Molly Nealeigh’s Mastery Based Classroom

Education is extremely important for the all round development of a child. Curriculum, monthly assessments, assignments that are usually designed by the school play a key role in imparting knowledge to the child. This is the ordinary approach that almost all educational institutions follow. An exception to this approach is Molly Nealeigh’s fourth-grade math classroom at Piney Grove Elementary School. In this class, students are allowed to make an analysis of the skills that they need to improve.

Students engage themselves in this improvisation most of the times. Every 12 weeks during the school year, students here take assessments to monitor their progress towards mastering all of the standards in the fourth-grade curriculum. Nealeigh’s fourth-graders pay attention to the results and chalk out their strengths and weaknesses in order to draw an analysis of the areas where they need to invest more time. Nealeigh is extremely supportive as a teacher. She helps them understand their results. Students calculate a percentage for each standard depending on how many related questions they attempted correctly. When students get 80 to 100 percent of questions related to a given standard correct, Nealeigh calls it mastery, and the students are not required to perform any review. In case if the questions attempted correctly are less than 60 percent in a given standard, the students need to work on that area with the assistance of a teacher. Nealeigh offers mastery based learning in her classroom. Usually a teacher teaches one topic a day and then moves on to the next one irrespective of whether the students have understood the previous one or not. But Nealeigh’s classroom is an exception to this. Here, students are permitted to keep going back to any topic until they derive clarity in that respect. Indeed, we need more teachers like Molly Nealeigh who dare to think differently. This would surely be a great contribution to our education system.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://hechingerreport.org/what-mastery-based-can-look-like-in-the-classroom/