Alex Sosa is a 9th grade English Language Arts teacher at the Urban Assembly Maker Academy, a new mastery-based high school that opened last fall. UA Maker focuses on design thinking, and uses rubrics to ground a competency-based approach to teaching and learning. Alex spoke with us this summer about his experience as a teacher during the school’s first year.
Springpoint: Congratulations on finishing off the year! What was most challenging for you this year? What was most exciting?
Alex: One of the biggest opportunities I had this year was being able to build my own curriculum for my ELA classroom. I was able to experiment with what I thought would work best for students. I experimented with several different kinds of curricula and submit them to my administrators (Luke Bauer and Madelaine Hackett) for approval.
Of course, not having a set curriculum was one of my biggest challenges as well. I had to figure out what I wanted to teach, and how. It was difficult to figure out how to sequence content and skills, and how to fit all of those pieces together.
Going into the year, given that it was a brand new school, I wasn’t sure what to expect, though I knew the school’s needs would shift as the year went on. I expected a lot of change and adaptation. The school model did, in fact, change and adapt, and this created some challenges in the beginning, especially around how we norm instruction and what classroom management looked like across the school. But it did give us the ability to set the tone and expectations for our students from scratch, which was very helpful.
One of our biggest challenges, of course, was figuring out how to do mastery-based learning well. We were trying to balance mastery-based learning with project-based learning, and to figure out how to structure both of them.
Throughout the year, the most helpful thing was that our support and administrative staff were very responsive. They gave me some helpful space to reflect individually on how I was designing my classroom. They also trusted me enough to design great deliverables for my students.
Another asset has been a program called LightSail, which enables students to read on their iPads. It tracks a lot of data about how students read: their reading habits, their Lexile growth, their understanding of a text based on a short answer, their understanding of a text based on a multiple-choice answer, and it gives you multiple data points for each student. I was able to use the software to tailor small-group interventions and say, for example, “you guys are reading very slowly” or “you guys are really struggling with these kinds of texts. This is what we can do start supporting you.”
Springpoint: How did you prepare for this year? What training did you have before coming to UA Maker? How did that training compare to the support you received at UA Maker?
Alex: The biggest shift between my preparatory program and the work at UA Maker is the way we assess students. At UA Maker, it’s about starting to look at them in terms of more than just grades. I went to Boston College’s Donovan program, which is a very strong program—it gave me lots of the foundational and background information I needed as a teacher. But I wasn’t doing this innovative thinking around mastery.
In grad school I learned a lot about what it meant to create multiple entry points, what it meant to inspire students and motivate them to want to learn more and do better. At UA Maker, I learned to translate those skills into actionable feedback for kids. I learned to give students steps so they can start having agency over their learning. It’s about making them the ones doing the heavy lifting, rather than me. In some ways, I let go of responsibility and gave students just enough that they would build a sense of agency over the work.
To reconcile one with the other: in grad school I learned a lot about what it meant to create multiple entry points, what it meant to inspire students and motivate them to want to learn more and do better. At UA Maker, I learned to take those skills and translate them into actionable feedback for students. I learned to give them steps so they can start taking agency in their learning, and I learned how to let students be the ones doing the heavy lifting rather than me.
And even in the way they reflected on their revisions, they would say, “Oh, I didn’t do so well on standard W2-A or W2-B. This is what the standard says and this is how I need to work on it.” I was able to teach them to read rubrics in that sense. I think that’s something that I learned here at UA Maker. I don’t think that’s something I learned in my grad school program.
Springpoint: How did you give students the self-awareness to articulate their progress in that way? Was that something that came from you or from the school?
Alex: It’s a multi-step process. One of the things we did was demystify the grading system so students aren’t expecting a 95 or an 85. They’re expecting 1-5 rubrics. The second thing is, once students start learning the rubric and start reading it, students start to say, “Oh, I can actually understand this. It’s not so esoteric. I know what this means and I have means of accessing it.”
We are also really big on revision in this school. We encourage students to find ways they can iterate on their process. That way, in my classroom they’re making revisions, in the physics classroom they’re making revisions, in the “making” classroom they’re making revisions. It’s a school-wide thing. And our job as teachers is to give targeted feedback so the students can then say, “I see where my mistake is, and these are the steps that I take to correct it.”
I think we’re trying to push that into the forefront even more. It isn’t my job as a teacher to find where the correction was made, it’s your job as a student to tell me, “this is a correction I made, and these are the steps I took to get there, and this is why I deserve a higher score.” I think that’s something that’s happening school-wide, and I think we kind of organically got there.
Next year, I think the push is going to be to make it much more intentional. We’re aiming for more structure so students are doing this in a manner that isn’t just about wanting a higher score, but is actually pushing further reflection. And I think that goes along with culture, and it goes along with us talking about mastery in a way that’s very honest and transparent for students. This enables students to access it rather than letting grades be something that only teachers have access to. It makes learning a dialogue rather than a dictatorship where, because “I am the teacher,” I am in control of it. And I think moving away from that model helps empower students and gives them the opportunity to do better than they would if they were just given a grade.
Springpoint: We’re curious about how a mastery-based approach might have triggered a shift in mindset or perspective among your students. Do you have any anecdotes about specific students growing or changing as a result of this approach?
Alex: There was a lot of growth that happened on the whole. On average, our students grew two grade levels as measured by the DRP (Degrees of Reading Power assessment). That’s a really big win for us. But I think there was also a lot of growth in mindset, in students thinking less about the grade and more about what they’ve learned.
All of our students have grown in different ways. One student, in particular, struggled with writing an essay at the beginning of the year. Part of this was because he struggled with reading, annotating, and taking notes. So, he and I sat together for literally three class days in a row. We went through the process of how to read carefully, and how to annotate. Then I gave him some graphic organizers, and he was able to use them to organize his notes and his thoughts. He used them to pick a side and find evidence for it. Slowly, as he progressed, he needed less and less of the scaffolds, and just more time to work independently. In that sense, he went from a student who didn’t believe he could write anything—or that he could even read—to a student who said, “I can do this.” Throughout the process, he would ask me as a teacher, “Is this good?” And I noticed that, as time went on, he began to need that reassurance less and less from me. He could do it intrinsically. He became self-guided once he had the tools and knew his objective.
This example is very similar to what would happen in a traditional school where a teacher provides scaffolds. One of the key distinctions in this example is the use of the rubric for the student to self assess. The student needed less reassurance because he became more familiar with the rubric used to grade his learning. Instead of getting a number grade that gave him a grade on the whole essay, the discrete skills the student needed to target were his areas of focus. This, however, demonstrated mastery as the student could make connection between his claims and evidence as well as talk through and write about his reasoning in relation to the rubric. In applying the skill and talking about the value of the skill, the student can talk about the value it adds to the essay as well as use it with effectively in an essay. This, to me, is mastery.
I also have students who submitted multiple copies of their rough drafts and said, “I was working specifically on this, this is what I did, can you tell me if I got the standard.” And I would just tell them to read the rubric. There were times when I read the rubric with students, and they would understand it slightly better, and they would be able to tell me how they were being graded. They could tell me what their essays should include, and they could start setting up their essays to reflect that.
Springpoint: Your school has a design thinking focus. How do you incorporate design thinking into your class?
Alex: I think I need to do a better job of making this transparent, so the students also know they’re doing design thinking. But the writing process is entirely design thinking. It starts very clearly with discovery: “what do you want to write about?” and “what are you being tasked to write about?” In that sense, I think a lot of the writing process really mirrors the design thinking process: You start with “what is this thing I want to write about?” And then you start defining it: “Well, the school-to-prison-pipeline is too big…”
We started a unit on incarceration—I just titled it “incarceration” and then we narrowed it down. We learned about different facets of incarceration, solitary confinement, inhumane treatment and youth incarceration. Students were really interested in youth incarceration and we started to tailor that down, and refining it into the school-to-prison-pipeline. Then we started to design rough drafts, to design arguments around questions like, “Is this fair? Is this ethical? Is this living up to the principles of freedom and liberation?”
And then we started to develop rough drafts and get feedback to start looking at revised drafts. And then ultimately we delivered it—we delivered our thoughts on the school-to-prison pipeline through a research portfolio. And the research portfolio showed the entire process of how students started with an idea and ended with a completed process. That process, and all of the writing work we do, really reflects the design thinking protocol.
Springpoint: If you could go back in time, what advice would you give to yourself at the beginning of last year?
Alex: I would tell myself to ask for support when needed. I think about some of the Carnegie design principles around human capital and hiring great people to work with, and here at UA Maker I’ve been around some of the smartest and most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. They are really intentional when it comes to their practice, they are really thoughtful and care a lot about children. I think there was a lot of learning that I could’ve done a lot earlier on had I asked for more support or simply gotten out of my classroom and observed how others were teaching.
I would also encourage myself to increase the rigor for students. I think I would teach a lot of the same things I have already taught, because I think they’re solid units. But there were definitely places where I thought the assignments could have asked for more thinking or more critical analysis. And in that sense, my sessions with administration as well as peer feedback have given me enough information that I can now start looking at my units and making them a bit more rigorous and more demanding for students.
Lastly, I think I would push myself to have a little bit more fun. I loved every second I taught. But there were also some parts where it just felt dry when it shouldn’t have. I’m going to push myself this year to make the units more fun, both for me and for the students so they can be more engaged. It will allow them to have more intrinsic buy-in, so I don’t have to hold a grade over their head in order to get things done.
Springpoint: How is innovation messy? From a teacher’s vantage point, what does school-wide innovation look and feel like? How did the school model change throughout the year?
Alex: I think innovation comes from the fact that we identify a need. We say that the school needs X, Y or Z, and we find ways to use what we have to meet that unmet need. It came from a lot of us being really thoughtful about, “What do our students need to be successful in our school?”
In a lot of cases, it did involve difficult, long and thought-provoking conversations about our grading system, about our in-class protocols, about how we enter grades, and about how we talk to parents about our mastery-based grading system. So, in many cases, we developed these innovations out of necessity.
During the first half of our school year, our grading system was still being developed. Many of our students felt really stressed about the uncertainty of their performance in our school. The grading system was still very abstract to them. In response to this, we iterated many mastery trackers used to keep students informed of their progress in each class. This asked a lot of our students and they weren’t ready for it – we knew we needed another system. We utilized our resources well; we contacted a developer who built our current student-facing grading system called “Kadion” because we haven’t figured out a better name for it.
In addition to this new and easy-to-use grading system, we put together a whole-school assembly to reset norms. In February our staff met and agreed on a set of norms that we would all use to strengthen school-wide policies around instruction and behavior expectations. When the instruction in English mirrored what happened in Math, student engagement increased. The grading system was used as a tool to support learning, resulting in more than 100 missing or revised work products turned in school wide. Students became more involved in their grades and could make a passing plan based on the standards they needed to unlock in order to pass. They had more agency then ever.
As a school, we radically changed practices and policies mid-year because we realized that major change wouldn’t happen if we were not intentional about the shifts in our school culture. Honestly, it’s always been a response to what students need. We’ve always tried to think about and anticipate their needs, and pooled our energies to make students as successful as possible. Working at a new school where everyone is, kind of, “all hands on deck” and everyone is really invested, made it easier to have make drastic change.
I also appreciate that everyone here is a team player and was able to go with it, even if they didn’t agree 100% on what the call was. We all agreed to it because we acknowledged the changes benefitted the school. That made the transition a lot easier. I know those conversations could be filled with a lot more tension. And, believe me, some tension was there, but we all agreed collectively that what we were trying to accomplish—and the vision of the school—was the most important thing. It never had anything to do with individual ego; the conversations were always about the students we served. We were able to put those things away and have the difficult conversations in order to have a better outcome for the school.
Springpoint: Final thoughts?
Alex: This year was so valuable. I never would have pictured learning as much as I did. It was fascinating. I want to become a school leader at some point, and I think this is a great environment to learn and grow.
I also think a lot of people are taking on different flavors of mastery-based learning, and mastery-based grading, and it would be really great if we could find a way to bring parties together so ideas can be exchanged in ways they haven’t. I’m a rookie in this league and I want to get better.