Teaching for the Stars

It hasn’t been that long since the tragedy that took the life of Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others, but I’m still in shock. This one really hurt and was the first time I was impacted by the loss of someone I’ve never met. Growing up, Kobe was my favorite player and I rooted for the Lakers simply because of him. Obviously, he gained worldwide fame for his abilities on the court, but I’m not here to talk about any of his stats, championships, or other basketball accomplishments. There are plenty of celebrities – athletes, actors, musicians, etc. – who have become famous and commanded large followings, whether these followings are deserved or not. Our culture has a strange relationship with fame and in the social media age it has become even easier to acquire some level of fame for various good or questionable reasons. And in my quantitative mind, I think it’s reasonable to claim that the impact of our words is proportional to our “fame” or level of follo...

Now that I explained the components of my mastery-based system to you in my last post and to the students on the first day of the semester, I want to share some thoughts about how this all played out in practice. Changing the language and the narrative. This probably isn’t surprising, but it is interesting – students quickly adapted their language to match the language of the grading system. “Checkboxes” or just “checks” became the predominant vocabulary along with “tokens” and “understanding.” Early on, students knew what was expected to achieve mastery of an objective and most of their language matched my goal of improving student mindset (and aligned with the mindset language I regularly used in the classroom). Homework Assignments. The initial plan was for these assignments to be a great opportunity to earn feedback towards your mastery of objectives and not impact your final grade, but because they were de-emphasized in the grades and only grading for completion, ...

For my second post, I want to describe for you the mastery-based system that I used for my first attempt, but before I do that, let me give you a quick overview of the course in which it was used. Course: Math 114 – “Math and Politics” This is a general education course and one that I taught in each of my previous two semesters at Trinity. The course content and assessments have evolved through the semesters, with the course covering the following four units (some associated topics): Voting Theory (unweighted voting methods, fairness criteria, weighted voting) Apportionment (methods, history, paradoxes, voting power) Redistricting (overview, efficiency gap, compactness) Game Theory (Nash equilibrium, simultaneous and sequential games, mixed strategies) Before implementing the mastery-based system, assessment in this course consisted of unit exams, regular homework assignments, written responses to articles relating the topics to politics, and a group project. Keeping in...