Episode 74: Feedback and Q&A - January 2022


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 the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. This is Zach Diamond. I am a middle school music teacher. I'm a Modern Classrooms mentor, and I've been implementing the model for three years now, going on three of course, I produced this podcast and I am super excited tonight. This is our first sort of structured Q and A and feedback episode, and we have a ton of really awesome feedback that we've gotten from you all on the past few episodes in January. So as you all know, our season topic this month is self pacing. So we've got a lot of really cool self pacing feedback. So first of all, the email that we've been getting has been great. I said this when we first mentioned that we're putting an email account together for the podcast, but I can't believe we didn't do this earlier. We've been getting tons of positive feedback, just little nice comments, and we really appreciate that a bunch of you let me know when there was a little audio issue and I fixed that. So the email has been really cool for us. Tony Rose and I look at that every week we go through it. We see your comments, we see your questions, and that's been great. So keep the email coming at podcast@modernclassrooms.org in the email and also on social media, we've seen a bunch of really positive response to some of the episodes this month. So the episode with Evan, our CTE guest, Evan Jarrett. That was a great episode that I loved listening to. As I edited, a lot of people really responded to his emphasis on building relationships, which is something that he talked about a lot, and in particular, people like the idea of feeling like a family. I saw one comment in the Modern Classroom Slack group that said something to the effect of especially in elementary school, we spend sometimes more time with our students than we do with our families, and so it's important to really build those familial relationships. We also have been getting a lot of positive feedback on the elementary emphasis that we're building in which I'm really happy about that with some feedback that we heard from you all. So we're doing that very intentionally. Another really cool thing that's been happening this month that I have been seeing more of is that people are actually sharing their pacing trackers with us as we talk about self pacing on the podcast. People are reaching out to us on social media, on Slack, and also an email with their pacing trackers. So I'm going to be linking a bunch from three teachers. We have one from Andrea who's got sort of a cool mix of a game board and a more traditional spreadsheet type of tracker. If you look at it, it's kind of like I think it's called like a Kanban where you sort of move the kids names along, but it's a spreadsheet. Very cool. Sarah has a pacing tracker that is unlike any I've ever seen. It's sort of just like a checklist, but it's really cool how she's broken it out into Mustang aspire to do and definitely something worth checking out. So that's linked below. And another teacher, Hillary, she makes student facing individual trackers, but each subject is unique. So she has a bunch of different kinds of trackers for her different school subjects. And that's also really cool. So lots of cool stuff to browse there in the show notes, I'll link all of this. So yeah, I'm just so happy to be reading all this feedback, seeing all these materials that teachers are sending in. Keep all that coming. Use the email address, use social, use slack. Send us this stuff. Even just a little comment. I love reading it. It brings me a little bit of joy every time I see one of those little comments in our email. Moving on to the Q and A portion here, I have a little surprise for you all, which is that I'm joined by Karim none other than Karim Farrah, who I'm sure all of you know who Kareem is. He and I are going to tackle some of these questions that you all have been sending. And I'm just really excited for this because Kareem and I haven't done an episode together for several months. And I think the last episode we did together with the Q and A as well. So, Kareem, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so excited to be here with you, Zach. It is a joy to be back. I feel at home. I remember when we started this thing together more than a year ago. At this point, I believe so super pumped to be here. Also great to hear this new segment about feedback and building community. I've always said that one of the coolest parts of the Modern Classrooms project is that sense of community it creates with folks that are like minded around thinking differently about instructions. So I love that there's an email and folks are sharing feedback and the feedback sounds fabulous. And pacing trackers are being shared and something core to our approach, which is building relationships, is constantly being discussed. I listened to the podcast with Evan. It was absolutely fabulous. So excited to be excited to see how amazing this podcast has grown and pumped to answer some questions from the community. I hope to be popping in every now and then to do stuff like this as much as possible. Awesome. Yeah, we love it. Well, and Zach, before we get started, how are you? I haven't talked to you in a few weeks. And I know, frankly, we're recording this in January of 2022, which is one of the tougher months in the last couple of years based on all the conversations I've been having with teachers and leaders. So how are you holding up? How are things going? How's school been? Yeah, it is tough. It is tough. I feel relatively calm on a DayToday basis. Something I've said a lot this year is that the easiest part of this school year, this 21, 22 school year, at least in the US, has been being in class with the kids. There's a lot of instability, there's a lot of changes, there's a lot of subs, there's a lot of rooms being switched on us. There's a lot of things like that happening and probably more happening to the kids than are happening to the teachers. So when you're just in a class with the kids and they're watching their instructional videos or they're working through their practice activities or their mastery checks, what have you. That's the time when I sort of feel like everything is normal. And that's sort of what I try and think about when I get stressed out is that when I'm in the classroom with the kids, as long as the videos are on the LMS, we're going to be fine. There have been a lot of changes this year, though, and it is definitely a stressful year. I am thankful for being able to implement this model and teach this way because the amount of times that we've gone virtual switched back and forth between virtual, frankly, would have my head spinning if I was trying to keep modifying my content to be able to teach it online. But with modern classrooms, I don't have to do any of that. I just keep kind of chugging along. But it hasn't been easy, but I feel like I'm doing all right. Yeah, there's no way it's been easy. If it's been easy something's wild, but it's good to hear. We consistently hear that the folks that do our model are able to handle some of the challenges of the moment a little bit better for the reason you just described. I think the easiest way to describe it is it sort of creates an Avenue for continuous learning when everything else feels disrupted and when you don't need to worry that much about that, I think there's a little bit of relief that sets in. And I sort of love what you said about just, like, the students being the part that's honestly, like, most relaxing. I'm not surprised to hear that. I feel like every single time there was something challenging or traumatic going on in the school building, it was the students that always brought me down to Earth. So I'm glad you're holding up okay. And to all the teachers out there, it's just sort of incredible what you all are doing and how you're kind of navigating these challenges. It's so unique. And we certainly at the Modern Classroom Project are so appreciative of your capacity to be innovative at this time and be persistent and continue to push students across the continuum. Master. It's really amazing. Well, I certainly appreciate that. I'm sure many teachers definitely appreciate that you want to tackle some of these questions. Let's do it. I am reading some of them now, and I'm fired up about it, and they're fabulous questions, so let's just fire them off. All right. The first question here says how do you motivate students to do more than just the must dos? This is from actually a question that Tony Rose received from an implementer at a partner school. So how do you motivate students to do more than just the must dos? Super interesting question. Over the last few months, I've been to a lot of modern classrooms, visiting a lot of our partners, Minnesota and Massachusetts, and it's been really interesting to sort of see how people make the model their own. It's one of my favorite parts about doing site visits, because I get to go and see just how different modern classrooms can be, but also just how similar they are and where the differences lie. I think this is a really good example of one of the tools and structures that we've created, the Modern Classroom Project, that have a fair amount of variability depending on implementor and depending on student. So one of the things I will say is, in a lot of modern classrooms, the kids actually don't know which lessons or must do should do and aspire to do. So, one way to motivate students to do more than just the must do is to actually tell anyone what they must do and they should do and aspire to do is and just put all the content out there and then excuse kids for should do's and aspire to do on a need basis. Kind of on the fly. Exactly. Like that's how I did it in about 60% of my classes. And it was because in those 60% of my classes, I just had a really diverse set of learners, very, very wide variability and just prerequisite skills. So it was just like kind of an odd structure where I couldn't layer on top must do is 80% should do is or 90% aspire to 100%. That wasn't actually enough differentiation. Some students truly were going to exclusively end up focusing on mustaches in a unit, and other students were going to cruise through mustache and get all the way up to those aspire to do is pretty comfortably. So isolating which ones were which actually just didn't really work. Instead, I had to be able to really personalize, like you said, and on the fly, tell kids they were excused for certain things, and that ensured that kids approach to work as if everything was a must do. And then things were kind of removed on a personalized way. So that's one idea. What are your thoughts back? Yeah, no, I agree. That resonates with me a lot. I can definitely think of some students who, if they see the aspire to it's, an immediate demotivation for them. It's like, oh, I'm not doing that. I think that for me, the way that I think about this is sort of more like a planning consideration. If there's something that I want to make sure that my students do, I'll make it a must do. And my aspire to do is if you look at the scope of one of my units, they're way out there. They're kind of like Mr. Diamond's Pet Project activity that doesn't really actually even matter. It's just sort of an extension. It could be fun. Like, I want to let my students take the things that they're learning and apply them to what they already know. And what I mean by that is like if we're learning about what a quarter note is, I'll teach them about quarter notes in a context that applies to their project. But then the aspire to do will be something like, go off and listen to whatever song that you like and tell me what you hear in that song that relates to what we've learned about quarter notes. I don't work that hard to motivate them to do that, because if they don't do it, their project won't suffer. Like they're still going to do in all the must dos, they're going to do the absolute essentials for the project. And the aspire to do is something totally separate. So I don't actually concern myself too much with it because the way I've planned out and the way I've classified the different types of lessons, I will force them to do the must use, or if they don't do them, they'll have a lower grade. Like they'll not do the must dos. And if it's an aspired to do, I don't feel strongly about motivating them to do it if they're not motivated already. And some students definitely are. And in some cases I will like, if a student is not behind and they get to a day where an aspire to do lessons is on pace, I'm not going to let them skip it just because they don't feel like it. They're going to be sitting there in my classroom for 50 minutes doing nothing. And so I'll tell them, no, you can't skip it unless you're behind on it. And I don't know if that motivates them to do it, but it does get them to do it because they have nothing else to do. But I definitely agree. Also, I don't identify the should do activities which are smaller pieces within my lessons. I don't tell them if they're taking too long on something, I'll just go over and be like, Why don't you skip this part? Just do this for me and I'll give you the mastery check. I'll give you the check on the tracker. So withholding that information strategically for those students who see show or aspire to do and think optional, I actually really like that. It's a good idea. Yes. What it comes down to to me, is usually a classroom culture and relationship building opportunity when I had a student. And this doesn't work every time. And the amount of imperfection that comes with teaching, I just can't stress that enough. Right. It's like the greatest imperfect science ever. So some of this stuff just doesn't work for certain students and you just keep trying different things. But I always looked at a student who wasn't tackling should do and aspire to do that truly had the time and the capabilities to do that in the moment as a total opportunity to have a great discussion and just be like, why are you choosing not to be your best self in this moment? I do think if you really want to figure out what the core source of the challenges there, you got to execute on that front and really just have the one on one discussion and build a relationship with the student, trying to get them to understand why they should be pushing themselves to be their best self. Yeah. And I think also you might not be able to motivate them. Right. It's okay if they don't want to do the aspire to do on a day that maybe it's the last period of the day and they've had a long day or something, maybe they're just not feeling it that day. If you look at my pacing tracker, you'll see certain aspire to do lessons that every student has skipped. And I don't, like, beat myself up over that because sometimes they just don't want to. Sometimes it's a bad lesson that I planned poorly and it happens. So that's why at first I mentioned planning, too. If you want to make sure students do something, if it's that important to you, then just make it a must do and make sure that they do it totally well, I think you bring up a really good point, which is, is it a pattern or is it a one time thing? Yeah, it's a one time thing. I really wouldn't press the issue right. And honestly, I think you gain a lot of credibility with students when someone tackles all the mustaches and is having a bad day and you're like, well, it's all right. Just like, take a deep breath, relax. If it's a pattern, then it's time to address whether a student is really maximizing what they can do in the classroom. That's a great point. Yeah, I agree with that. Shall we move on to the next question? Let's do it. I can ask this one. What are the pros and cons of having a digital progress tracker and a physical progress tracker? And this is a question also from an implementer at one of our school and district partners, Zach Super curious what do you have to say about this one? Well, I'll link my anonymized pacing tracker. I think that the digital progress tracker is, like, in every way superior. And one of the reasons that I say that is because as a teacher who now teaches in multiple different classrooms and has other teachers teaching in the same classrooms that I do on other periods, I can't wrap my head around how I would manage a physical progress tracker unless it was like an individual one that was printed out for students. And I want to be able to update it myself and see it whenever I want to see it. So I don't think I could do that either. And that's why a single spreadsheet that has all eight of my class sections in it is clearly for me the way to go. I've also talked about how I use mail merges to send data from my progress tracker to parents or Guardians and also to students. I use it to calculate grades, like I use it to project summative grades. I do all kinds of spreadsheet things, and those are the pros for me of having a digital progress tracker. I can imagine maybe in an elementary setting where a teacher is in one room with the same kids, that could be an opportunity to use a physical progress tracker, like on the wall, where it's the same kids coming into the same room every day and there's just sort of more life to that. Right. You can decorate it and put the kids names, or you can put their pictures and things like that. And that's not my experience. I don't teach that way. So I'm only sort of speculating. But that would be my sense of what the pros would be of a physical progress tracker. But in my case, the cons of having to manage the paper and the display in multiple classrooms and not know what's happening to the displays when I'm not there and other classes are happening. Those cons outweigh the pros for me in a big way. Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to play doubles advocate. I'm just going to present the alternative. Yeah, sorry. Let me clarify. I'm not against physical progress trackers at all. Totally. I think they're very cool, and I've seen lots of pictures of awesome ones. But I'm talking about my personal situation as a teacher currently this year who doesn't have the same room for every class. It's hard for me to imagine using a physical tracker 100%. So I think some of the biggest benefits of the physical progress tracker are as follows. First, if you're using a personal tracker or a game board, I think there's something really powerful about kids being able to track their own pace, and the gameboard structure makes it a little bit more personal and structured to the actual students themselves. And I think them being able to get pulled off the computer, going back on the computer being pulled off the computer and all that good stuff really matters. I think that's critical. I think it's important to understand that dynamic. And I think it's great, too, for strengthening certain elements of executive functioning. Like, I think kids being able to sort of set many goals and look at the physical tracker and be able to isolate that can be very powerful as well, especially the teachers that use checklist. Is it integral? Do you need to do it? Absolutely not. I didn't have a physical tracker when I ran a modern classroom myself. So I think there's the gameboard physical trackers and the checklist models, and that can be really powerful. And they're very popular at the younger grade levels because of the younger grade levels. There's a huge asset there to being able to be structured in that way. The other side of it, to your point is the physical trackers that are in rooms now, you have to have your own room, obviously, to be able to do that. But there's another piece there about pulling kids off of the technology and being able to engage in the physical space that create kind of natural breaks from the tech that can be super powerful as well. So I think the pros of the virtual ones and the digital ones is they're accessible anytime, anywhere, and they're very convenient. I think the pros of the physical ones, if they're game boards and like personal ones, is a they're personal. They're certainly not public, and they're for every single student and can be brought home and shared with parents in the physical sense, so can the digital ones. But I think there's something powerful about the physical piece, and there are some ways you can loop in that executive functioning piece and then just having the physical ones in the classroom can just be fun. They're cool. They can be magnets, they can be pictures of kids faces. They can be color coded in creative ways. And I think it just livens up the room. But all those things are extra right. And frankly, my classroom, from a visual standpoint, I was always not a particularly creative teacher, so my classroom didn't have those very cool elements to it. But I've been to some of the best modern classrooms out there that I've ever seen, and they use the physical space beautifully. And one of the core elements that I use beautifully is those physical pacing trackers. And very often in the K to eight setting is where I see that come to life. Yeah. I guess also, like, it depends on what kind of person you are, what kind of teacher you are. I like to tinker around in the spreadsheets. I like to do formulas that make cool things happen, and that's how I express my creativity in a spreadsheet. Whereas some teachers do really amazing things with, like, wall displays. But I guess do the one that feels more comfortable for you, because I have definitely had moments where I figured out some new formula or something. And I show the kids I'm like, check this out. This is so cool. It says how many lessons you did and how many more you need to do. And they're like, all right, Mr. Diamond. But it's still kind of like a fun little moment in class that is sort of like my version of having a cool, pretty display, which I could never make because I'm not that kind of creative. But I express that through a digital progress tracker. And maybe I'm just a total nerd, but it's still fun. Sometimes I think that both have pros and cons. Both work fine in any kind of modern classroom, unless there are, like, spatial constraints, like what I was talking about, which would make it very hard to have a physical progress tracker, or at least not like a physical public tracker for the entire class. Totally. And so, yeah, just go with the one that you feel like worked for you and the way that you feel like you track the best because the data is really what matters, I think at the end of the day, definitely. But Karen, you're absolutely right that those physical, big, cool displays, especially in younger grades, I think add a really cool element to the sort of environment to the physical space of the classroom, too. Absolutely. Okay. Let's go on to the next question here. This is a question that came up on the Facebook group in response to episode 71, which was the first episode of the season where we talked about where Tony, Rose, and Meg talked about what self pacing is. So the question says, what do you consider a lesson? This is a really good question, by the way. I like this question a lot. What do you consider a lesson? Is the notes one lesson, the practice a separate one, et cetera? If not, how do you make sure students go back to revise when the pacing tracker just says lesson one and not less than one notes, less than one practice, etc? I love this question. Yeah, me too. Because oftentimes the best questions are like, in some ways the simplest. Right. Which is like, what is the lesson? What I would say generally is that if all the activities connect to one core skill being mastered, I usually consider that to be one lesson. So a video, a set of notes, a mastery check, an assignment to me if they're all connecting to the same skill, and that mastery check encapsulates all that was done to get there, that's one lesson. That lesson has multiple parts. And if you want to create a checklist structure so that you isolate all those parts so kids are super clear on what needs to be tackled. Fabulous. But I would say that that whole sort of series right there makes one lesson and that has multiple parts. There's a sort of digesting, some of the direct instruction that might be coming through the instructional video. There's the practice component of that lesson. There's a mastery check component that lesson. There might be a collaborative element of that lesson, but all that to me comprises one lesson. And I think as people think about, well, how do I structure this? Is this one lesson? Is this two lessons? I think one of the greatest benefits of our model is you shouldn't actually really obsess over that too much. You should just say, hey, what's a logical amount of a skill to be teaching students at once? I remember trying to fit like really complicated concepts into a 60 minutes period and then really simple concepts as far as the sort of scope and sequence into that same 60 minutes period because I was teaching traditionally and felt like I was lecturing and it felt silly, right. When I taught using this model, one lesson sometimes took kids only 20 minutes and another lesson could take kids 120 minutes and it was still just one skill each. But depending on the skill, there was just a different level of rigor, a different level to what was going on in the assignment and how much the assignment required. And that was totally okay. And I felt comfortable with that. So I didn't have to kind of chunk content in these arbitrary time frames. So that's how I would answer the question. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Something that you said made me think of a lot of progress trackers that I've seen that do sort of like group together multiple smaller components of a lesson sort of under that umbrella. Sarah's tracker that I'm linking in the show notes that I talked about before in the feedback section looks like that where you see lesson one and then by the side of lesson one, sort of in the same row, it says check in with the teacher, practice, and mastery check. All three of them are sort of check boxes within the lesson one row. You can totally do that in a pacing tracker and keep track of them. Personally, in my own unit planning, I think that a lesson ends with a mastery check. So anything that happens before the master check for lesson three is part of lesson three. I know some teachers will do multiple lessons and then like a mastercheck that covers multiple lessons. I personally would consider that to be more like a summative, but that's just how I've conceived of this. I don't know if the question is getting more at like conceptually, what is it or how do you keep track of these things? If you want the students to go back and revise notes and not like the practice activity, then I guess you have to keep track of both separately, which is fine. You can totally do that by adding another row or adding another check box. But conceptually, I agree with what you said. Everything that's related to a single skill or subject or topic is a lesson. Yes, I think we're aligned on that. I think that's the most common way it's done. And by the way, some lessons I mean, I know some science teachers in particular whose lessons one lesson can last a week because it's one skill and they're tackling multiple components of that lesson over the course of that week long span of time. So it's totally normal to have lessons take a while and also totally normal for lessons to be super truncated. Yeah. You'll see, I've seen a lot of this in project based units that I see from my mentees when I'm working with them. Their unit might be really long, but we always say this, it's good to break up those long units into smaller chunks for self pacing. So they might have like lesson one A, lesson one B, and lesson one C on the tracker. And they're different activities and maybe they each have different notes or different practice problems or something like that, but it's all less than one. And so you can think about it that way, too. But at the end, the lesson one mastery check is what it is, and it's all what they've done in that lesson. But it's like a shorter self pacing sort of sprint than the entire unit, which might take, I don't know, four weeks. Right. Because that's a long time to self pace over and kids can lose the threat a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Let's jump to the next one. This is a question that comes up every now and then, and I think it's a really interesting one, which is how do you combat cheating? This particular teacher said we're seeing some people cheating using others'notes or just copying someone else's notes and not watching the video in a math class. I'm seeing some cheating on mastery checks. Curious what you think here on Zach, and then I certainly have some thoughts. Yeah. I would say that the mastery check is generally the place where I can catch cheating on the other aspects anyway. Like a student has to take their own mastery check, and if they can't pass it, I don't care if they cheat it or not. Like they didn't learn the lesson and so they've got to go back and revise if they're cheating on the mastery checks, I don't know. I will sit down with them and talk to them about the mastery check that they submitted to me and see if I can sort of tease out what they know and what they don't know. And if they understand it, I might not be too concerned if it's clear that they just copied another student. Like a lot of students that I have worked in groups and they're doing a group project and the mastery check is to submit a screenshot of something. So if some kid just takes a screenshot of the other partners who's done all the work right that I consider to be cheating, and I'll pull them over and be like, okay, explain this to me. Explain this to me. Draw an arrow on your slides to this thing that I want you to understand. And if they can't do it, I will ask them to go back and revise the lesson. I guess the buck stops at the mastery check, really, because that's where they have to show me what they know. And if they collaborate before the mastery check, I can't imagine how they could possibly cheat because I let them collaborate before the mastery check pretty much with complete freedom. So that's not an issue. And on the mastery checks, I just deal with it sort of on a case by case basis. If I don't think I could know something, even though they submitted a correct mastery check, I will talk with them. Yeah, I think that's spot on. I think this is one of those times where you as an educator, you do want to create the conditions to ensure that cheating is not happening on the mastery checks, whether it's a mastery check zone in your class, whether you use mastery check days, whether you're really structured about what resources kids have like whether you keep mastery checks behind your desk and only give them out on certain times, whatever structure you want to use and color coded paper is really popular, whatever structure you want to use, I think you really want to Hone in and drill down on the mastery check being where you stop students from cheating. It's also why I'm a huge fan of mastery checks being done in person and if possible, not even digitally. I'm a pretty big fan of that. Not that you have to do it that way. There's some really efficient digital tools to run mastery checks, and if those work fabulous and there's a way to sort of constantly see new problems and new deviations fabulous, or if it's just really hard to cheat on a particular mastery check because it's your own original thoughts, then great use the digital tools. But I sometimes use kind of the physical space, the in person space, and physical mastery checks because it made it even easier for me to create the conditions where cheating couldn't happen. So that's where I really directed my attention around the academic integrity piece. If students are copying each other's notes, if students are not really doing assignments to their full potential and they're kind of crossing the line between collaborating and cheating, and then they don't perform well on the mastery check, that's the teachable moment. Yes, I would do that all the time. I pulled it down and be like, this mastery check is not right. But how is your assignment perfect? And the student starts to realize that I'm not going to get through this class if I keep trying to cheat my way through to the mastery check, because I'm not going to get the mastery check. Right. And if I don't get the mastery check right, I just can't be successful in this classroom. And that's super powerful because you're teaching the student that right then and there that you don't not cheat because you're told not to cheat. You don't cheat because you don't actually learn the skill. You can't replicate what you're hoping to replicate a novel environment. You're not going to achieve what you want to achieve. And that's a life lesson, not just a lesson in a particular classroom. So that's my thoughts on that one. All right. We have one last question. This is a really good question, too. This is from a mentee who is currently enrolled in the virtual mentorship program. It says, how is a pacing tracker different than a grade book? I love this question. And I think the biggest thing to really like to adjust with the pacing tracker is it's an instantaneous snapshot of progress within a short span of time. And that is super different, in my opinion, than the overarching set of assignments, mastery checks, and grades that comprise someone's overall performance in a course over a quarter or a year or a semester. And I think the big distinguishing factor there is a student can be behind pace on the progress tractor, but we're rocking the class overall because in that moment, in that unit, in that chunk of self pacing, they've fallen behind. And similarly, a student could be way ahead in one chunk of skills, but not really taking care of business in a previous previous set of skills. So their overall grade doesn't show that they're crushing it and ahead of pace. But it does show that in that individual moment. And I think what it does is it creates the pacing tracker creates a fresh start opportunity, ensures that kids can constantly be moving up that ladder. The grade book has certain limitations and constraints. Right. You did something, now you're on a different unit, and that was your performance. With that being said, I always told kids that if we're in a grading period and the grading period hasn't closed, you can always turn on assignments and show master on skills from previous units. And I'll still give you credit for it. So the really simple way, in my opinion, to distill it is the pacing tracker is an instantaneous snapshot that's constantly moving and changing. And the grade book has historical data compiled over multiple units that has a cumulative grade that it spits out. And kids can go back to those old kind of assignments, lessons and skills outside of the scope of normal class time if it's in a previous unit. But a lot of those are in the grade book until they're changed. And the pacing tracker creates a really nice space for fresh starts. Yeah, that's a great way of thinking about it. I didn't think about it that way. But the idea of the fresh start, I guess as I thought about this. I was trying to distinguish them in my head, like conceptually. But it occurred to me that there's a much simpler way to think about this, which is that a pacing tracker doesn't show grades like it's not a grade book, at least in my class. It just shows checks and ours, meaning that you need to revise. Like, those aren't grades. Once a student has a check, it's 100% or 0%, right? There's no middle ground. And so what it shows is something different than how they performed on the assessment or on the task. The grade that I give at the end of the unit is a summative grade like I gave in traditional teaching. My students make a song, and I grade the song, and that's based on a rubric that I use that I've always used, and it's very well documented. I give grades based on certain criteria, but progress is an entirely different metric. It says what they've done and what they haven't done. It's not a grade. And so I have a grade book, like, they're different documents. And so to me, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the distinction it's actually pretty clear in my head. The pacing tracker shows what they have done, and if they've done it, they have 100% on it, they have an A plus or whatever the case may be on what they've done. And a grade book doesn't show that the grade book assesses how they did on it. And I see a very clear distinction there. I think that is so spot on. I mean, I always used to say that the best gut check to use with your pacing tracker is does it truly reflect students effort? Because if you're leveraging a pacing tracker and the lesson classifications correctly, then a student who is trying their best and working really hard should be on pace. You should have the systems and structures to ensure that they are on pace, or at least close to pace. But if a student is doing everything they can but they're perpetually off pace, then the pacing tracker is reflecting is sort of a little bit too restrained or restrictive and hasn't actually created the flexibility to provide a snapshot that largely shows the effort students are putting in a class to progress through the unit. So I think that's also a really important way to think about pacing tracker, which is the amount of effort students are putting in to a particular unit. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really cool question that got me thinking about just conceptually high level stuff in a different way than I did before. Totally. I mean, I think it's a very important question. The two things are very distinct, but isolating the why behind that is critical. So I love that question as well. Yeah. And that's a great last question, too. A great way to close this out. And, man, having this conversation with you on the podcast brings me back to 2020. We haven't talked for so long and I feel like old school podcasting now. I know. It's absolutely fabulous, Zach and thanks for having me jump on and hopefully I'll jump on more, especially on these Q and A's. I think these are super fun and it's always fabulous to answer challenging and thought provoking questions from our community. It's what I love to do. So yeah, thanks for having me on, Zach. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for joining me. It's been great. Listen, there's a member you can always email us. We love that feedback. The email address again is podcast@modernclassrooms.org and you should definitely take a look at the Show notes for this one. You can find them at Podcast Modernclassrooms.org 74, which is the episode number. There are a bunch of pacing trackers that teachers have shared with me and I'll just link them down below so definitely check those out. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great week and we will 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.