Moving to Mastery Learning Class by Class, Teacher by Teacher

An item from a neo-liberal…  This one is an item from a business professor with little direct experience in education, but who believes free market economic principles are the answer to education’s (and pretty much all other society’s social) problems.

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MAY 10

Moving to Mastery Learning Class by Class, Teacher by Teacher

		MICHAEL B. HORN

The Modern Classrooms Project is a nonprofit dedicated to helping teachers enact personalized learning, student-centered instruction, and mastery-based assessment. They take a grassroots approach by supporting teachers with making the transition to a specific new learning model. Their theory of change is that this approach can help create a tidal wave of change through the resulting ripples and tensions. In this conversation with the co-founder and CEO Kareem Farah, we dig into just how they operate and what he sees as the most critical points of leverage in changing the system. We also dug into the results of their work–both in terms of student learning outcomes and attitudes from the teachers themselves.

As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it below, or read the transcript.

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Michael Horn:                Delighted to be with you all today to talk about what I’m passionate about, which is helping build a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And today, we have someone in Kareem Farah, who is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Classrooms, who is seeking to do that in our nation’s classrooms and with our nation’s teachers. And so, Kareem, welcome to the Future of Education. Great to see you.

Farah:               Nice to see you as well. Thanks for having me.

Horn:                Yeah, you bet. So, Modern Classrooms is one of these organizations that I’ve long heard of and seen in the ecosystem, but we haven’t gotten to connect before. For our audience that perhaps doesn’t know you, just tell us what is Modern Classrooms and what’s the theory of change behind what you’re doing?

Farah:               Yeah, absolutely. Modern Classrooms project’s a nonprofit, we were founded out of DC. And our entire vision as an organization is to support educators in actually accomplishing a lot of the buzzwords we often hear, right? Things like personalized learning, student-centered instruction, mastery-based and competency-based grading. I think for a lot of educators across the country in the world, they aspire to create classrooms that look like that, including myself, when I was teaching in DC public schools. But when you wake up in the morning and you go, I support either 30 students a day or 150 in my… If I’m at the secondary level and I need to figure out how to pull this off with all the challenges and constraints that I face within a traditional school system, what do I actually do? We built an instructional model that provides a blueprint for how educators actually do that.

It’s a blended, self-paced mastery-based approach where essentially educators eliminate live lectures with digital resources and instructional videos that they create or leverage from external resources, letting students work at their own pace within a unit of study or a short burst. And then finally getting to mastery-based grading where students don’t move forward based on day of the week, but actual understanding of content. So, we created the instructional model, we saw a ton of success with it. And now, the organization’s vision is to very simply empower as many educators as possible across the country and the world with our instructional approach.

Horn:                So, it sounds awesome. Before we go with the plan of questions that I wanted to ask, I thought actually maybe it makes sense for you to quickly define those buzzwords in a bit of a lightning round, if you will. Let’s start with… You said, personalizing learning. What does that mean from your perspective?

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