Newspaper summary

THE NEW YORK TIMES

A New Kind of Classroom: No Grades, No Failing, No Hurry

By Kyle Spencer Aug. 11 2017

Summary
In this article the newspaper explained about this newest school program that is
challenging the way teachers and students think about academic
accomplishments, students are encouraged to focus instead on mastering a set
of grade-level skills, like writing a scientific hypothesis or identifying themes
in a story, moving to the next set of skills when they have demonstrated that
they are ready. The strategy looks different from classroom to classroom, as
does the material that students must master. But in general, students work at
their own pace through worksheets, online lessons and in small group
discussions with teachers. They get frequent updates on skills they have
learned and those they need to acquire.
Mastery-based learning, also known as proficiency-based or
competency-based learning, is taking hold across the country. More than 40
schools in New York City — home to the largest school district in the country,
with 1.1 million students — have adopted the program. the method faced
considerable resistance from parents and teachers annoyed that the time-
consuming, and sometimes confusing, change has come from top-tier school
administrators. Some contend that giving students an unlimited amount of
time to master every classroom lesson is unrealistic and inefficient.
Some of the schools— like the North Queens Community High School —
came to mastery-based learning as a way to help disillusioned and at-risk
students. At Flushing International High School, whose student body is
dominated by recent immigrants, mastery-based learning lets students
concentrate on learning English. This gets them speaking, reading and writing
as quickly as possible, while also rewarding them for picking up academic
skills and knowledge. In a biology classroom, for example, lab reports are
evaluated on the student’s understanding of concepts as well as on a command
of scientific vocabulary.
To make the system work, in this article the teachers used New York
State curriculum guidelines and Common Core standards to develop a rubric
of every skill students needed before they could move to the next grade. In one
of the school example in the sixth-grade class, there were 37 skills designated
in math and 37 in English. They included the ability to add and subtract
decimals; identify, understand and describe unit rate; recognize story
elements; and discern what is important in a text.
This article was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news website
focused on inequality and innovation in education.

My Comment : i think my perseption about this article, as a teacher in Indonesia

i think we should try to learn this new method that has bring a big succesfully in
America. If this program could apply in Indonesia we can be more easy to
achive the goal of teaching and helps student to learn better.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/nyregion/mastery-based-learning-no-
grades.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Feducation&action=click&contentCollec
tion=education&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=41
&pgtype=sectionfront