By MC Director Joy Nolan
The Mastery Collaborative community of K-12 schools across NYC seek to improve academics and school culture by moving toward effective schoolwide use of youth-centered, culturally responsive-sustaining, mastery-based shifts. This is multi-dimensional work. Understandably, we are often asked: How does it look in real life? How can we get started and keep deepening our practice?
Today we share an updated resource that introduces the basics of youth-centered approaches, culturally responsive-sustaining education (CRSE), and mastery-based learning—and then invites readers to engage in a process of exploring, reflecting, brainstorming, and designing an action plan to effect meaningful change in your work with young people that can support equity and clarity, increase support, and decrease stress for everyone—yourself included.
Making these shifts is ongoing collaborative work that deepens and opens out over time, we have all found. We engage in this journey knowing it will influence and possibly transform our mindsets, practices, and resources; our identities and our interactions with others—the young people and families we serve, our colleagues in school and beyond. Engaging deeply in this work involves a commitment over time to our own evolution, to our collective evolution, and to the young people we work with, who are both our present and our future.
This updated CRSE/Mastery Growth Plan: http://bit.ly/MCGrowthPlan is offered as a way to take the pulse of work happening in your own school or your own practice—and to create a way forward that deepens your work. We offer this to educators who seek to support love of learning (students’, your own, your colleagues’, and others’), build young people’s cognitive capacities, celebrate their cultures and identities, attend to their sense of belonging, and live toward our shared values of racial equity and justice, anti-oppression, healthy school culture, and delight in learning.
This is a “live” document that will be updated over time as we increase our awareness and expertise about how we adults can join forces to better serve the young people in our public schools.
What’s included in this updated resource?
Pages 3-7: Basics of CRSE and Mastery-based Learning. Engage here with short resources that introduce the MC community’s dual focuses: CRSE and mastery, and how they can combine to create youth-centered, dynamically responsive, more equitable learning spaces.
Pages 8-11: CRSE/Mastery Growth Plan. Engage here in a process of exploring, reflecting, brainstorming, and designing an action plan.
Page 12: More learning you may wish to pursue.
Thanks for spending time on this important work! Please reach out along the way if we can be company on the pathway, or support your work in any way. You can reach us here: team@masterycollaborative.org.
Here’s our updated MC Growth Plan Resource. Let us know how you put it to use!