Teaching for the Stars

In addition to creating a new course this past semester, I also took on another creative teaching endeavor by implementing mastery-based grading in one of my courses for the first time. I’m going to write a short series of posts talking about my approach and my experiences: Motivation guiding my design (this post) Implementation of my system Reflections and moving forward If you’re reading this, I’m not assuming you have any background in what mastery-based grading is, but I don’t want to spend too much time explaining the various components because they will mostly be revealed through my reasoning and approach. However, it is important that I would describe the key tenets of such a system as (a) assessment and grades are based on the understanding (“mastery”) of learning objectives rather than a traditional numerical scale, and (b) there should be a way for students to have additional attempts to demonstrate mastery. So why did I want to do something like this in the f...

As yet another semester comes to a close, this one was even more special than usual because my vision of creating a new class finally came to life. Considering I assigned my students a final reflection assignment, I thought I’d share my thoughts and experiences as well. First some background if you haven’t been following along: the goal of creating an entire class on redistricting that authentically uses math in the context of a relevant (and often contentious) political issue was almost two years in the making. In my last semester at UConn (Spring 2018), Adam Giambrone (now teaching at Elmira) and I tried the “let’s throw some things [content] at the wall [students] and see what sticks” approach to teaching this topic which for my money is an underrated approach to education – you don’t always need to have a plan! (More on that later.) Anyway, upon being hired at Trinity, I was connected to Jack Dougherty who made me quickly realize that my goal of creating such a c...