Hello, MC Community!
This is a special edition of “Dear MC.” in which, instead of responding to a question we got from you, we instead asked 3 teachers across our community to weigh in on a specific topic: How to deal with missing student work, a common puzzle for teachers in a mastery-based learning environment. We first share our query to them, and then, here and in the next blog post, we share the thoughtful and varied responses we received.
Enjoy! And thanks to the teachers for sharing their ideas and practices— Meg for the MC program team
MC practitioners in the wild—exchanging ideas at the Winter Quarterly.
Dear Esteemed MC practitioners,
The question we hear most often centers around this question: what do you do about missing work? Sometimes the question takes the form: How do you teach deadlines? Or it lurks in the background of: How do you motivate students?
New-to-mastery teachers ask as they struggle to input grades. Teachers five years deep in their process ask because they want their mastery system to be philosophically pure. We on the MC team have a variety of answers, and best practices we can relay back, but in your own words: What do you do about missing work?
Love, the MC team
Hi, MC team!
Thanks for asking. I would say this is an issue we grapple with a lot, and while we haven't found the perfect system for handling it, I feel relatively comfortable with how I personally deal with late work.
First, I would say that philosophically, I believe students having the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of skills and content is my higher priority over meeting deadlines (not to say I don't think deadlines are also important.) Because of this belief, I tend to accept late work for quite some time. My rule of thumb is to accept late work as long as the work is still a valid assessment of the skill or content that I want them to master.
For example, we did a case study on the Rwandan genocide that ended about a week before Thanksgiving. I accepted late homework assignments (which are usually text-dependent questions and some evaluative thinking questions) until after the Thanksgiving break—about two weeks after we ended the case study. It was no longer useful for them to go back and read a text we had read a month prior and have them answer questions about it—no longer a valid assessment of any learning targets. I accepted the final assessment—a short essay answering our guiding question—indefinitely, because it is still a valid assessment, although, pretty much every student who will do it had done it by the beginning of December ( this did ensure that almost all students completed the assignment). The final deadline for everything will be about a week before grades are due, so I leave enough time to grade.
As far as penalties go, the main thing mechanism that could be a penalty for not meeting a deadline is assessing habits of work. These habits of work outcomes (e.g. collaboration, deadlines, participation) count for 30% of a student's grade. (I would actually prefer they counted for nothing or maybe just 10%, but I digress.) Students who turn in work late would get a lower grade on that assignment for their deadline outcome: “I always communicate with my teacher about extensions or supports needed well before deadlines.” Some teachers might also restrict whether or how much a student can revise a late assignment. This is also a natural consequence of turning in an assignment late--there is just less time to revise and get feedback. If students don't turn in an assignment at all, we use "M" in JumpRope, which converts to a 0.
I don't love this and think it would typically be better to just have no grade, i.e. “no evidence of mastery.” But if a kid rarely turns in work and only has one or two assessments of a learning target, they might not have valid evidence of mastery—better to have more data points. It's a bit of a Catch-22 for a few outlier students, but in many of these cases it is moot because the student hasn't sufficiently demonstrated mastery on the few learning targets we have data for.
Kevin Mears, teacher at Leaders High School.
One last thought about this in relation to daily homework/assessments is that I give students the opportunity to self-assess some of these assignments on academic learning targets. Most of my daily assignments are initially just assessed using habits of work learning targets. Students get a grade for completing it in a timely manner. Then, at some point, I ask students to choose 2-4 assignments where they think they have demonstrated mastery of an academic learning target, and to give themselves a grade on a rubric for that learning target. They have to justify why they earned that grade. I check to make sure their grade reflects what their work shows. I try to do this twice a semester or at the end of a big case study. So they are taking daily assignments that don't actually count for much and choosing their best work to demonstrate mastery of the targets.
I hope this helps some, and look forward to hearing what other schools/teachers do.
Best,
Kevin Mears, Esteemed Mastery Practitioner
Kevin is originally from Denver, CO, and has been a teacher in New York since 2005, and at Leaders High School since 2009. He enjoys eating good food (but doesn't qualify as a foodie) and traveling to interesting places.