Mastery-based learning refers to an instructional approach where students have to exhibit a certain threshold of competence with a task before moving on to the next.

Pedagogy

Mastery Learning

Instructional Strategy

Self-Pacing: Self-paced approaches to learning are those where students are provided learning tasks that they complete at a speed that is customized to their personal levels of mastery. In these learning environments, students can progress through the material based on their learning needs. They can take longer with material they might struggle with, skip topics that cover material they already know, or repeat topics as needed.

Instructional Activity

Daily Goal-Setting: Students set a goal, create an action plan, and adjust the plan accordingly as they work towards this goal.

These are future-focused, solution-based skills students need to live and succeed in the present and future world.

There are 6 Essential Fluencies:

1. Solution Fluency

2. Information Fluency

3. Creativity Fluency

4. Media Fluency

5. Collaboration Fluency

6. Global Citizenship

Pedagogy

Essential Fluencies

Instructional Strategy

Active learning through creativity.

Use creativity to solve real-world problems. Creativity, which is relevant to the learner, fosters determination.

Instructional Activity

Present the students with a problem-solving scenario that genuinely matters to them. Then turn them loose to explore solutions to the problem.

Critical Consciousness is the ability to recognize and analyze systems of inequality and the commitment to take action against those systems.

Pedagogy

Critical Consciousness

Instructional Strategy Make the familiar seem strange.

This involves identifying and critically analyzing hidden assumptions, values or power structures in familiar things. Students should also identify assumptions or beliefs in familiar ideas.

Instructional Activity Identify and analyze the origins of assumptions or beliefs in meritocracy, color-blindness, and traditional gender roles. Ask students to consider where these assumptions and beliefs come from and how they serve to benefit or oppress people.

Student-Centered Learning shifts the focus of instruction from the teacher to the student.

Pedagogy Student-Centered Learning

Instructional Strategy Project-Based Learning In Project Based Learning students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.

Instructional Activity Students build their reading fluency and comprehension skills by creating engaging video productions of stories. Students work in teams to engage in a close reading of selected stories, create storyboards, and write reader’s theater style scripts for these stories. They then plan and produce their dramatic readings as video stories. Student hosts conclude each story with an explanation of the story’s central message, moral or theme.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, also known as simply Common Core, is an educational initiative from 2010 that details what K–12 students throughout the United States should know in English language arts and mathematics at the conclusion of each school grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Pedagogy Common Core

Instructional Strategy Relational Equality or Relational Equity This is, “Promoting Equitable relations in classrooms; relations that include students treating each other with respect and considering different viewpoints fairly”

Instructional Activity Fractions With Sense-Making Ask students to draw their solutions. Ask them to think about how they see math. In this video example, Cathy Humphreys asks students to make sense of 1 divided by 2/3 by drawing their solutions. Watch the video to find out more.

Behaviorism is a popular concept that focuses on how students learn. Behaviorism focuses on the idea that all behaviors are learned through interaction with the environment, and that innate or inherited factors have very little influence on behavior.

Pedagogy Behaviorism

Instructional Strategy Growth Mindset Through this strategy, a teacher praises the process that kids engage in: their effort; their strategies; their focus; their perseverance; and their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient, a growth mindset.

Instructional Activity Students write down a mistake that they made on a piece of paper. They crumple that paper and throw it at the wall with as close of a feeling as they can have to when they made that mistake. After a minute, they then pick up the paper, open it, and look at their mistake again. The kumu encourages them to accept that everyone makes mistakes, no matter how hard we try, and no matter who we are. Students are led in a discussion on how to improve on their actions next time, and what they might do if they make another mistake. They then crumple up the paper again, and throw it away for good.

Blended Learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace, and is at least partially delivered away from the home.

Pedagogy Blended Learning

Instructional Strategy Flipped Classroom

A flipped classroom is structured around the idea that lecture or direct instruction is not the best use of class time. Instead students encounter information before class, freeing class time for activities that involve higher order thinking.

Instructional Activity Fishbowl Discussion Students are introduced to a topic at home with the help of videos and other tailored content. During the class, a small group of students take part in a peer-mediated discussion about the topic, bringing different perceptions of the topic to the table. The remaining students sit in a larger circle watching the discussion, taking notes and critiquing the logic and content of the discussion. The outer circle then discuss the interaction and provide additional insights and constructive feedback.

Learner-centered pedagogy creates an environment that speaks to the heart of learning. It encourages students to deeply engage with the material, develop a dialogue, and reflect on their progress. It represents a shift away from the “sage-on-the-stage” mentality and puts the students’ learning at center stage.

Pedagogy Learner-Centered

Instructional Strategy Role of the Teacher

Instructional action focused on students’ learning. Approaches in this strategy avoid the tendency to tell students what to learn.

Instructional Activity

Not “reading the syllabus” to students Providing “how-to” study advice.