Posts published in “Day: August 18, 2023”

Amid all the complaints from parents and activists about what they don’t like in public schools, are there ways forward to deal with the constant uproar and simply improve public education? Are there ways to break through the constant telling, accusations and self-destruction?

Sure. And for one good example of useful general direction, look to the Bonneville School District at Idaho Falls, which is in the middle of trying “mastery based teaching.”

Before you dismiss this as just another education fad - and we’ve seen a river of those over the decades - take a look at what the premise of this one entails, and how it might plug into our difficulties in building sound relationships between school districts and many of their constituents. It could be called revolutionary, gut-level basic, intuitively sensible, and even may stand a chance of bringing educators and parents into closer alignment.

Here is how another state (Connecticut) describes the idea: “With mastery-based learning, all students must demonstrate what they have learned before moving on. Before students can pass a course, move on to the next grade level, or graduate, they must demonstrate that they have mastered the skills and knowledge they were expected to learn. If students fail to meet learning expectations, they are given more support and instruction from teachers, more time to learn and practice, and more opportunities to demonstrate progress.”

From that simple premise a lot of ideas become implicit. For one thing, a high school diploma (for example) would mean more: To obtain one, you have to demonstrate certain abilities and understanding. For another, a lot of work with individual students, who have widely varied ways of learning, is implicit. The traditional default mass-production mode of teaching, in which all students are presumed to learn the same way and at the same rate, leaves many under-educated and others frustrated; closer attention to actual mastery of skills and ideas (emphatically not the same thing as teaching to the test) could do a lot more good. True, lots of good teachers do provide individual help for many students, but the system as a whole isn’t well set up for it on a large scale.

As the Connecticut description put it: “Even though learning expectations and evaluation criteria are consistent, teachers can be given more flexibility in how they teach and students can be given more choice in how they learn. For example, teachers don’t need to use the same textbooks, assignments, and tests - as long as their students learn what they need to learn, teachers can develop new and more creative ways to teach.”

And that part of where parents become an essential part of the equation.

But parents and communities also can get into the ground level of teaching designs under this approach, because the first step in looking at a mastery approach should involve deciding what exactly students should be expected to master, and what other options should be offered. Were we to plan education effectively, we might start by deciding more clearly what the end result should look like. Developing those kinds of expectations are where parental - and community - involvement makes the most sense.

The mastery approach can be developed in a variety of ways, and the Bonneville district is finding its own with initial emphasis on reading and writing. A report in the Idaho Ed News quoted Superintendent Scott  Woolstenhulme: “If your time is fixed, your learning is variable. If you want your learning to be fixed, then you need to have variable time. This means some kids are going to take longer to learn certain things and some are going to learn them more quickly, which is the whole point behind mastery-based learning.”

This approach holds out the promise of producing better educated cohorts of students while bringing parents and communities more fully into the process, and taking better advantage of the skills teachers bring to the table.

Don’t say there aren’t any solutions out there for our public schools. Keep a watch on places like Bonneville. They may surprise you.