A Breakthrough on Mastery Learning

Transcript

[ About the Teach Blue Fellows Conversation Series ]

Rod Franchi: Hi, my name is Rod Franchi and I welcome you to the Teach Blue Fellows Conversation Series where we drill down with one of our fellows in the problem of practice they've been working on. If you don't know about "Teach Blue Fellows", let me fill you in on this cool new program here at the Marsal School of Education. It's made up of six amazing alumni who now work in K–12 spaces. Our aim is to pull back the curtain and show what it looks like when expert practitioners take on authentic problems, all in the service of helping their students learn. In the last year, each fellow work alongside their peers and a Marsal faculty partner to take on that problem of practice. They got a little smarter about their problem, crafted a solution plan, and then they implemented it. Along the way, the fellows file accounts to tell their story in real time. Most accounts are in blog form, but this third one is a conversation. At the end of their cycle, each fellow will file their final account, a little talk at our Teach Blue Fellows Symposium. 

[ Introducing Ravi Smith ]

Rod: Hello, everyone. This is Rod Franchi, the program coordinator for Teach Blue Fellows. As part of the Teach Blue Fellows Conversation Series, I'm excited to talk with engineering educator, Ravi Smith. Ravi earned his teaching certificate and a master's degree from the Marsal Family School of Education. Today we'll be discussing Ravi's problem of practice, which involves the intersection of mastery learning and grade reporting. Ravi's students' grades are based on mastering engineering standards. So a grade at any given time is a work in progress. Now, imagine a parent who's checking their child's grades online, and after reviewing the grade books of conventional classes, they come to Ravi's engineering class. It might look like their child is struggling, when in reality, they're just going through the natural process of mastering this complex set of skills. 

As you'll hear in my interview, Ravi is bursting with enthusiasm with any challenge he takes up, from teaching to coaching, to baking cookies. You're even gonna hear about how his cats help his teaching. I really like how Ravi is cutting through quote unquote, "game of school," where students might skip the steps of authentic learning to score the grade they need. Ravi is helping them reset their focus on deeper, longer lasting learning. I think it should be noted that this sort of reform takes bravery. As Ravi will explain, a lot of students feel way more comfortable playing the game of school, and when a course has a different assessment structure, parents are gonna have questions about how their child's progressing. Out of all this, Ravi developed a new grade reporting system that involves a color coded fuel gauge. I think this gauge is a huge breakthrough. Now parents can see exactly how their child is progressing and students are clear on where they're at too. Here is my conversation with Ravi Smith. 

[ Ravi's background and U-M affiliations ]

Rod: Hello, everyone. Today I'm talking with Ravi Smith, an engineering teacher at the school at Marygrove, which is located in Detroit. Hey, Ravi, it's great to talk with you again. Let's dig in and talk mastery learning and grade reporting.

Ravi Smith: Yes.

Rod: All right. How you doing today?

Ravi: I'm great. Great. It's a good day.

Rod: Good, good. All right. So a little background. Can you share with our audience your affiliation with the University of Michigan Marsal School of Education?

Ravi: Sure. I'm one of the Teach Blue Fellows, the first cohort coming through. But beyond that, I went to University of Michigan and was Michigan Engineering undergraduate and added to that the teacher certification program at the School of Education where Dean Moje was one of my professors. 

Rod: Nice. Yeah.

Ravi: Back in the late 90s, early aughts. I also went back a few years later while I was teaching in Southfield, my first teaching assignment. Went back to School of Education to work on my master's administration policy in the FARP Program, Foundation, Administration, Research and Policy.

Rod: Nice. Wow. Yeah, so strong ties. So yeah, we love having you as part of this first cohort. It's been a fun ride so far. So we're getting around the bend and I can see the finish line, so it's a—

Ravi: I forgot one other part of that. I also more recently worked with Wolverine Pathways, which is out of School of Education, headquartered in the School of Education and run by School of Education professor. 

Rod: And what is that program?

Ravi: So the Wolverine Pathways program is designed as part of the diversity initiatives. I'm not quite sure if it's embedded in comprehensive studies program, but it's has a similar sort of mission of really developing the acumen necessary to succeed in highly selective schools, specifically University of Michigan, but focusing on students that are in middle school and high school at that point time, as opposed to like a bridge program where they're right coming in already. And they work with them on giving them programming that enable them to sort of supplement and broaden their capabilities beyond what they're being given in high school. And also we work with them on admissions to really create a sort of pipeline or ideal sort of candidate base for University of Michigan in areas that are underrepresented. So targeting specific geographies. Detroit, Southfield, and Ypsilanti were the three main areas that they were targeting to really develop those resources and develop those children so they could be strong candidates for University of Michigan.

[ Ravi's problem of practice ]

Rod: All right, so as a Teach Blue Fellow, you defined a problem of practice last spring. Can you give us a general idea of this problem that you wanted to work with?

Ravi: So the broad strokes, I engage in sort of a quasi form of mastery-based framing for classes where the grading system is rooted on whether or not students have mastered a given learning objective or standard thing to be learned as opposed to the typical mode where students are simply graded on their work on a given assignment. So in a typical math class that I may teach with a mastery framing, the way that might look different, in traditional math class, you may have a test with 10 items and based on the percentage of correctness that would equate to some grade. So if 90% of those 10 problems are correct, say they're multiple choice just for simplicity, then you get a 90% that might equate to an A minus. For me, I'm simply looking not at the assignment, but did you master the thing that I needed you to learn? And putting that out front. So it's not just unit one test, it's student will be able to create a system of linear equations based off of a real world situation. So I'm looking at did they master that?

Rod: It sounds like a more authentic way to think about a grade book and to think about the focus of the work that we deal with students.

Ravi: Absolutely, absolutely. I think the real benefit is that we've turned grading into something that is a bit more useful than it traditionally has been. Where typically, it's really about concepts of studenting and performance on very specific sorts of tests. And you pour in timelines, which now you're not even grading on the material anymore. It's like you could fail something on the basis of not having met a timeline, right? Not that you didn't know your stuff or not that you don't have the skill development, not that you didn't learn, but simply that you didn't do it quick enough. And testing to be in that same way, right? Like I have 60 minutes to perform this and it's not that I can't do it, but I can't do it quickly enough to warrant getting this grade that says what exactly? That I just can't do it fast. It's certainly not saying that you can't or cannot do it.

Rod: Right.

Ravi: So it's just pulling grades back into something that are a bit more useful. And I think tying them to the mastery of the skills that you want them to develop and the things that you want them to know is the only useful way to do grading. I was given a list of standards, the AEEE framework for engineering standards. It's pretty comprehensive and covers all sorts of engineering learning and the consultants that gave me this pointed out that there are a set of standards that are dealing with the professional aspects of being an engineer. And one of them is dealing with timelines, right? And being able to manage work. So if I want to grade on that, I can, and I just incorporate that as one of the learning objectives. So it's about getting things on time. It's estranged from the content of the thing that you were getting completed on time. We separate that out and have it be its own separate grade and our standards for engineering at least work with that well. I didn't quite get to the problem portion. I just sort of framed what the mastery approach was. But the problem in that is that I'm in a sea of traditional instruction and grading where my system doesn't fit. It doesn't fit with their timelines. Especially when I'm saying it's not about a timeline. It's about did you master it? So if you master something I assigned in September, you don't master it until February, then the grade needs to change to reflect that because I'm going off of mastery. And if I have the evidence in hand that you have mastered this thing, I am bound to change that. That does not work well with a system where you have to put in grades every week, two grades a week, and everything needs to move along, right? Everything is sort of cut off at a point, right? So it's sort of managing the necessity of additional time being warranted with the traditional systems and requirements that I have placed on me as an educator in this district. The professor I've worked with, Barry Fishman, education professor I actually briefly worked with when I first came on board at the school at Marygrove. Long story short, University of Michigan was one of the key architects of the school I teach in. So we're very much connected to University of Michigan faculty and work hand in hand with a lot of the initiatives and things that we're doing. And I did some brief work with the LEAPS program that Barry Fishman is developing over at University of Michigan, which is a very exciting program, degree in learning, equity, and problem solving for the public good. Amazing concept. It's gonna revamp higher education. So I knew Barry from that and have worked with him in limited fashion for summer helping out sort of as a staffer for the program. So that was the partnership. And I was given a ton of sort of a data dump of relevant information that sort of just got me up to speed on the literature to help me along the way. And one of the pieces he gave me was actually just a ready made solution for what I was looking at. And it was a system of parent communication that allowed me to make automatic or automated sort of mail merged mass communications to parents on the basis of what the students were doing.

Rod: Okay.

Ravi: And the system was built on something called Form Publisher, which is an attachment to Google Forms and Google Sheets. So what this essentially enables me to do is... 'Cause largely my problem is about communication with parents within the system that is geared towards this consistent sort of set of grading for me to communicate what I'm doing to parents that's different to sort of smooth over these differences and explain what's happening so that they are appropriately onboarded and motivated to really champion what I'm doing. And if the parents are on board with what you're doing, then the problem sort of goes away. It's essentially, at its core, a parent communication issue that I have. So all these differences, if they're palatable to parents, then administration, the system isn't gonna really come down on me even though it's different.

Rod: That's great. So what I'm hearing you say is that it reminds me that a teacher doesn't just need to know their content. They don't just need to know the pedagogy that would help teach that content, but also craft knowledge of how the systems work in your workplace. So go ahead and tell us about your solution plan.

Ravi: So utilizing Google Forms and some assignments that I've sort of modified to feed into that, students are able to communicate directly to their parents what they're learning through their work. It sort of takes responses from students within conscious of this assignment and then puts them into a letter that's sent on to parents when they do anything. So any assignment they do, a portion of that assignment is sort of this metacognitive piece that I've been using beforehand. I've sort of tasked that to be the thing that is used to communicate to parents. So this comes in two phases. The first phase is what I'm describing now, where students answer questions about what they were supposed to learn, what they specifically did to learn that thing. They self-assess and engage in a sort of error analysis where they dig into things that went wrong or the misunderstanding that they had, mistakes they may have had and what they did about them. So that information is pulled in the form of a survey, or not survey, a Google Form set questions, and then responses are then ported into a pre-made template that sort of personalizes and puts all those responses into a letter home to parents. And the parents get that every time a student does an assignment. So that's the first portion of it. The second portion, which is I'm hoping to launch for second semester 'cause it's sort of piled out the first portion of this, the second portion is capturing of their mastery scores across every learning objective across the entire semester as they develop. And it's framed as a sort of meter of mastery, almost like a fuel gauge that's being filled as they master, as I get more evidence for mastery, that's being filled. And that's sort of keyed into a spreadsheet that I keep of their mastery scores. So on my end, I see a bunch of student names and all the learning objectives and then just numbers for where they're at, at any given time for each one of those learning objectives. What the parents see would be just these sort of fuel gauges of mastery or each of those learning objectives and an explanation of what they are. So the student was... For my mechatronics course, one of them is to be able to make these two light bulbs light up, so soon be able to make these two light bulbs light up. Right?

Rod: Yeah.

Ravi: They master that skill and you'll see, okay, eight is the number for mastery. So you'll actually see a visual representation of that with the maize blue mastery meter. So everything's U of M branded. And they'll have a green bar once they... It turns from orange to green once they hit that mastery level. So it's like you're trying to fill this fuel gauge up until the point it gets green or in higher levels of green. So that's the second portion that I'm getting set to launch. I had some hiccups in trying to make that portion work, but I think I've sorted that largely out and that's due within the next week or two.

Rod: Right. Couple follow up questions. First of all, just to kinda wrap my head around this, about how many learning objectives are we talking about for one semester?

Ravi: Oh, about 30. So depending on the class, give or take.

Rod: And then if a student is tasked with making a light bulb light up, what would it look like if they're not quite there? So from a layman's perspective, from my perspective, it just seems like it's either gonna work or not work. So what does in between look like?

Ravi: Sure, so I can look at the work that you've done in order to try to make it light up and for that particular assignment, the issue could be that you put the light bulb, the LED backwards, right? The anode and the cathode is just switched around. That's why it's not lighting up. But everything else is perfect, right? The code is written well, the wiring for everything else is hooked up appropriately. Just that one little thing could keep you from having it light up. So maybe you're really close to mastery at this point. Right? And that the numbering system is worded based on whether or not you've achieved mastery and how close you are to mastery. So seven is almost achieved mastery. Eight is mastery. Nine and 10 are levels of exceeding mastery. So it's not just by modal. There are certain levels to mastering something and 10 isn't the end all be all 'cause I certainly have mastered it at a level beyond what I expect the students to be at to get a 10. So I mean, maybe there is an 11 or 12 or 13, but it just stops at 10 conveniently for the purposes of grading. So on the other end, so not only have you gotten the light bulb to light up, but now you're making it using a code beyond what I've given you. You're making it turn on and off in different ways, and maybe you're changing the amount of time it turns on and then to a half second. And then you change the amount of time that it's off for two seconds and then maybe you switch it and I can see you doing extra things beyond whatever I have intended for you to do. That's how you get to nine or 10. Now if you're pretty far away and nothing is hooked up properly, maybe you're a six, but I see you're in the neighborhood. Five would be you really can't do much at all. So that's sort of where your journey begins. So if you don't really have any demonstration of mastery now that you're at this five level, but as I see you're starting to be able to put a little bit together, but you're not quite close, maybe you're at a six. You're really close and there's a few things that are keeping you from getting to that basic mastery level. Now you're at a seven. So it sort of levels up based on the evidence of whatever I'm seeing. So it's not just the finished product. I wanna see what work you did to get to that point. And that's a lot of what I'm doing as a teacher, especially in engineering class, is just sort of observing and giving feedback and telling them, okay, the anode and cathode, they're switched around, right? So what do we do? And okay, let's switch that around and I can refer them to what we did in the previous assignment, because lighting two light bulbs up was the second assignment. Light one light bulb up was the first. And that's where that expertise of knowing where the anode and the cathode go in relation to the power and the ground, that sort of learning happened in that first learning objective. And you have to be able to apply it now and to make this work over here. So that gives me the ability when I'm just walking around and interacting with students, giving them feedback, seeing where they're going wrong and seeing where they can switch things, that gives me a ton of just data and evidence on where they are in the spectrum.

Rod: Right, that's very cool. I would think as a student, that they would welcome this structure to see, okay, I have a five right now, I'm getting closer, and with the color coding. How have they responded to this system?

Ravi: So I think there are two competing sort of influences that will, depending on which one's stronger, will change how that manifests in terms of student reaction. The first is this is different, and change, especially when you're talking about 10th and 11th graders when they've been doing schooling this one way my entire career, and someone's asked me to switch it, that can be uncomfortable and they can reject it. The other influence is my ability to redo and to iterate, to make things better. I'm not satisfied with the fact that I got a D on this, so let's make it not a D anymore. What do we need to do? And that's an explicit conversation that I'm always willing to have no matter how long it's been. Let's make this better. Let's iterate, let's improve upon it. Let's develop mastery.

Rod: Mastery. You're right.

Ravi: It's very similar to what I do on the track, right? If you fall in hurdles, it is not a summative type of thing where, oh, you fell. D, move on. No, I'm gonna show you what you did wrong. We're gonna try to fix it.

Rod: Yeah.

Ravi: Until we have it fixed. Because the whole point of this is to get you to master this. And when you're mastering your craft and athletics, people get that. Why are we putting these limits on math and engineering? I want you to be able to get these light bulbs to turn on. That's the goal. Now, how this manifests in terms of what I experience interacting with them, I think depends on which one of these two things is more salient to them. And if they really reject doing things differently, then they can kind of reject this whole system. And I do get complaints about that and it makes me rethink my approach to make this a better sell. I need you to feel more of the benefit of doing it this way so that becomes stronger and that makes me focus on marketing, right? This only works if I marketed well and selling this.

Rod: Yeah, like—

Ravi: If they don't buy into this, none of it works and it just becomes a disaster.

Rod: Yeah.

Ravi: If I feel like I'm doing something different, makes it actionable, right? They can rebel and I'm actionable because I'm doing something no one else is doing and they don't like it.

Rod: Yes, yes.

Ravi: Everyone's gonna come down to me. So I have to really sell this to students to be able to be successful.

Rod: Yeah, a teacher has to wear so many different hats and you're exactly right, that you're also a marketer. You have to sort of brand, especially if something is new and it's gonna ask for commitments that are different than what they're used to. And so you're exactly right. Also, I thought really interesting, I've talked about with my students, I talk about the game of school and how sort of easy it is for our students to get into this sort of track where they might plug in numbers to a formula or they might use a formula, but they're not really clear on the big picture of what they're doing. But they're getting the scores they want, but the authentic learning is not happening. I think as educators too, we can also kind of get in that track of the game of school. But what I'm hearing you're doing is you're pulling back your view of things and trying to focus on what is it that we're really trying to do here? Are we really... Is our goal really for them to get an A minus or whatever on the test? No, it's to master these skills. And I love how to kind of make that even clearer for everyone, you're pulling from another lane of your work, which is you as a track coach and so that story itself, I'm talking about marketing. That's a great story right there to explain this to students, to parents in administration.

Ravi: And I leverage it constantly. Everything is a track analogy. Now I'll refer to specific athletes that I coach and talk about the training thing, and the mastery being the thing. It's not these summative things. It's not like some grade, it's not some time, even in track. It's the development, it's the mastery of your craft. It's the mastery of whatever it is that you're trying to do. And I happen to be in a situation with track where it's probably the most beneficial classroom that I've ever been involved in.

Rod: What's one thing you think you've learned so far at this point about mastery grading and there was something that you didn't know before?

Ravi: Yeah, I mentioned this in one of the assignments that I've written on, I don't think I knew what I was doing. I kind of like the idea generally, and this is when I referred to everything as sort of standards based learning, because that's what I heard. And this sort of distinction between, and there's a lot of overlap there between standards-based and mastery-based. I don't think I had a full appreciation for sort of the framework that undergirded all this stuff. Right? I kind of knew the purpose, I knew the broad strokes. I didn't know what had been done before. And there was some reinventing of the wheel that, again, it's not my forte. I scavenge, I retool. That was sort of left in this limbo 'cause I didn't pull from the literature. I didn't pull from what had been done before. And a lot of what I've been given in this process is sort of that background, right? What's sort of the full understanding that undergirds all of this, right? The full theory of this that we're trying to accomplish and why we're trying to do it and what have people done before. One of the big pieces that I was missing was this idea of infrastructure. If you don't have the infrastructure to do the thing that you want to do, and I kind of knew this all along, but this sort of captured it well, I knew that I was butting my head against a system that was preexisting that wasn't built to do what I was doing. But the idea of applying, idea of infrastructure to it, you need infrastructure specifically built for the thing that you're trying to do for the system. And it's kind of fool hearted to think that you're going to take infrastructure built for something else and then try to apply this new thing that the system's not built for. So what I've been trying to come up with is applying tools in ways that create workarounds to build my own sort of new infrastructure that's almost like in a video game language, like a skin that sits on top of a pre-existing game that makes it look a different way, right? You've modified the infrastructure with the skin or sort of superficial thing that allows you to have your sort of infrastructure that's harmonious, to a degree, with the preexisting systems and structures that you're working with, that were sort of bringing me down. So understanding all that, understanding what had been done and how these hiccups have happened in the past. Understanding the parent piece was huge. Why our parents are rejecting it, why are students rejecting it? Helping become a better marketer of the things I'm doing and help to create a sort of finished product that they needed to see in order to be onboarded properly to do that marketing piece. So all that stuff that I didn't understand before 'cause I hadn't done the reading, hadn't done the requisite research to really understand this was added in, I think to help me to come to a much better solution.

[ Work-life balance ]

Rod: I love it. Your mind does not rest. You're constantly thinking things over and with your mission in mind. We talk a lot in education about trying to get some sort of work life balance. A lot of us never really quite reached that, but what's one thing that you enjoy doing that helps you find some sort of work life balance?

Ravi: So I think work life balance for me is a little bit different than... I think of it differently now than back in the classroom because I spent some time consulting where I don't have these copious breaks. Now I'm on break for much of the year and allows me to sort of pursue other things. So the work-life balance I think is built in to the fact that I'm not in school, at the job for a very long portion of the year, percentage wise like I used to be where I was working longer hours as a consultant and five, six days a week consistently, right? Not having that and having reasonable hours, that's certainly in of itself, just the time has been released. But I think part of it's what you do with that time, right? So for me it's a few different things. I have been working on a cookie recipe I think you've tried before.

Rod: Oh yeah. I was gonna ask you about it.

Ravi: Probably longer than I've worked on anything else. So since the mid 80s, since I was like third grade, I've been perfecting my own cookie recipe that I want to take to market eventually. I'm working on the branding for that and sort of consistency of the product. And I'm gonna have two product lines, my oatmeal cookies that you've tried, and I also have the macarons and I've about 30 or so recipes that I'm ready to launch with that. So that's been sort of a huge getaway, just delving into that. Of course the track thing is huge, but the coaching is everything for me. So being back on the track and coaching, because I had to sort of leave it for a few years when I was consulting. That was a huge thing that was missing. I'm missing that core thing that I do. So the coaching is huge and my family, right? My wife, my cats. We have a couple cats now. I never wanted pets, right? My wife demanded like, "We're getting cats." So I'm like, okay, I guess I'm gonna have to get into this cat. It's life changing. I don't have stress anymore. It's the craziest thing. Teaching used to be a stressful job. Now I go home and I cuddle with cats and it all melts away and it's like, what was I worried about? The ultimate stress relief.

Rod: Incredible.

Ravi: So between my cats, family, and tracking and baking, I think that it's afforded me a sort of balance.

Rod: Yeah.

Ravi: It's kept me sane.

Rod: That's great. What an interesting life. You have so many pokers in the fire. I love it. Like I said, Ravi, your mind does not rest and it's been a pleasure talking to you and I'm really looking forward to seeing how your initiative works out this year and beyond.

Ravi: Thank you.

Rod: Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the "Teach Blue Fellows Conversation" series. Ravi is such an incredible educator. As I said in the interview, his mind never quits. So thank you to our guest, Ravi, and a special thanks to the Ed Hub for community and professional learning at Marsal for their many production talents. You can learn more about Teach Blue Fellows by clicking the link in our show notes. Also, don't forget to join our social communities available through marsal.umich.edu so you can stay connected with the Teach Blue Fellows and hear more about upcoming episodes. There are more conversations with our amazing Teach Blue Fellows. I hope you'll check them out. Thank you.