reDesign, an organization that collaborates with a range of clients to design innovative teaching and learning practices, just launched a suite of practical resources geared toward enabling teachers and school leaders to drive innovation in their own contexts.

Over the last 3 years, Springpoint has worked with district and network partners all over the country to support new, innovative school design. One of Springpoint’s collaborators in the design of learning experiences for the sites in our network has been reDesign, an organization that collaborates with a range of clients to design innovative teaching and learning practices. Today, we present Making Mastery Accessible: A Practitioner’s Guide to Mastery Learning, a suite of practical resources geared toward enabling teachers and school leaders to drive innovation in their own contexts.

This project was born out of a shared concern that despite growing awareness of the urgent need to rethink secondary education, coupled with considerably more fertile soil for the development of full-blown mastery learning systems, too many of the mastery-based schools launched in the past decade bear a disappointing resemblance to the archetypal 19th century institution that is familiar to us all.

This trend suggests that despite the expansion of available resources on mastery learning, there remains a significant gap in the practical knowledge and expertise available to school design teams, isolating them in their work, often for years. As a result of this closed-loop learning system, mastery learning model design has often taken eight, ten, or even twelve years to fully evolve; this prolonged journey to maturity can deeply affect student success as well as adult endurance.

To remedy this, Carnegie Corporation of New York supported Springpoint to partner with reDesign—in developing this Making Mastery Accessible toolkit. The toolkit comprises learning activities, performance tasks, teaching resources, and skills development guides. These resources are available for educators to download and use on their own, with the goal of making mastery-based learning a real possibility for schools and classrooms across systems.

As a primer, we’d suggest digging into these introductory resources from the toolkit:

• The Design Roadmap: If you’re interested in the broad strokes of how to implement mastery-based learning, start with this step-by-step guide. The process begins with a self-assessment to gauge your experience with the concept of mastery-based learning, and to guide you in determining your design preferences. From there, the roadmap outlines a path toward developing standards-aligned competencies and systems for student advancement upon mastery. The roadmap also indicates where specific tools already exist to guide the journey.
• Features of a Mastery-Based System: This guide outlines six major elements of a mastery learning system. While these elements are all integrated, some of them deserve more time than others. This resource would be useful when determining how much staff time to allocate to each element. It’s useful to know at the outset, for example, that designing meaningful assessments and differentiated student supports will take much of your time.
• The Competency Adoption Guide: This tool guides teams through the process of adopting existing competencies and adapting them to their local context. The guide instructs teams to begin with a vision for specific student skills, knowledge, and dispositions, and to use that vision to determine which existing competencies to use and how to adapt them. The guide includes case studies of how other districts and schools, like Springpoint’s partners at the School District of Philadelphia, have developed their competencies.
• A Guide to Developing a Mastery-Based Grading Policy: Once you’ve developed competencies, you will need to create a system to support mastery-based grading. This system of assessments and policies/practices will drive daily instruction. Defining the grading policy, and accounting for all types of assessments in a mastery-based framework, is probably the most technically difficult step in creating a mastery-based model. This is where all the elements of school design intersect, including:
  • Assessments (formative and summative)
  • Teacher grading practices
  • Communication of progress to students and families
  • Promotion and crediting
  • Technology, and how it can enable all of the above

A strong grading policy also serves as a de facto overview of your model for families and community members. Given that many families are interested in their children’s grades, a school’s grading policy guide is an opportunity for school leaders to articulate what mastery-based learning is, more broadly.

The Design Lab contains several more resources, though the ones listed above are essential. We are delighted to share these resources with our network of school designers and the field at large. We think they will benefit designers, practitioners, and students in enormous ways.