Mastery Learning and the Grid Method

Can Our Education Process Be Fixed?

Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, said the process of education is broken in his TED Talk titled “Let’s Teach for Mastery Not Test Scores” - Mastery learning is the time it takes different students to master or learn the same content.  According to the article, Mastery, time and effective instructional strategies will assure that all children can learn.

Essential elements of mastery learning:

• Identify learning standards
• Allow students to work at their own pace
• Utilize ongoing assessments to provide feedback and inform the need for reteaching
• Assess as evidence of mastery

Why is Mastery Learning Important?

For some students, we are trying to build a house on shifting sand.  Sal Khan’s comparisons of mastery learning to martial arts or learning to play an instrument really left an impression on me.  Students learning karate master the skills required of a white belt before they move on to learn the skills of a yellow belt.   Basic skills are necessary prior to learn more advanced skills.  When learning music, musicians learn simple songs first.  Once simple skills are mastered, musicians begin to practice more complex music and accomplish more challenging skills.  I can still hear Hot Cross Buns ringing in my ears from weeks of my daughter practicing her oboe as a beginner.  Practicing that same easy song until she mastered it, led to more difficult pieces of music.  After several years of practice, now she can play complex scores.  What a difference the mastery of skills and a few years of practice make!  The same holds true of students of any discipline.

Knowing students are missing foundational skills, time constraints force many teachers to march on through our curriculum.  The lack of essentials skills causes frustration and leads to disengagement.  Sal Khan’s TED Talk reinforces my concerns about why we continue to force children to build on top of gaps in their learning.  His message hit home when he compared learning to build a home.  If an inspector declared the foundation of a home 80% satisfactory, would you want to live in that house?  Let’s say you did move on to build the first level of the house and that level only met 75% of building codes.  I’m sure none of us would think it’s safe to continue building that structure.  If so, why is it acceptable for our students to continue to build knowledge on top of gaps?

What can we do about it?

In today’s day and age, we can do better for the students in our classrooms. While we are required to teach a set curriculum, as Sal Khan suggested, we can vary when and how long it takes for individuals to master that content.  The idea of personalized learning sounds overwhelming, but now more than any other time in the history of education, we have the means to make this a reality.

Taking advantage of resources like Khan Academy or Freckle to provide students access to instructional videos, adaptive practice, and immediate feedback makes personalized learning possible.  These practice opportunities prepare students for more in-depth application of content in the class where students can be supported by a professional educator as they persevere through challenges, work in small groups for reteaching, or engage in enrichment opportunities. 

Chad Ostrowski developed a method of managing personalized learning called the Grid Method.  According to this video from Teach Better, the Grid Method is designed to help students succeed at their own pace while the teacher guides and facilitates learning.  This seems like a very manageable way to deliver personalized and mastery learning.

Why bother?                            

Benefits include:

• Increased student motivation

• Increased positive relationships between teacher and students

• Increased ownership of learning 

• Allows for greater differentiation and remediation 

Based on the video titled Grid Method, teachers can work collaboratively to create a “Grid” on a Google Doc or via a website.  Wherever you warehouse your Grid, keep it simple and easy for students to access.  I envision using a Google Doc, starting out simple, and soliciting student feedback along the way to see how I could improve the process.

The Grid starts with learning standards and outlines learning pathways that students can follow to take control of their own learning.  The teacher provides access to a variety of learning opportunities at various levels of Depth of Knowledge which guide students through mastery of content targets.  Learning opportunities, as Chad Ostrowski calls them in his free online Grid Method course, might include teacher made videos, professional or YouTube videos, Quizlet activities, old-fashioned worksheets, online adaptive practice resources, links to online textbook resources, hands-on activities, or projects.  The options are limitless.  Once students feel they have mastered the content, they can access an assessment.  The feedback from ongoing assessments provides the teacher with the data she needs to determine how to best support each student.  Students might need reteaching or extra practice or to engage in an application project or enrichment opportunity.

Many people might object to allowing students to redo work and take an assessment again, but Mr. Ostrowski said that we need to teach our students that FAIL means First Attempt in Learning.  Kids work hard because they quickly figure out that failure means more work - they keep working on a skill until they master it.  Grades should be based on whether or not the learners have mastered content standards, not on task completion.

Will It Work?

Using the Grid Method does seem labor intensive at the onset, but if you work collaboratively with teachers in your grade level, you can lighten the load.  Not only does the Grid Method incorporate best instructional practices, but research has shown it is effective.  Gusky stated that “80 percent or more of the students in a class [to] reach the same high level that only about 20 percent do under more traditional approaches to instruction.”  Using the Grid Method has shifted the bell curve and has the potential to reach those students some might consider “unreachable.”  Students that are difficult to engage, unmotivated and challenging to manage have thrived in classrooms using this method of mastery learning. 

Using the Grid Method also seems to fit really well with gamifying the classroom with a digital badging system.  I would want to incorporate digital badges related to content mastery as students complete a learning pathway.  From my experience with elementary students, they would be motivated to collect as many digital badges as they could throughout a unit of study.

In his TED Talk, Sal Khan mentioned that the education system is broken, but we can change education and fix what’s broken.  Through mastery and personalized learning, educators can meet the needs of all learners and empower students to succeed.