Recently, I was flattered and honored to be the guest of Season 2 Episode 2 of Education Perspectives, a podcast hosted by Liza Holland. Our talk ranged from edtech to game-based learning. You can listen to the episode on your favorite platform from here.
On the podcast, one of the topics I briefly discussed was the need to shift from a "Credit Recovery" system to one of "Credit Discovery." I wanted to extrapolate on that subject for today's blog entry,
Credit recovery, as educators well know, is a pretty common hallmark of the traditional educational system. For a semester or a school year, a student attempts to get a passing grade in a class. The student is marched dutifully through a curriculum. For a variety of reasons -- likely aggravated by absences, low grades or missing assignments that creates a statistical hole the student cannot climb out of -- the student reaches the end of the timeline, only to fail. In some cases, the student may have an opportunity to spend time in the summer "making up" for the class, somehow achieving in a few weeks what the student could not do in months. In other cases -- especially if there are several such classes to make up -- a student may be put into a program where they can tackle several credits side by side, thanks to an online course platform that asks students to watch a video, take a quiz, watch a video, take a quiz, then take a multiple choice test.
There are, of course, well meaning variations to the above. Perhaps the student completes a PBL in the summer, knocking out credits for a few classes simultaneously. Perhaps the online course platform has some interactive tools to make the learning more engaging. In the end, however, credit recovery is mostly a seat-based solution to learning that rarely takes mastery or personalized interests into account. It is also an inefficient approach that closes the door after the cow has already left the barn. Last but not least, it saves the innovation of learning until the end. If somehow a novel way of teaching can really work in just a handful of weeks -- in a PBL, or through a digital platform -- why would you waste the prior instructional months in frustration just to arrive at failure?
If we don't like such outcomes of a traditional system, let's start something new by changing the questions. What if we instead turn a reactive, post-mortem, negative approach to learning into a pro-active, diagnostic, positive one? What if students were allowed to discover a way to earn their credits, with their input front and center from the start? What if the rigor of learning was raised, right alongside the joy?
Breaking away from Carnegie Units and fixed seat-time scheduling is not easy, but it is not impossible either. I've blogged before about William Smith High School in Colorado, and how its courses (created with teacher passions and student input in mind) ingeniously blend traditional credits into PBL classes that are high interest with a complex, authentic performance assessment as a final product. Back in November, Cory Steiner, superintendent of Northern Cass School District of North Dakota, visited OVEC educators (he'll return next month to talk to our regional district leaders). He shared the many innovations of Northern Cass, but one that particularly jumped out for me was the studio classes being put into place at its secondary schools. From the beginning, these inquiry-based "courses" are co-designed between students and advisors in order to complete credits the way students want to earn them, through independent mastery-based projects. (For more on Northern Cass and its "microschool" program, read this Getting Smart article from May 2023.)
As educators, we can be commended for all the energy we spend trying to save a student who has already "failed." But this may not be the best way to focus our time, and certainly suffers from framing a student in a deficit mindset rather than an asset-based one. Instead, let's invert the model. Let's spend at least the same amount of energy empowering our students who often are the victims of a failed, traditional, outdated school system. Let's help our students discover their own greatness, and be the exploring pioneers of their own learning.
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