Episode 71: What Is Self Pacing?


Voiceover: Welcome to the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. Each week we bring you discussions with educators on how they use blended, self-paced, and mastery-based learning to better serve their students. We believe teachers learn best from each other, so this is our way of lifting up the voices of leaders and innovators in our community. This is the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. 


Hello and welcome to episode 71 of the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. My name is Tony Rosen. She her pronouns a program manager at Modern Classroom, and I am joined today by MCP's own director of virtual mentorship, aka my supervisor, Meg McGregor. She has been a podcast guest before episode 18, building effective instructional videos if you're interested in hearing more from her. So welcome, Meg. Hi, everyone. I'm super excited to be here again. It's been a minute. It has been. We just briefly talked about it. It has been like last year, really, right. That's been on the podcast. It's so bizarre to me, but it's so exciting to be in the space with you. And thank you so much for saying yes to the podcast listeners. Remember, if you have any questions or you hear something you really love, you can always email us at podcast@modernclassrooms.org. So, Meg, first of all, Happy New Year is 2022. How exciting. How are you feeling? Happy New Year to you, too. I'm feeling great. We have a big year coming up. I joke that Modern Classrooms time is different than normal time, but it's crazy to think that I recorded the podcast a year ago and we're going into a second summer Institute. There's just so much happening. I'm really excited for what this year is going to bring for us all. Yeah. Like you said, we have some exciting things planned out. So I'm really looking forward to everything this year, really. So just a little bit for new listeners. And sometimes our seasoned listeners really just tell us more about who you are and how you started your MCP journey. So my journey, I actually started implementing a version of the Modern Classrooms model on my own when I was a teacher in the South Bronx in New York City. And then I shifted I moved to DC Public Schools, and I started implementing this kind of blended, self paced, mastery based Ish model that I had been working on in my own classroom. And I ran into a colleague at my new school, Kareem Sarah. We know him, right? And he really introduced me to a community of implementers and gave me a few other tools in my toolkit to start implementing my own modern classroom. So I implemented the model for about three years in my physics, computer science, and engineering classes before I joined Modern Classrooms full time in 2020. And now, obviously, I'm working for Modern Classrooms. I run our virtual mentorship program. I'm in some videos, I do some presentations so our listeners might know me and maybe have seen my face before. So, yeah, that's my journey. Yeah. It's so quick, right? I feel like everything happened so quickly, but it's also just super refreshing to hear that you're able to implement this model for quite some time. And I'm always impressed, Meg, when you say, like, computer science and engineer. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, so cool. So an exciting thing this year for podcasting. We're doing seasons now, so for this season specifically, we're talking about self pacing. So when you started implementing Modern classroom in your own classroom, tell us more about your experience with self pacing. Sure. So I'm really happy to be on this episode about self pacing because I actually had a pretty unique journey with self pacing because as I said, I was implementing kind of my own version of the modern Classrooms model before I became a part of the modern classroom community. And in my first modern classroom, I was saying to my students, like, you have all term to self paced through this unit, and at the end of the term, you have to present this portfolio. And I had some must do and should do activities that had to be included in this portfolio. But I really just kind of gave my high school seniors the full term to go for it. And let me tell you, it was a total fail. And I'm going to talk about this later. I think one of the most important misconceptions about self pacing when shifting to a modern classroom is that students know how to self pace. And my high school senior certainly did not. So I didn't have any tools to facilitate self pacing, like a pacing tracker, private or public. I just kind of thought my students could self paced. And, oh, how I was wrong. And that's one of the tools I mentioned that I actually received from Kareem when I joined this community of modern classroom teachers in DC public schools and then started on my modern Classrooms journey was actually implementing a pacing tracker in my classroom is kind of like the missing secret sauce for successful self pacing for me. Yeah. And I mean, you said something that resonated with me. Right. Educators, we tend to assume that our students just know how to do something. And I learned throughout my years of teaching that actually no, let's actually assume that they don't know. So we can briefly go over it or at least have some kind of model so that students can have something to look at. So self pacing has been a buzzword for a while now in education. And so it was really nice when I came into with Modern Classroom, I was really intrigued by it because again, like you said, so many tools in our toolkit, and it just made it a little bit clear as to what self pacing would look like and not necessarily just knowing the definition. Right. So that's really exciting. And so as we continue to work with so many educators, like all over the country, all over the world, we noticed that self pacing is probably the most challenging component of our model. So what are some challenges that you've seen so far, and why do you think that self pacing is just so challenging? Yeah, it's hard to pick out, like, some challenges because there are so many challenges. But I think what makes this the most challenging aspect of our model is kind of twofold. I think the first aspect is just that, like in any classroom, modern classroom, traditional classroom, kindergarten classroom, adult classroom, whatever students will inevitably fall behind for a variety of reasons. It could be absences, it could be instructional, it could be medical, like anything could happen that could cause a student to fall behind in any kind of classroom. So trouble with helping students stay on pace isn't a uniquely modern classroom problem. It's just like a problem in education, period. And it makes self pacing even harder. Kids will struggle to stay on pace no matter what. And when we're giving them the autonomy to determine their own pacing, it's just going to kind of shine a light on that problem that already existed. So I think that's the one component that makes self pacing really hard. The second piece is kids are human, and what works for one group of kids or what works for one kid certainly does not work for another kid or another group of kids. And I think one of the most fascinating things for me implementing this model over three different years as a high school teacher, many different groups of students is sometimes in one year, one academic year, I would be doing something very different with one class period than another, especially when it comes with self pacing and supports for self pacing. And to give a very concrete example of that, my third year implementing my physics classes were kind of like a welloiled machine. I had my public pacing tracker. I conference with students periodically really have a problem with self pacing. I had developed systems to kind of vary the activities in class so students didn't get kind of like, bogged down and bored with self pacing. I had really nailed that. But I found that my high school seniors once again trend here. But my high school seniors in my computer science class were like, not succeeding with self pacing and the exact same structures that my physics students were selling. My comps by students were just struggling. And I had to totally change how I thought about self pacing for that class instead of giving students, for example, seven lessons in a unit and saying five or must do and two or should do. That's what I did with my physics classes. But in my computer science class, I actually had to say to my students, we self paced each day, but there is something due each day and we move on to another lesson the next day. And if you don't do it, it's homework. So that kind of worked for that ID class and the population of students that I had. But I just think it's a really interesting example of how there's no right answer for successful self pacing and sometimes what works for an entire class. You need to change that for one student in your class. Yeah. And you brought up some good points there again, too, Meg. It differs for every class because it just depends on your students. Right. This is off script. But how did you manage that with having different classes? You taught physics, you taught computer science, and then you had to also differ the self pacing structure. How did you manage all of that trial and error to begin with? But I love spreadsheets, which. Tony Rose, that's no surprise to you, but might be a surprise to some of our listeners. But I used a lot of auto updating trackers that I actually changed to be specific for each class. And I also found different online platforms and, like, naming conventions that just worked really well. For example, in my computer science class, they had, like, instead of must do should do aspire to do, they had not very appealing, but in A practice, A B practice, and a C practice. And A was must do, B was to do, C was aspired to do you get the idea? And I actually, like, showcase that on the tracker as opposed to just kind of like showing lessons. I showed parts of lessons and just had different color coding and different visual cues for students to help them know where they should be. For me, it was just a lot of trying things, failing, and then figuring out what worked. But most importantly, talking to my students and figuring out why certain things weren't working and why certain things were. And I think a common pitfall is saying, like, oh, my God, my students don't like this. So I need to change and my students are complaining, so I need to change what I'm doing. And I like to remind educators that students, especially teenagers, are always going to complain when something is uncomfortable for them. And this model is super uncomfortable, especially when it's new for students, because for the first time in their careers, their educational careers, they're being asked to work really hard. So a lot of students will push back on this model, and they can especially push back when it comes to self pacing. We hear the constant complaints of, like, you're not teaching me right or like, my teacher doesn't teach me in this class. I've heard that from students before, and I think we need to be careful about what complaints or constructive feedback from our students we listen to or what we understand is a growing pain and that students will stop making that complaint if that makes sense. Yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense working with middle school. Kudos to you for working with high schoolers, because I could not. But my middle school students, they did the same exact thing. Right. They just complained over and over and over again. And I heard them and I listened to them. And then we just continued on with the model because I really am looking at constructive feedback as opposed to just like very, just complaining, whining kind of deal. Right. And this is something that I also remind my mentees is that our students are going to complain because this is so uncomfortable, this is so new, and the learning is now really on them. They can no longer depend on the teacher for all of the learning that's happening. They have to be active learners at this point. And that's really uncomfortable and scary. And there's confidence that we have to look at as well with students. And so that's good to just keep in mind that, yes, we want our students to be able to share their feedback and their thoughts and their questions and comments at the same time. As teachers, we can really determine what is really just a complaint and then what is actually good feedback. So I really liked that. I was actually on a call with one of my mentees yesterday who is a Latin teacher, and her schedule, her classes are so different than what I'm used to. And so we're talking about the model. And she said, you know what? I just know it's going to be a lot of trial and error, and I just have to, like, stop and take it all in. I was like, you know what? I really appreciate you saying that. And just like knowing that it's going to take some trial and error to figure out what works best for you and your students. And I think that that's something that our new implementers. And really just like our educators need to keep in mind that some things you're just going to have to keep trying until you find the right thing that works for you and your students. And something that Zach and I always say, right. There's no right or wrong way to do this model. It is typically what feels good for you and your students. Totally. And what works this year might not work next year. So it's constant trial and error. Yeah. I mean, it really does depend on our students. Right. And I think that's, like, one of my favorite things about teaching is that it's never boring every year, every month, every day, really, it changes. And so I appreciate that about teaching. And so I've heard you mention your public pacing tracker. We've had some questions and some hesitations about the public pacing tracker. What was your thought process and how did you roll this out with your students? Great question. I barely even remember my role out, to be honest, but the way it existed in my classroom was that it's truly just a way to walk in the room and know what you should be doing and also to be able to find someone you can work with or to help you. And I tried to really model that for my students and actually make it an active part of their classroom routines by building in activities that I called co labs. So, like, say, for less than 4.5, it's a lab on acceleration due to gravity, and it's actually a collab activity. So you need to go to the pacing track or find someone else who's on 4.5, you both need to come to me and I'll give you the lab tray. So I built in these opportunities for students to understand the utility of the tracker. Also having kind of like an ask three before me, I called it something different in my classroom, but that kind of protocol encouraging students to go to each other before coming to me. So if a student came to me with a question, I'll take a peek at the tracker and I'll say, oh, did you talk to Bobby or Billy? And if they haven't, I'm like, oh, I see on the tracker there one lesson ahead of you. And in fact, so and so is even a lesson expert. So why don't you go chat with them and then come back to me and we'll talk through it? So really trying to model that for students and create that routine kind of showed them the utility of the tracker and that it wasn't about grades. I actually never had pushback with the public facing tracker. I know that some people experience it in my classroom environment. In my school environment, other teachers were using it. Our students were very used to it and they loved it. My students were talking like my 17 and 18 year old students would be hovering over my shoulder, begging me to update the progress tracker so they could see their name go to the next lesson. So it really is so motivating for students. Even older students, they love to watch themselves kind of go down the line. It's gamified, it's fun. Yes. No, it definitely does. And I think it's one of my favorite things about the pacing tracker as well is how excited the students got because mine was color coded, right? And so when they see that green pop up, they're like, oh, Ben, I keep going. This is great. I have all Greens all throughout. And like you said, it's not about grades, right? Like, my students never knew each other's grades. They just knew like, oh, this person is in this lesson, so I know that I can collaborate with that person. Another way that I use the pacing tracker, too is I had my student teachers on there. So the students who are way ahead of pace and who are willing to be group leaders or student teachers, they had a star right beside their name. So students knew. Okay, I'm going to go ask this person for help and some guidance. And I also did some kind of training with my student teachers as well. So they're not just giving answers, but actually analyzing and providing questions to get their peers to where they need to be. I love the pacing tracker. Did you share this with anyone else outside of your students, Meg? No, I actually didn't post it on Canvas, my learning management system. I really kept it as a tool just within the four walls of my classroom. It's really just for us, it's truly about progress. I changed it after every unit so we could start fresh. I know that some people like to put it on their learning management systems or share it with families, but for us, it was really just useful in my classroom. Yeah. And for me, again, it's like middle school. I shared it with caregivers and parents and families because there are lots of questions. Right. Of like, hey, Where's my student? What are we learning about what's happening? And so the pacing tracker actually began conversations at home about what they're learning in the classroom, which I always found to be so powerful. So I always talk to my caregivers like, hey, instead of asking, what did you learn today? Or how was your day at school? You could be more specific and be like, hey, lesson 1.1 is theme, what did you learn? And they really loved that. And I also shared it with all stakeholders. So I had a coteacher. I shared it with Admin, I shared it with the SP coordinator. And so they kind of all knew where the students were. Everyone was on the same page, and the students knew it wasn't like a gotcha moment, but it was a way that like, hey, if you're going to go work with Ms. Peterson, right? Ms. Peterson knows exactly where you are just by looking at the pacing tracker. And I think the messaging is all, like, pretty standard. Everyone knows where everything is. And so I really like that part about the pacing tracker. So thanks for sharing that, Meg. During our mentorship programs, both school year mentorships and virtual summer Institute, we often get positive feedback from our mentees saying that they love how they're able to work through our course at their own pace. So the self paced structure seems to be pretty successful for adult learners. So then how can we justify this for young learners, starting from, like, pre K kindergarten all the way up to your 1718 year old babies as well? Yeah, I think the very simple answer is just that no one learns at a uniform pace. Adults don't. Kids don't. Babies don't. We're all going to take different time to grasp different content, skills, ideas, whatever. Right? It might take me five minutes to do something, and you need 30 for one thing and then vice versa for another thing. This is just true about learning, period. I think we know this outside of the classroom. But then for some reason, when we're in teacher training school and teaching, we suddenly think that we should all learn about constant velocity on Monday and then acceleration on Tuesday and kinematic equations on Wednesday. I don't know. How can we just forget this fundamental idea about learning that we all learn at our own pace and we throw that out the window and we become teachers? So I think that's the argument simply everyone needs time to learn whatever they're going to learn. We're not all going to do it in 45 minutes periods or in the case of younger students, a day of learning. But I think the difference that we see when we're working with adults in the virtual mentorship program or summer versus working with kids is that kids likely need more structure to successfully self pace. And like we said before, Tony Rose, students and adults don't know how to self pace. We have to provide structures for successful self pacing for all learners. We can't just have kindergarteners rock up in our classroom and be like, okay, we self paced in this class. So I'll see you guys in two weeks when you're done with this unit. Right? We need to actually show them what that looks like, teach them those metacognitive skills to be successful in a self paced environment. The same goes with all learners. I think we even still here to be fully transparent on the virtual mentorship side. Occasionally we have mentees who say, you know what? I wish that my mentor was a little bit hands on. And then sometimes we have mentees who say, you know what? I wish my mentor was a little bit more hands off. So I think the moral of the story is every learner is unique, and self paced structures need to be tailored to those individuals. Some people will just inevitably need more support, and some will need less. Yeah. I mean, all the topics that you listed out earlier, I was like, I don't know what any of those terms means. I will definitely be taking the 30 minutes while you take five minutes to learn that


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these are all great. Right? We have to keep in mind that everybody is different. And so the self pacing really allows for students to kind of take control of their learning and take the time that they need to digest and process everything that they're learning. I mean, thinking back to Meg with adult learners, like, speaking for myself, I had a really hard time with self pacing. I love it. I'm like, oh, I can do this later. Oh, I'll do this later. Oh, I'll do this later. And then it becomes like, the dude, right? And it's like, oh, my God, what did I do? I absolutely did nothing. And it would be really nice to have those check ins. Even as an adult, when I was in grad school, everything was self paced, and I just really had to figure things out. It took me a while and I'm still figuring it out. But it is nice to have those structures of like, you know what today is going to be. We're going to have self pacing every single day. It's going to look similar. It's going to look different. And talking to teachers as well implementers right. There's this misconception again that like you said earlier that, hey, you have this whole entire unit to self paced, and we'll check in at the end of the unit and you have to create this thing at the end of the unit. And so we also have implementors who are like, oh, my gosh, my students are really behind. Like, they can't seem to be on pace and I don't know what to do. And I think, like you said, the structures are going to be really helpful with that, right? So for me, I only released one lesson a week. So that's still self pacing for the week, right? So some students will take one day to do the lesson. Some students will take two or three days. Some students will take the whole week to do that lesson. But they knew that by the end of the week they needed to have their mastery check completed. So in that way, I know, okay, I need to work with these five students during this week because they're a little bit behind. And so I'm having those touch points with students so that they don't feel like they're getting way behind, and then they feel less motivated to do the work because, hey, I'm already like five or six or seven lessons behind. There's no point of me trying to catch up. I think you made two really important points there. The first about being an adult learner this idea of like, I'll do it later, I'll do it later, and then later never comes. This is exactly why adults pay $500 to attend a Spanish class, right? Like, there are so many resources online. I could do Duolingo. I could find a community partner who maybe wants to speak Spanish, I mean, who I can speak Spanish with, and then they'll practice their English with me. I could go through all these efforts to learn Spanish on my own self paced, if you will. But there is a reason why I might actually choose to pay to learn Spanish. It's because I'm paying for the structure. Obviously, our students aren't paying us for the structure, but we need to think about it through that lens. We need to provide the structures so that students can learn at the pace that works for them. The second point you made was just this idea of, like, self pacing doesn't mean to you at the end of the unit by, like, what you said about releasing one lesson per week. I think that is so important, and I think that is something that for whatever reason, new implementers get confused about. I would release one lesson per day. It has three components. Right. Must do, should do, aspire to do. We're still self pacing because some students need the whole 80 minutes to just do the must do component. And some students in those 80 minutes will do the must do, the should do, the aspire to do. And then they'll ask me for an additional challenge. So that's still self paced learning, but it doesn't look like you have the whole first quarter to work on a portfolio, and then you'll submit it to me and I'll talk to you at the end of the semester. That might work, by the way, for your students. I'm not saying it wouldn't, but it depends on the experiences of your students with self pacing, their executive functioning skills. And it's going to vary kid to kid. Of course. Class to class. Yeah. I mean, and you're absolutely right about as adults, I would pay like, for example, Covet happened. Right. And I'm thinking, oh, I can do all my workouts at home. I never did any workouts at home. I wanted to go pay for a CrossFit membership so I can go in there and they can teach me and show me and motivate me how to do a specific thing. So completely get that, Meg. So we'll take a quick break here and we'll be right back. Hey there, listeners. We've got a love note to share with you this week. This one is from Alison Stone. So let's hear from Allison. Hello. My name is Alison Stone, and I teach in Dallasown, Pennsylvania, in Central Bucks School District. I teach secondary life science, I teach anatomy and physiology, and I teach biology. The best part of my school year as a modern classrooms teacher has been implementing the must do, should do and aspire to do assignments for my students. It's really given me the ability to differentiate, which I never was doing well before. And my students are absolutely thriving. I get to see students who need more of a challenge, really doing wonderful things. And I also get to see those students that might be struggling otherwise, being successful and checking off all of the accomplishments that they've had this year. If you want to submit one of these audio notes, we can include it on a future episode of the podcast. I'm linking a form, a Google form in the show notes that you can use to send us a note. And remember, you can always email us any feedback or questions or an audio note at podcast@modernclassrooms.org. But now let's get back into it with Tony Rose and Meg. All right. So, Meg, well shift gears and continue on with the questions that we have. Right. So what is one success story that you have pertaining to self pacing structure? So this can be about the students that you taught or any mentees and mentors that you've worked with. Okay. So when I was reflecting on this question earlier, what was funny was one of the students in my first class that I ever self paced in came to mind because what he said to me when we first started self pacing was kind of the impetus for me to not give up on my blended self paced, mastery based class and to continue in this model, not just in one prep, but in all of my preps. And this student said to me, Ms. Mcgregor, he was a senior, by the way. He said, Ms. Mcgregor, this is the first class I've taken in my entire educational career that actually is making me feel like I'm being prepared for College. And that just kind of blew my mind. I had never had a student say that to me before. And I mean, he was right. This was a student who I would say his grades were average, sometimes CS and DS. That was never a reflection of his ability. He was bored in school. He was bored. And he didn't want to just kind of like go lesson to lesson. He was a super talented artist. So he'd be drawing anime characters and writing, creating comic strips and just doing this magnificent stuff in school and flunking his classes or barely passing his classes because he was bored out of his mind. So I really saw the potential in this particular student of this model to actually meet the needs of students like him. And then on the flip side, in the same year, using this model in my engineering class in the South Bronx, I had a lot of students who were chronically absent for a variety of reasons. I had a student on medical leave for multiple months. I had students who had dealt with long term suspensions and were rejoining the classroom. There's just a lot going on. And what was super amazing to me was seeing that my student, who had been out for like two or three months on medical leave, came back and she could just rejoin class simply. There was no like, what am I going to do with this student? I'm going to make like a bunch of packets that aren't actually going to be reflective of learning. I could actually just say, oh, here's where you left off when you left class. Let's keep going. And it was mind blowing because I think that's the most discouraging moment for a student when they're out in the long term and they come back and they realize they have no chance to learn. So to be able to see that particular student and then many students after that student in a similar position just be able to rejoin class and feel like they belonged and had a place who could continue their learning. That's what sold me on self pacing. Yeah. And I mean, that story with your student melted my heart because I feel like those comments like that are really the ones that kind of keep us going with trying to innovate and making sure that learning is relevant and meaningful for our students. Right. And something, too, that I thought about is that sometimes majority of the time, students are okay with being compliant. Right. It's easy to be compliant in education, but then some who are bored, like, your students are like, Nah, I'm good. I'm not going to be compliant. I'm not going to do this because this is not relevant nor entertaining nor useful for me at this time. Right. And so with the self pacing, it really does give students a little bit more motivation to work through. Like, hey, here are the must dos. These are the most important things. And if you're good with the must dos, you can move on to your should do and aspire to do tasks as well. So it is a little bit more intentional. It keeps the students engaged as well, which is exciting. Another thing, too, that you talked about with the student who could just rejoin the class. Right. And it's funny because you're looking at it from a student's perspective. And in my head, all I could think about was like, oh, my gosh, this makes me so selfish because I love the self paced structure so that I don't actually have to catch students up who have been absent. Right? So because for me, that was like, my least favorite part was like, oh, if the student is absent today, in the past three days now it's my job to catch the student up while I'm also teaching the rest of the students. And that was just so overwhelming for me, and I just hated it. And I felt like I couldn't divide my attention. I felt like I couldn't really catch the student up, and it was just a lot of stress for me. And so when I found this model, the self paced structure was perfect because I didn't have to actually take 10, 15, 20 minutes of my time to go over what the students have missed. They can just go into their LMS and be like, oh, here are the lessons. And then I can go and quickly check in on just being like, hey, I'm so happy you're here. Let me know if there's anything that you need from me, but I'm excited that you're back. I'm really happy to see you in person, whatever that may be. So I can start working on that relationship as opposed to just me being frustrated and like, oh, my God, you missed all of these lessons, and now I got to catch you up. So for me, it's not a selfish reason, but it was definitely like a teacher. Like, oh, this is great for me. Totally. I think I've been there, right? I've been asked, can you provide a packet for this student who's been out for X period of time? And they're going to be out for y, period. More, they're going to need this many packets. And not only is it frustrating, just as a human who has a particular amount of time for work in their life and has a personal life that happens after work. Right. Like, having to make all these packets is quite draining, but it also just feels like such a farce to me. We all know that this package doesn't represent the loss of learning. It doesn't change the fact that the student wasn't in the classroom. So this is just kind of like we're all covering our behinds. Right. And pretending that this student is still learning. And that's just truly a crime against humanity. Right. Like, we're just okay with pretending that these students who are out for whatever reason, we're just cool with just pretending that they're learning and knowing in reality that they're really not. So the model's capacity to just totally eliminate that problem is so awesome to me. Yeah. And I cringed when you said packets, Meg, because I remember having to create so many packets for students who have been out. And in my head, I was like, why am I creating this packet? Like, this is just extra work? Because those packets actually didn't help any of my students. Right. It was just more work for me. It was a waste of paper. And then my students really didn't get it. They would just come back and I'd be like, hey, did you get into your packets? And they'd be like, what packet? I lost it. Yeah. Okay, cool. So thank you for that. How do teachers really know if self pacing works? Such a good question. I know we'd love to talk about data informed instruction, but for real, I think it's just a lot of tracking your data very closely. And for me, it was seeing my unit exams after the first year, after the second after the third year, and just seeing the difference in performance. So, like, that literal, sorry, quantitative data that we can't argue with because we're talking about the same unit exams. Right. I was able to give the same exam two years in a row and see the difference. But then I also think that qualitative data that we were talking about before, and of course, taking it with a grain of salt, really looking at that qualitative data through the lens of, like, I'm taking the opinion of my students who are human. So ultimately they're going to prefer what's comfortable. But looking at all that data together and assessing for yourself, is this actually working? And I was converted after my first year because I saw that it was my first engineering class. I had such varied levels of learners, and I had students who were there every day early. And I had students who had a lot of absences for a variety of reasons. And I'd worked with that population for many years. And for that year, that was the first time ever that I saw so many students able to be successful. And that for me was like, wow, this works. Yeah. And the pacing tracker definitely helps with that. And it's funny that you bring up data, Meg, because I know how important data is, but whenever I hear the word data, it would just be such a turn off for me, and I would just completely shut down because no one's ever really taught me how to properly collect data. And so when I had the pacing tracker, I was able to really see like, oh, this is why Johnny didn't meet mastery here, because they hadn't done ABCD. It was really the pacing tracker really helped me determine, like, oh, my students are really good at this one skill, while some really struggle with this skill. And then I was just able to pinpoint very clearly and right there in the moment of where my students were. And that was just so awesome. And I taught English. And so seeing the difference between we were writing narrative. Right. Like narrative writing. And so seeing the difference from how it was the year before prior to modern classroom and then, like, how it was in my modern classroom, there was such a huge difference, like you said. And it was all because of how we delivered the content. And this model really helped with us innovating and really just enhancing what we were teaching so that our students could be a little bit more successful, which is really great. All right. So, Meg, what are some tips to make self pacing successful in learning environments? So many I think my big one, my number one, we've already talked about this. Don't assume your students know how to self pace. Even my high school seniors needed extreme scaffolding every single year. So if you teach students younger than high school seniors and I bet a lot of you do, you're going to need a lot of scaffolding, a lot of modeling. You can change that throughout the year. So start with a lot of scaffolding and a lot of modeling and slowly decrease it. And you can also see your students grow in that respect, and they'll see themselves grow in that respect. And it'll be really exciting. So that would be my number one tip. And my second tip is not what educators want to hear because we all want the silver bullet. But there will never be a system or routine that works for every class or every student. There just never will be so successful. Self pacing is iterative for me. And I might have one class where everyone is racking it with my self pacing. I have no problems. It's a dream except for one student. Right. And I need to try everything under the sun to make it work with that one student. So just understand that that is going to be part of the process and it's normal and it's okay. And like you said, earlier, Tony Rose. It actually makes teaching really fun because it's never monotonous. As we all know. It's always that one student. Right, Meg? For me, it's more like usually ten, but for the sake of this argument, we'll pretend it's one. And I kind of want to piggyback off of what you were saying with structures, timers and soft deadlines were my best friend for those structures. And so one last question. What do you hope to see in the future, and what goals do you have when it pertains to self pacing or just modern classroom in general and education? Wow. That's a big question. I'll talk about self pacingmodernclassrooms. I am really excited to come back to this conversation in five or ten years because I feel very privileged to have been able to watch our community of modern classroom implementers really grow over the past three years. And I'm so excited to come to this conversation with a bunch of implementers in five or ten years who have been implementing for five or ten years, like, way longer than I am implemented for, way longer than a lot of our community of teachers have been implementing our model for like, I just can't wait to see all of the routines and systems and tips and tricks that people develop in the long term after so many years of implementation. Because when I thought I was going into my fourth year of implementing, I had so many ideas of what I was going to do differently. And specifically with respect to self pacing, I had this idea of using mastery paths and canvas to create different learning experiences for every student based on a pretest. And, like, how would that have impacted motivation with respect to self pacing for my students? I don't know. So I'm just so excited to see what we're going to learn in the next five to ten years because I think it's going to be incredible. And I hope that in five to ten years, when we're having this conversation, self pacing is no longer the hardest aspect of our model because we're going to have just so much knowledge and so much collective experience. Meg, I love all of that. I, too, am looking forward to that when it comes. And so again, thank you so much for saying yes to the podcast. Of course. Thanks for having me. And so listeners, remember, you can always email us at podcast@modernclassrooms.org and you can find the show notes for this episode at Podcast Modernclassrooms.org 71. So thank you all for listening. Have a great week, and we'll be back next week.


Voiceover: Thank you so much for listening. You can find links to topics and tools we discussed in our show notes for this episode. And remember, you can learn more about our work at www.modernclassrooms.org, and you can learn the essentials of our model through our free course at Learn.Modernclassrooms.org. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at modernclassproj, that's P-R-O-J. We are so appreciative of all you do for students and schools. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday with another episode of the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast.