Every student is different. I know this is not really a revelation for most of you, but do we really try to adapt our instruction with this concept in mind?

My family is full of very different learners. My husband hates reading (especially instructions), but he can do anything hands-on. He wants to take things apart and then put them back together to see how they work. On the other hand, my brother-in-law wants to read about everything and completely understand it before he attempts any sort of hands-on learning. I am somewhere in between.

I think my students follow this same pattern. Traditionally, school has been aimed at book learners. I have many students who struggled with tests and paper assessments but were great at labs. I wanted to even the playing field in my class so that these students could be successful also. I also feel like knowing something and applying it are two different things, so I decided to add in Mastery Demonstrations.

What are mastery demonstrations? Glad you asked. Mastery demonstrations are a time for my kids to show what they know. I typically use these after we have learned the material as a hands-on assessment.

How do mastery demonstrations work? I first tried this with my Circuits & Electricity Unit in Physics. I created two different demonstrations for this unit.

Mastery Demo #1: I put everything a student would need to build a circuit in a basket. Their task was to build a complete, working circuit using everything in the basket. They had ~8 minutes to complete this task. To prevent cheating, I had different materials in each basket in the lab. Once they had a complete working circuit, they had to draw the schematic diagram for their circuit.

Mastery Demo #2: I placed all of our circuit building materials on a table. Each student was given a schematic and required to build a working circuit that matched their schematic. They had ~8 minutes to complete this task.

How did it go? Students found this challenging. For my book learners, they had struggled to apply what they had learned. They did not understand circuits nearly as well as they thought they did. However, my hands-on students had no trouble at all. They met this challenge and blew it out of the water. Mission accomplished.

I love to read! My husband thinks I am a complete nerd, but I don’t care. I especially enjoy reading other teacher’s blogs for new and innovative ideas. Some teachers are doing some really great things in their classrooms, and I want to know if I can incorporate any of these great ideas into my own classroom.

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is by Matthew Moore, a high school math teacher. One of his ideas was to change his math curriculum from a linear format to a non-linear format. Instead of teaching Topic A, Topic B, and Topic C in order, what if we rearranged the sequence. Does Topic A really need to be first? Maybe. Maybe not.

Since I had already switched my class to a flexible-paced learning environment, I was really interested in the idea of a more non-linear format. What if instead of teaching the unit in the same order as always, what if I clustered the information around central topics. I decided to start with Circuits & Electricity and give it a shot.

I watched his video on how he creates a non-linear lesson using Google Drawings. So I started with my objectives and created my first ever Google Drawing. I decided that a completely non-linear unit would not work in this case, so I broke my unit into 4 parts. Here is a screenshot of my first attempt at non-linear instruction.

So how did it go? Glad you asked. It actually went better than I expected. It was interesting the first week because it was new and unfamiliar. Once my kids understood that they could do Part 1 in any order, it got much easier. They loved having more control and more choices over how they learned.

For some kids, having all 4 parts on one Google Drawing was overwhelming. So for the next unit, I made separate drawings for each part.

They also really liked having all of the links to assignments on one document. I had chosen to create all of the assignment for this unit in Google. This was great, because with all of these new changes, I was bound to make some a lot of mistakes. Using Google, it was really easy to make changes that were instantly live. Sometimes I just needed to clarify instructions or change a link to a video. Now I only had to change it in one place instead of 6.

Using Google also allowed for more variety in assignments. I was no longer limited to paper pencil tasks. Now my students could use technology to create all kinds of new products to show me what they learned. This provided great opportunities for differentiation that were easy for me to manage.

Overall, this was a really positive change to my classroom. I am not sure how well it will work with every unit, but it will definitely work with most of them. I plan to continue teaching this way. My kids loved it, and I loved it.

Here are the things that stood out to us from the student survey:

1. Students love being able to work at their own pace. Students who needed more time were able to slow down, while our more advanced students could work more quickly.
2. As teachers, we always have a plan of how a unit should progress, but we don’t always provide this information to our students at the beginning of the unit. When we changed to the flexile-paced format, our students now have all of the information about a unit on the first day. They know when all assignments will be due and can now adapt their schedules accordingly.
3. It was evident that our students noticed that they were able to get more 1:1 instruction (if necessary) when they needed it, not just at the end of class.
4. Students really seemed to take more ownership of the class. When we asked for ways to improve our instruction, they really gave thoughtful answers with practical ways that we could implement some simple changes.

Bases on our student survey responses and our observations during the unit, we made some minor changes for the next unit. Here are some of our changes:

1. We added a class calendar for the unit. We created the calendar using a Google doc, so that if we needed to make changes on the fly, the student link was updated immediately.                                                                                                                                                                                       We color-coded the days to make it easier to see what was happening in class each day. We posted the calendar on our Schoology pages, and we printed a hard-copy and posted it in our rooms. Our kids loved this change because it made it easy to know what was happening each day in class.
2. Our students really preferred having lab days as a class instead of working on them individually. They wanted to be able to discuss the lab with other people during the lab. This was a really easy change to make and actually made it much easier on us.
3. We changed the Optional Assignments to Supplemental Assignments. To the students, optional implied that you really didn’t need to do the assignments and that was not our intent. By changing the title to supplemental, our students understood that these weren’t just busy work.
4. The types of assignments are changing from online worksheets to more authentic, student-created assignments (EX. Real world posters, online discussions, comics…)