop flexibility, critical thinking skills, and grit they will need to thrive in a changing world.
If Not Now, When?
Prior to COVID-19, only 10% of teachers had ever experienced an online learning environment, let alone taught in one. Overnight, 100% of teachers were expected to teach online. The spread of abilities that existed in classrooms prior to the pandemic are now amplified: the case for a personalized mastery-based learning model has never been more urgent for this entire cohort of students.
The movement to personalized competency-based learning was already underway but faced institutional resistance to change. However, the pandemic thrust change upon all of us and we cannot go backward. Our students need us to now make the kinds of reforms that represent the only way forward for a digitally literate generation of young people who will face unprecedented challenges.
Learning Management System vs. Mastery Learning Platform
When evaluating a platform first consider the instructional model you wish to support. Frame your evaluation on how well the platform supports your instructional goals.
Legacy learning management systems like Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard and Schoology are designed and optimized to make the “factory model” of learning evermore efficient. They are teacher-centric with tools, workflows, and capabilities that streamline the one-size-fits-all approach. The legacy platforms that are designed for group management and don’t adapt well to a student-centric personalized approach.
If you are implementing a personalized and competency-based learning program and considering a new platform, ask yourself these questions:
What is the instructional model that the LMS supports?
Does the learning model promote student agency and a growth mindset?
Are students responsible and accountable for their own learning?
Can students make assertions about their mastery and back it up with evidence and artifact?
How does it support differentiated instruction?
Can you blend instructional modalities and support innovative teaching models including project-based learning, peer-based learning, and workplace-based learning?
How responsive can teachers be to provide feedback, interventions and SEL?
Can teachers easily create what they need and share what they create with their peers?
Core Learning Exchange - A True Mastery Learning Platform
The Core-LX Platform is a “Mastery Learning Platform” designed from the ground up to support a student-centric, blended, personalized competency-based instructional model. In comparison to legacy learning management systems that are optimized to help teachers support the prevalent one-size-fits-all factory instructional model, Core-LX is optimized to support a personalized learning experience.
Students earn badges and advance when they demonstrate mastery and produce evidence of learning. To earn a badge, students work through playlists of blended learning activities remixed from our curriculum library or created by teachers using the Core-LX professional authoring tools. Embedded into the playlists are formative assessments that can include a variety of assessment modalities including quizzes, projects, creation of work products, and performance tasks.
As students work through the playlists, the teachers monitor real-time progress and can direct the learners to accelerate with extension opportunities, or provide additional support. Because each learning activity and each assessment item is tagged with standards alignment metadata, the system can track which standards are covered, how and when each student has mastered a requirement, and where gaps still exist.
The Core-LX platform incorporates the Core Collection, an open marketplace for natively digital modular standards-aligned curriculum. Teachers have the flexibility to remix the content to meet individual student needs. The content is sourced from Open Educational Resources and commercial providers with over 40,000 learning activities. Core Collection includes content from top OER providers including Khan Academy, CK-12 digital textbooks, and many more.
Each student can have a personalized set of learning goals matched to diagnosed needs and preferences. This is accomplished by assigning a student with a unique profile of competency badges. Even within the same “course”, some students will need supplemental support to help them be successful, while others will have specific preferences and personal goals. In mastery-based learning, students have voice and choice in the learning targets they work on, and have a transparent understanding of what the performance expectations are.
In Core-LX teachers have a “My PD” portal where they can register for and participate in professional development. Teachers learn in the same mastery-based model that they will use with their students. As teachers master skills in their PD programs, their accomplishments are documented in their comprehensive learner record.
Many organizations have a sunk cost in their traditional LMS. In this case, Core-LX can be integrated with SIS and other LMS systems using a single sign or providing a link from the legacy systems to the Core-LX platform, enabling a seamless transition to personalized competency-based learning.
Leapfrog to Personalized Mastery Learning
The only way to address the widening gap in student performance exacerbated by COVID-19 is to meet each student where they are with a mastery-based personalized learning experience. But the tools and platforms that are in place are designed to support the one-size-fits-all model and will strain and falter as they are perverted to do something they never were intended to do: support a personalized learning model.
If your district is ready to leapfrog to a more equitable and sustainable learning model, consider personalized mastery-based learning and the Core-LX platform.
For more information about Core-LX, go to https://core-lx.com or info@core-lx.com
