Why Schools Should Ditch A-F Grades And Focus On Mastery

Welcome to the future of education. Really excited about today's conversation. Longtime friend and collaborator in the space of education, Scott Ellis, who was the CEO of the Learning Accelerator and now has started up an organization called MasteryTrack with a really cool tool to help do mastery learning, which for the. For those tuning in. You may have heard of mastery learning from folks like Sal Khan. He always talks about how you would never build a house with just part of a foundation and say, oh, we got an 80% or a B and now let's go build the first floor on top of that. But that's actually how our schools work. And here today to join us and explain all about mastery learning and how to actually implement it is Scott Ellis. Scott, thanks for being here.

Nice to see you this morning, Michael.

Yeah. So, Scott, I would love to dive in on the first part of our conversation. Just for those tuning in who maybe aren't familiar with mastery learning or competency based learning and concepts around that. What exactly are we talking about and what would it look like in practice?

Well, I think fundamentally the key is to enable students to move forward in their learning at their own pace as they master content. So rather than simply saying, starting to work on decimals, and now it's Tuesday and it's time to move on. And if you already knew it before we started, well, I'm sorry you've been bored, but that's what we did. And if you're still confused and haven't got it yet, I'm sorry, but we're out of time and we're moving on anyway. And then for some students, when you're ready, great, it's time for you to learn the next thing. And shifting from that world to say, no, the goal is not teaching, the goal is learning. And so the whole system should be based on learning. And so the metric is not have I taught it yet? If I've taught it, we keep going. The answer is, have the students learned it yet? And if they've learned it now, we're ready to move on. And so I think the core of this is let's make sure we give the students and the teachers the information so they know in real time, here's where they are in their learning, here's what they've mastered so far. And then the teachers and the students can use that information to say, now what should they learn next? And for some students, they're ready to go on to the next thing. And then. And for other students, they need more support and we should provide them that support because the Goal is to make sure that every student learns what we want them to learn.

So makes a ton of sense on its premise. I'd love to dig in a little bit deeper and explore some of the objections people have and sort of how it works on the ground. One that I hear a lot is the notion that a student may confront a concept, but they, they're not sort of ready to master it yet. Right. Like it's an introduction to something and then what teachers call spiraling. Like you're going to have to come back to it. How do you know though whether a student should move on to something else or stay on it? And when they come back to it, like, how do you manage that process of not holding someone back just because maybe they aren't ready to master something?

Right. Well, I mean, I think there's a, there's a kind of an additional level of precision we need. And when we talk about what does it mean to master something, sometimes I feel like we use the word mastery and I hear the choir singing and the angels come out and we say, oh, mastery. And I say, everyone calm down for a second. Right? We've been doing this all the time, right. If you're an educator working with a student and you're trying to help them learn something new, at some point the student will do it and you'll say, great, we got it. The learning we were hoping to create has just occurred and so now we can move on. And so that's what we're talking about. So the first, which is just to be clear, that when we talk about mastery, it really means that the student's ready to move on, they've learned what we wanted them to learn. And so that's great. And then I think the next piece is sometimes people talk about different levels of mastery and it kind of links to the spiraling conversation. And what I say is that there are not different levels of mastery. What there are different learning objectives, each of which is sort of binary, each of which can be mastered. And so you can say the students mastered the basic level of this skill and then now they can work maybe on a more advanced skill. But it's not spiraling around the same objective. It's actually a different objective. And it can either be a more complicated version of using this skill. So you could say, are you able to like solve, you know, are you able to solve problems that are multiplying two one digit numbers versus solving a word problem using that? And that may be a different skill? Or we could say, hey, are you able to do it at all. And then are you able to do it fluently and quickly? And there actually could just be one objective, which is no, you need to be able to solve them quickly. Or there could be two. And I run in situations. You could think, for example, in something like dance, where you'd say, can someone do this move at all? Versus can they do it at the level of a competition team or for performance ready? And not everyone's aspiring to have that higher level objective, but they're not different levels of mastery. And I think a lot of times people talk about them, oh, it's different levels of mastery kind of very naturally. And I think we need to be more precise in our thinking as educators and say, no, they're actually different learning objectives, each of which can be mastered. And then there is a question that we come back to which is, well, is it sort of like once mastered, always mastered, and so you never need to come back again? And I think we all know that kids do forget things and there's a well known sort of aspect of cognition there. And I think again, it comes back to us as educators to be clear, what do we want? And if we want, it's for the student to show that they can. Like, we got it. My son, I'm teaching him right now and using basic formatting for Excel charts. So yes, now he's shown he can do it. So now the question is, do I come back in six months and say, hey, show me that again, or do I build that into future objectives? So now, when I say now, you're going to build a full cash flow model, including charts. And by the way, the formatting that you learned before needs to be included here. And so I think there are different ways of dealing with it. And then there can even be an objective, which is, as educators, we say, my goal is that you know how to do this, and six months later when I check, you can still do it. Let's just be explicit. And then we solve a lot of the kind of spiraling and levels of mastery stuff that I think has kind of confused us because we haven't been clear about what we really mean.

Gotcha. So that basically, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's about getting more precise in what we mean from a learning objective perspective, whether that's understanding knowledge, skill, being able to perform a skill, being able to apply something, or even outside of the academic domains. I imagine in terms of habits of success or social emotional learning, actually like knowing about something, demonstrating it, demonstrating it at different levels each would be their own, if you will, objective to be mastered or not. And then we, once we've defined it with a sufficient level of proficient or excuse me, precision, then we can have a binary distinction. You've mastered it or you haven't. And maybe, I guess you could say a third one would be, and you haven't even started working on it yet to sort of understand where someone is against that. Do I have, am I, am I taking your, your point correctly?

Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing I would add and I think can help in this is we have learning objectives, which is what do we want the student to know or be able to do? And then we have mastery thresholds which is like what do you mean when you say someone's mastered it? And I kind of think in a lens like at some point we're going to mark a student green and say, yep, you've got it right, ready to move on. We need to know what that threshold is. And what I've seen is that depending on the type of objective, there are different types of mastery thresholds. Right. If we're talking about something like computation, like multiply two one digit numbers, then it may be that the way you demonstrate mastery is solving problems and the mastery of threshold is getting nine out of 10 right within three minutes or something. And so then there's a pretty straightforward one. But if we talk about a behavior like in social emotional learning, one of the elementary objectives is to treat others belongings with respect. And so now we may think differently about the mastery threshold where there's one part which is can you articulate what that means? Like you at least know what we're trying to do? The second is can you do it once so I know you're capable of doing it? And then the third is, do you do it consistently? And I hear things like you hear teachers sometimes have groups of kids where they're actually kind of assessing each other and saying, so are we doing this? Or a teacher may check in every couple weeks or we're kind of looking for a pattern. And there are different ways of doing that. But it's those that last aspect of are we looking for consistent behavior? And if so, let's just be clear that that's what that is. But you know, the learning objective is clear. Treat others belongings with respect. And then the mastery threshold, we're clear about in this case maybe having three parts. Can you articulate it? Are you able to do it once and then are you able to do it repeatedly? And I think these kinds of thresholds apply whether you're talking about Spanish oral language or kung fu or basketball, or identifying the theme of a story. I think the same thinking applies for anything we want someone to learn.

Gotcha. That's super helpful. And essentially what I hear you saying is take that learning objective and break it into three different, for example, demonstrable behaviors or skills that we can then assess against and be clear about what the assessment is. I suppose, as well, uh, it gets into the other. Another objection that you sometimes hear around mastery learning, which is. So Peter Green, who. Who. Who sort of writes about this stuff is. And on social media, he gave the example recently that. That you could demonstrate mastery of being able to shoot a free throw. And we might agree that, you know, if you're hitting, say, 70 or 80% of your free throw attempts, that that's, you know, having mastered that skill or something like that. But then mastering basketball, he said, like, how do you. How do you even think about mastering basketball? It's a silly idea. And I think the reason he brings it up is his big worry is that if we go into the direction of mastery learning, we'll just reduce everything to sort of these atomistic parts of learning that don't actually add up to anything holistic, if you will. It'll be just reductivist. How do you. How do you think about that and respond?

Yeah, well, I think that the first, we need to get to be a little clearer about what does success look like. And especially when we talk about complex tasks, I would say absolutely. We want students to be able to do complex things, whether it's solve problems in all four operations and make sure we can solve complex word problems in those cases. And things like, how do we help people get better at basketball? But I think we need to, again, be clear about what we mean. And so I think we actually need both. We need both kind of higher level. What are we ultimately looking for the person to do that's a complex skill. And often we need to break it down into the individual parts, both so that we can think about how is the student gonna learn it and how do we track how they're doing. So in the case of basketball, I wouldn't say, oh, have you mastered basketball? What we might do is say, well, there's a part which is mastering the fundamentals of basketball. And you could say that students really mastered that learner's really mastered the fundamentals. Well, what does that look like? Well, there's one part which is, are they able to dribble? There's another Is are they able to pass, can they shoot, can they rebound, can they play defense? And maybe we might say those are kind of the five units in, in fundamentals of basketball. Well, what does it mean for them to be able to shoot? Right? And so you can talk about, well, are they able to make a layup with good form, Are they able to make a short jump shot with good form, are they able to make a short bank shot? And then eventually are they able to make free throws? And I think it could be very reasonable to say, yeah, there's a mastery threshold, which is if you can make five or seven out of 10 free throws, then we'd say, yep, you've mastered that fundamental part. And at some point when they've mastered all of those skills, then you'd be able to say, yep, I think they've mastered all the learning objectives and the fundamentals of basketball. Now you might envision there's a next level which is, are they able to do basic team play? Well, and so now part of this is executing a lot of those basic skills, those fundamentals in a game situation. So like, are they able to dribble well under pressure? Are they able to dribble with both hands? Are they able to help on defense, right? Are they able to call a switch when they get picked? And then you could really envision that an advanced, you know, team basketball, where it's really understanding what's the situation, right? How much time's left, what quarter are we in, how many fouls do I have? Therefore, how should I play defense when this guy's coming at me and should I try to take a charge or not? But I think it's not as simple as saying, well, have they mastered basketball? It's really saying, have they mastered the fundamentals? Have they mastered basic team play? Have they mastered advanced team play? And understanding? What does that mean? And I think when I first started masterytrack, actually I started out with just one fourth grade in this world, fourth grade math objective, which is to effectively solve multi step word problems in all four operations. I think about that we just say, oh, can you do math? No, can you actually do that piece I just described, which actually has five parts? Can you add, subtract, multiply, divide and do multi step word problems? Because that's what you need to be able to do to do that kind of advanced sort of synthesized learning objective. And then you can then break down what does it mean to add, to multiply, et cetera. And a lot of times I think if you envision a Situation where a new student comes to a school district and we don't know what the student knows. You don't actually have to say, well, why don't you start at the beginning and show me if you can add, you could say, oh, so you're about fourth grader, you're pretty good at math. Okay, why don't you try and master this one learning objective and if you can show me that you can solve multi step word problems in all four operations, then I'm not going to check on the little underlying pieces. And we can do the same thing in basketball, if you can say, oh no, I've been playing for a while. Well, maybe I'm not going to do all the details of. Can you show me that you can dribble five times with your right hand? I may start looking for more sort of a more advanced synthetic skill and say, oh no, you've clearly got the fundamentals. We're ready to help you work on this particular aspect of basic team player. But that clarity.

Yeah, so it's that precision. So if I. And just to back it up a little bit, taxonomies like this already exist in, in work based skills, for example, so Lumina Foundation, I'm pretty sure and some systems in the United Kingdom as well, they'll take a profession, say carpentry or whatever it might be, and they might have the skills broken out as you just started to delineate. But then they also might say, and then when we added holistically back up, you're a level two carpenter or you're a level four carpenter or gee, you're at the top of the scale, you're the LeBron James of carpentry, you're level eight or something like that. Right. And so that's how they can also break it down in terms of assembling those parts into a whole by having precision around the levels. And in tennis they do this all the time with NTRP ratings and things like that.

I guess one thing about it is part of the power I think of mastery learning is it's not rocket science and it's not like we're inventing something brand new that we've never done before. This is actually very natural for us. We just need to clarify our thinking a little bit and sharpen a few things and then we can use a lot of what we already know how to do.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then the other thing it also implies is these things don't have to be overly linear or sequential because I could be playing basketball with not A foundation of a lot of those skills mastered, yet it gives me input that, like, actually dribbling with both hands would be something good to master. I now that do that offline, if you will, outside of the game. I come back and I hopefully start to show progress. And then these things feed each other. So the performance can feed the skill development and vice versa. And I can independently be assessing mastery in both contexts.

Well, I think one of the things that I found very interesting, I had one educator that I worked with in middle school, math, and one of the things he said as we were talking about how it went is he said, I realized that I've got students who are able to demonstrate mastery of learning objectives, and they can't actually articulate what the objectives are in the first place. And so he said, I realized that I need to spend more time as an educator helping my students know what is it that we're learning here? Because the more they know, then they can learn from me as a teacher. But they can also, like you said, they can work on it outside of class. They can pursue things they're interested in. And if you think about the basketball or the tennis or the guitar analogy, I think the more we can give a learner a roadmap to say, here are the things that you need to be able to do if you want to master the basic or the intermediate or whatever. It both provides a roadmap that they could choose to follow. And there could be existing curricula they could follow step by step, but they could also say, oh, interesting, I think I want to go work on that. And it frees up the learner to figure out how to advance their own learning, either on their own or supplemented by a teacher. But now we're leveraging all of our. Both our collective abilities to help learning. Right. The learner as well as the teacher, but also really tapping in the motivation of the learner. And they can say, I want to learn X. And since I know it's kind of part of where we want to go anyway, I know I'm working on something that I need. And what a great thing.

Yeah. So now you're getting into one of the parts that I love about mastery learning also, which is this notion that we start to change. So our current grading system, A through F grades, in effect, are an autopsy on how well you have done without data to actually improve performance. There's a ton of research. We just talked about this in my podcast with Diane Tavener, actually, on class disrupted, about how when you give information like that it's demotivating to learning because it's like you're a. This student. Sorry, that's it. Whereas what you were just talking about creates actually transparency and a feedback loop where I can now use that information to, to improve my performance in an effort to get to mastery and assuming that's a goal that I and the teacher and the school system have. Is that right?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of interesting. My son, when he was in elementary school, he got back a little math test and it was one of these kind of aggregate tests with all the different, everything kind of jumbled together and he got like a 93% and we were like, great, that looks like mastered. But then I actually looked at the test and he got almost everything right on nine out of the 10 sections. And then on one section he missed all five questions. And so he had not learned one of the skills. It was very clear, but nobody knew. And if I hadn't looked and said, oh well, let's dig into this 93%, I wouldn't know that there was a gap in his learning. And then I think the other piece is that he wouldn't know either. And then when we go back to the basketball analogy, the other thing that really helps is it helps the coach or it helps the teacher when they want to look and say how am I going to use my time and how am I going to use the students learning time most effectively today? And if we can see well, where are there holes or gaps in the student's learning, let's make sure we can address those. Let's figure out where they are and figure out what they should learn next. As you say, I don't believe there is a sequence necessarily, although in many cases there is a sequence and it helps the learning process. But rather than mandating that, if we can sort of show folks here are the things you need to learn, here's some evidence about what has seemed to work best for a lot of folks, what will work best for you, and let's figure out how to make that work. Having that information enables both learners and teachers to be able to use that effectively.

You just highlighted another important facet of this, I think, which is that the transparency from your son's example, that moving to a mastery based approach with clarity around each of the objectives and what you mean by that actually creates way more transparency for the learner teacher, parents about what the child knows and can and can do and so forth. Whereas a letter grade or a percentage is really a blunt instrument that it masks over, if you will, some of those skills that maybe may have been missed or that where someone's particularly sharp in and so forth.

Absolutely. Well, the other thing that happens with grades that's interesting is I had a situation where one of my children, they didn't do very well on the first test of the quarter. And so then they spent the whole rest of the quarter kind of in this deficit mode being like, oh my gosh, how do I make up for that thing that I did poorly on that? It's almost like an albatross hanging around my neck and I can never do anything about it. And I get some point, I say, well, why would we do that? Why wouldn't we say, oh, so you tried to demonstrate mastery, you didn't succeed, that's okay, so you haven't learned it yet. So the recourse is, well, let's work on it together and then at some point you will have learned it. And then when you have, great, let's keep going. And so instead of a negative bias and a negative incentive, and ultimately it's about punishment and fear, in many cases we say no, it's about accurate information to help us all work together to help you learn, which is what we're.

Trying to do, which is the purpose there of schooling. Yeah, no, that's super helpful. So I want to turn now to implementation and thinking about that. And I'll show your website of the organization you created, MasteryTrack. Talk to us about what MasteryTrack is and what does it enable. And then I suspect by introducing that, we'll get into the question of how do you make mastery learning work on the ground in a classroom?

Yeah. So masterytrack, it's a mastery based dashboard that enables a student or a teacher, but also a principal or a parent to instantly see where students are in their learning. So you can see for the student every single learning objective and then see either that it's green because they've mastered it, or it's purple because they tried to master it and they didn't succeed, or it's gray, they just haven't gotten there yet. And the whole idea is if you make this information instantly available for educators and learners, then educators and learners can figure out what to do next. I think the exciting thing is if we look at where education is compared to where, where it was five or 10 years ago, more and more kids have Internet connectivity for sure in their schools and more of them at home. They've got devices, we've got things like Khan Academy, and we've got lots of learning software programs, and we've got more and more educators who are used to the ideas of things like station rotation model and flex model, and either using videos or creating videos and having those be part of the learning process, we have more ways for teachers to teach and for kids to learn. I think the missing piece is having that information so we know where kids are and can figure out how to use these great tools to help them learn. And so masterytrack is about not showing the way to do mastery learning, but a way that is fully scalable and it's free for any educator to try and use today.

So that's an important part of it, free for any educator to jump on and do today. I'm curious, does mastery track, when a teacher goes to use it, you know, is it already pre populated with ideas of how to create clarity around these learning objectives that we've talked about, or is that something teachers choose to do? Because that does sound like it could get very complicated very quickly to try to be precise at the right granular level of granularity, if you will, so that we can make the mastery system actually work and not fall into sort of the various traps we talked at the beginning. How does that work?

Well, so masterytrack currently has, I would say, dozens of courses now in English, math, science, social studies, kung fu. Right. I have all of these dashboards in MasteryTrack. And so any educator who wants to use MasteryTrack instantly, if they want a course that we already have, we do a data privacy agreement. We set them up for their teacher logins, their student logins, and then they're ready to go. Right. So once I get that information, half an hour later, they're ready to go. And it's a very simple system. And so I think we have all of that. And all the time I work with educators to say, hey, so we're looking for content in the following area, and if I don't have it, then we'll work together to create it. And so I've got a lot of experience helping educators, first of all, see what learning objectives they're using today. And increasingly, as more and more people are getting more knowledgeable about competency education and mastery education, I'm seeing more learning objectives that are specific and clear and demonstrable. But in cases where they're not, I kind of help the educators translate those somewhat to make it so that they've got learning objectives that enable mastery learning. And then it's really about organizing them so that they show up well on a dashboard. And a lot of what this comes down to is there's no sequence, there's no required progression. Teachers can teach and students can learn using any system you want. But it's helpful to see the learning objectives that kind of go go together, or the kind of things that kids roughly learn at about the same time on the same dashboard, because that's easy for the educator to see. And so we just structure that. Because part of the reality of implementation is all these ideas are nice. Can you actually click a button and see the dashboard? Because if not, you got to spend lots and lots of time creating a Google spreadsheet and all of this stuff. And so I've solved how to create the structure. And then I have a lot of courses already, and if it's one that I don't have, I work with educators to structure it with the agreement that when we finish, that course is now available for free for any educator in the world. And that's kind of the requirement I have for working with educators to make that happen.

And then the assessment piece of it. Do you offer assessments or is it teacher driven on that end? Or how does that work?

So I have mastery assessments for elementary math. And also I have a partnership with a startup called Level Chinese that's using masterytrack as a structure for Mandarin immersion, particularly for reading and writing. And they have developed automated assessments that are in masterytrack as well. So I have it for those courses. For the rest, I don't have automated grading built in, but I think the key and then and the way that works both in math and in Chinese as well as everything else, is the teachers can go in and they manually mark the students as mastered. And we've got functionality that enables you to mark lots of students at once and things to make it easier. But it is a step. But I think the key in all of this is the clarity. What does mastery mean? And I think this is a piece that educators, we haven't really grappled with before because we've been able to say, well, according to the pacing guide, it's time to move on. And so we're going to give everyone the test and we'll see what they get. But there's also a lot that we know because we have been assessing kids for a long time and we have seen learning happen. And so a lot of it's just using that expertise. But I don't have an automated grading yet. And I'm always interested in finding more opportunities to partner with folks to make that possible.

Cool. Two other topics as we start to wind down. The first one in reference to the current moment we're in where COVID 19 shut physical schools down for basically the end of the school year that just concluded. We're now going to have, I think most schools will reopen in a variety of formats come the fall. We're still figuring that out. Starting to get some clarity. A lot of schools went to pass fail grades or all A's or things like that. You just made a very provocative point, which is that educators haven't historically grappled with what, you know, the clarity around what is mastery for a particular concept. We have three months of summer right now. What's the opportunity? What should we do? What should schools look like in the fall? Presuming that I think there's an opportunity actually for mastery learning to help solve a lot of the challenges schools and students are facing. But talk to me about how you see it.

Well, I think there's a first piece, which is the choice about whether to go down this path. And I always say the most important thing in my work is to help students and to help educators. And sometimes we all know how hard it is just to run school. And there is a lot of work and a lot of challenges there, and certainly extremely challenging now with all of the additional work with the pandemic and the associated transition. And in some ways, you'd say as a country where we're doing an immediate jump into a lot of online learning and blended learning, which in some ways does provide an opportunity for us all to say, so now how do we use this crisis to help us transform and move forward? And so there's a first, a reality check, which is, what are you, your educators, your kids? What are you up for? And to the extent that you say we do think this is an opportunity, we've been interested in mastery learning and we want to try and make it happen. That's decision number one. But then once you decide to go down that path, I think the key is to find other organizations. There's MasteryTrack. There are a lot of other educators out there increasingly who are thinking about mastery learning and trying to help make it happen. So find others to partner with to work on this together, because there's a lot to build on. But then it's looking at your curriculum and trying to really think clearly about. So what do we want the students to know and be able to do? How clear are we about that? And then we've been doing a lot of grading. We've been going a's B's and C's. Can we, can we use some of those rubrics to say, well, so let's talk about what, what does mastery mean for these different learning objectives? And the goal is to really be able to then educate with that in mind. And then we end up, I think, doing in some ways more assessing, but it becomes sort of rapid, low stakes assessment to really understand what do the kids know so that we can then use our time effectively. And so I think that's the next piece is to try and be clear about those thresholds. And then I've seen situations where folks are still, they have to do A's, B, C's. They've got, we have an existing regulatory structure and requirements for this. But for example, a few years ago I worked with some geometry teachers to help them think about how to structure their geometry course. And when they started out, they said, well, we have say 20 units of geometry. And so we'll teach all 20. And if you get about 75% right, you get a C. And we actually restructured it to say, you know what, There are about 10 of these units that everyone needs to learn. And so we're going to make sure that the critical things are all learned. And if you master all those, that's how you get a C. Then we call it Geometry one. And then we have the next five that are important. Right? But only once you've got those, that first group and we'll call that geometry too. And if you master those five units, that's how you get a B. And then they're the last five, the most advanced. And if you master those now, you get an A. And so I think there are ways of living in the current world if people are worried about just doing pass fail or just giving A's. And I understand why, because there are real equity issues about access to technology that we've got to be honest about and figure out how to support those folks and help make sure those kids have opportunities. But we can use the mastery structure to again be clear about what we want kids to learn, be clear about what mastery means and then organize our learning and our teaching around that. And I think as compared to a number of years ago, we've come so far as a country in figuring these things out. On masterytrack, if you go to the website, there's a blog that I've written which is a series of 10 sessions talking about examples that are really clear about what does this look like in math or English or Spanish. And so I think There's a lot to learn for folks to see. So what could I do in my classroom? I think we're getting to a place where educators can do this, principals can do this. So recognize what the reality of your situation is and first things first and make sure everyone's safe and make sure you're able to do the work of school. But if you think you're in a position to try and then take the learning to the next level and to frankly take advantage of the fact that if you're going to do a lot of of transformation in your district and helping your staff and your families get used to a new way of working, take advantage of it to also implement a way that enables us to improve better learning at the same time.

Yeah. And I would add and reinforce that I think the missed opportunity for schools that have gone to pass fail or A's for all is that they've missed the opportunity to actually use Mastery learning to be very clear about what does a student know and can do and what have they just not been able to access because of all these equity reasons. You just named maybe, you know, not having a device at home, whatever it might be. And then that way we have a much clearer picture. We don't have to do all this testing and remediation when students come back. We just help them get on their own personalized learning plan and their journey and move from there. But I guess the last question on my mind is you just talked about geometry. That's being used there. You've talked about it in elementary math, you've talked about in Chinese. Give us a sense where masterytrack is being used. Like how wide a range have you seen it be deployed to? Because I think it'll be instructive for those tuning in.

Yeah, well, so it's been interesting, it's been a kind of multi year journey and the biggest thing has been to respond to what do educators want? Because this is new, it is transformational. So what I've seen is a couple years ago I had a K8 school of about 750 students who got rid of all of their existing report cards and used masterytrack for every grade, every subject for a whole school year and including we set up a functionality where we could print out mastery based report cards and mail them home to the parents a few times a year. Even though actually we don't even need that because teachers and parents and kids can see where students are instantaneously. But as part of the change management for folks saying, well, people are used to Receiving a report card, so we can do that. So I had that experience again. I've done quite a bit of work with schools around the country in elementary math and found it interesting how much middle school kids and middle school teachers actually use the elementary content just to check and make sure that the kids have actually mastered everything in terms of multiplication, order of operations, et cetera. I worked with a series of high school social studies educators a couple years ago who were using it with the C3 framework in social studies, and so very much focused around inquiry questions and the advanced thinking questions about, like, analyzing sources and assessing evidence and using mastery learning in that context. And then was really excited to see the kind of things that are happening in social emotional learning and in things like computer science, where I think the learning objectives, and I would say the standards, if you will, are getting better in my view. They're getting more specific, they're getting clearer. So, you know, looking at Rhode island, right, they rolled out computer science to their, to their state, and they have standards that are based on the national working group that I look at and say, hey, we can do mastery learning with these today. And I've actually put them all into mastery track to say, look, we've got dashboards for computer science that are available today. And so in all those areas, I see a lot of potential. And even things like the next gen science standards, I think are amazing and in many ways entirely unusable for educators as they are. They need help to turn them into something that becomes specific and clear that educators can use and so kind of gone down that path to try and say, can we build on so much the great content that's out there, but it's really all about any learner and anything we want learners to learn. The same thought process applies learning objectives, mastery thresholds, clarity about how students demonstrate mastery and how teachers assess it, and some way to organize and display the data. If you have those five pieces, then you can do mastery learning for anything.

It's a great way to end it with those five pieces being attainable and something I would urge educators and parents to advocate for so that they can get more transparency and build more motivation also into the learning process itself for students, so that it's something they want to do, not something that they're being made to do. So, Scott, super appreciate the work you continue to do. I've put the website down there at the bottom of this, people. Check it out. And thanks for doing the good work.

Thanks so much for having me.

All right. And we'll be back. The next time on the future of education.