Let mastery be your metric
Most of the time, it’s okay if it takes multiple tries to get the hang of something. (Photo by George Jackman for Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd, 1930)
Each human being is on their own unique developmental timetable. It doesn't matter whether a baby learns to sit up at five months or eight months — it makes no difference in the quality of the sitting. Don’t let your pediatrician scare you — it's okay if your child isn't walking or talking on the same day as everyone else who was born the same day. Everyone is different.
Unfortunately, traditional school requires that everyone born within a few months of each other hit specific cognitive milestones as a group.
When this person requires a little longer to hit these milestones but does not have that time, they all to often end up believing that they are stupid or "slow."
To make matters worse, such a student may never be given the opportunity to catch up or fill in the gaps.
That's how I end up with students who come to me in middle school without a basic number sense or an understanding of place value.
It's not because these students are incapable of understanding these concepts. It's just that they missed something back in first grade, and it never got filled in. That concept, foundational to all other concepts, left them unable to understand virtually anything that came afterward.
It's as though we're conducting classes in Chinese and expecting everyone to have the same level of understanding — regardless of whether they speak Chinese.
After many of these kinds of experiences, students learn that there's no point in trying to understand.
There's no point in raising their hand, because someone else will always be faster.
They learn that they have nothing to contribute.
They learn that school is a source of nothing but stress and drama. And trauma. And all day, they have teachers (and maybe parents) hounding them to get work done that they don't know how to do. Maybe they don't even know how to organize a list of what they are supposed to do. They go home just trying to forget all the pain of facing their inadequacy, only to return to school and realize that they've fallen farther behind, all while sinking lower in the estimation of the adults in their lives.
There is a better way. In order to prevent such painful school experiences, we can take the revolutionary step of allowing a student to take all the time they need in order to learn the material or master a certain concept.
When we let mastery be our metric — and not the calendar or the clock — we begin to let students experience what confidence and competence feel like. When you can see yourself getting better, learning is enjoyable and addictive instead of unpleasant and boring. Paradoxically, students end up making faster progress after all.
Mastery-based pacing and grading are not possible in most school programs, but it’s a core aspect of the philosophy behind The Rulerless School. Check it out!