I just read this article by Aubrey Walsh in CommonLit.
The new school year offers a great chance for a fresh start for students and teachers. Students are in the right place to embrace new ways of thinking as they set goals for the year, making this time of year particularly important for encouraging students to be okay with making mistakes and to embrace a growth mindset.
It led me to this video, look below, and the transcript found here from a speech by Sal Kahn.
I’m here today to talk about the two ideas that, at least based on my observations at Khan Academy, are kind of the core, or the key leverage points for learning. And it’s the idea of mastery and the idea of mindset.
Two of my favorite topics these days, mastery and the idea of the growth mindset and positive mindset. I have previously written some articles on both topics.
So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite. Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F — do it the other way around. What’s variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what’s fixed is that they actually master the material.
And it’s important to realize that not only will this make the student learn their exponents better, but it’ll reinforce the right mindset muscles. It makes them realize that if you got 20 percent wrong on something, it doesn’t mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow. It means that you should just keep working on it. You should have grit; you should have perseverance; you should take agency over your learning
I encourage you to read the text found here and watch the video. You can even answer some questions while reading the text giving you time to reflect on the meaning and on the message. Once again someone who advocates for changing the system working on making learning the constant, not the time.