I am watching the North Dakota Governor’s Innovation Education Summit. The online access is great as I wouldn’t travel to North Dakota to participate. North Dakota recently passed legislation to allow schools to innovate in allowing alternative models of the way student progress is established. I have been most interested in what I would describe as mastery approaches – individualized progress systems. Here is the session that describes the legislation and some insight into the ways some schools have taken advantage of this opportunity.
I am interested in the learning continuum which I understand to be the required skills and the sequence of these skills. The Kahn Academy has revealed snippets of their skill maps and competency/mastery expectation of mastery before progress is based on such maps. Some skills are hierarchically related and some not so the mapping process can be based on careful analysis of skills and subskills in complete maps or it can be more arbitrary as a concession to the demands of identifying and sequencing many skills. An important role for technology in a fully implemented approach is to maintain a record of the progress of each student within such maps to guide students and to help teachers determine how they might help individual students.