MC Mentor Chad Frade shares how he became a mastery-based teacher, and how it has benefitted students.
“ I had the epiphany: these tests that loom over our head are aligned to skills, and once you identify the skills and incorporate them into your curriculum, your students can both master your class and the Regents because the test is just a stop on our destination to college-and-career ready. ”
In 2013, I started teaching 11th grade English for the first time after five years of teaching 9th graders. The shift from the younger grade to an upperclassmen, Regents-bearing course was overwhelming, and as I taught Arthur Miller's The Crucible, an instructional coach noted that I was teaching juniors as though they were freshmen. In order to properly prepare students for college (as opposed to introducing them into high school), I was perplexed on how to approach that daunting task.
A colleague teaching AP Literature was utilizing mastery-based learning, and she had found success in the previous year. I was hesitant, but once I looked at the skills that students had to mastery by 11th grade, combined with the skills assessed on the ELA-Regents and the AP English courses, I identified 20 skills and upon refinement, realized that there were really 13 skills that students needed to master in order to be successful.
That year, I shifted my focus from content to skills and in doing so, created assessments, performance tasks, and lesson plans that focused on one skill aligned to a great goal. Through a revision process, wherein I received feedback from my department and administrators, my curriculum revolved around a synthesis of skills that were repeatedly assessed with times and spaces for revision (or Try Again Days), my "scores" went up by 15%. From then on, my scores climbed, and I had the epiphany: these tests that loom over our head are aligned to skills, and once you identify the skills and incorporate them into your curriculum, your students can both master your class and the Regents because the test is just a stop on our destination to college-and-career ready.
Chad Frade, MC Mastery Mentor
Over the years, as I have changed grades and schools, one of the keys to my success as a mastery-based teacher are the planning tools that allowed me to organize my thoughts and effectively convey the goals, major ideas, and instructional moves. Additionally, it allowed me to figure out how and when to assess skills, especially considering revision and opportunities to assess feedback. I am a huge proponent of planning with mastery in mind, and it transformed my instruction. I realized that in adopting mastery-based learning, all of my students received an equitable, higher-quality, more rigorous classroom experience in English instruction. In the years that followed, I refined my mastery-based instruction to include standards-based rubrics, actionable feedback, aligned essential skills, one-on-one conferences, and relevant, engaging performance tasks that considered an audience outside of the teacher.
Want to see how it all comes together? Check out Chad’s unit plan for The Great Gatsby. And here is Chad’s entry document introducing a unit on Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Chad Frade is an Instructional Coach and English teacher at MC Living Lab School Urban Assembly Maker Academy, and previously worked at MC Active Member Urban Assembly School for Design and Construction.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom and experience with the MC community, Chad!