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. In this episode, Zach Diamond is joined by teachers Emily Johb, Dave Read, and Distinguished Modern Classroom Educator, Karla McEachern, to talk about a wide variety of tools they use to facilitate self-pacing in their Modern Classrooms.

Getting Started with a Modern Classroom

Dave and Emily, team teachers in Saskatchewan, started by looking at their standards and what kinds of units they could start with to model the approach for their grade four students. Grade four students need a lot of modeling to understand the approach, so they started by teaching kids how to use the LMS, how to log in properly, and how to use the self-paced tracker. They started by watching the videos together, then filling out guided notes together, checking things off their checklist and trackers together. This helps to set them up for self-pacing when they are going through things solo. The students can often be released to complete lessons on their own after that. 

Karla started by creating a Unit Zero for her grade eight students. It was basically an overview of what learning in Modern Classrooms looks like and the rules and routines they could expect. 

Then she started by rolling out an English unit. Karla and her students struggled with English, mainly because students struggled with those basic self-regulation and organization skills that they needed to be successful.

Introducing the Learning Management System

At the beginning of the year, Emily set up a scavenger hunt within Google Classroom, her school’s LMS, to help students who were unfamiliar with it to understand the virtual lay of the land. She also made video tutorials so she could send them home to parents to help understand the Google Classroom, too, and so that students could have an additional source of support if they had to revert to virtual learning.

Karla sets each subject up as its own class in Google Classroom, allowing students to keep all the subject-matter content together. She spends a lot of time on organizing the content so it is easily navigable for students, but also makes sure not to post too much at one time so that students don’t get overwhelmed. She also color-codes her Google Classroom, so they can visually see their required classwork, as opposed to what is a may do (her alternative to “Should Dos”) or aspire-to-do task.

Learning Tasks in a Modern Classroom

Karla has found that implementing a Modern Classroom means her students are able to achieve a greater depth of understanding and they are actually able to complete projects she would have run out of time to complete in her previous set-up. She keeps her may do tasks as ones that reinforce whatever is being taught in class, while her aspire-to-do tasks are much more high-level, far-reaching tasks. In her previous set-up, Karla found these tasks were “often the tasks that I've had sitting in my Google Drive. And I'm like, ‘Dang, I wish I could teach this’ or ‘I wish I had time for this.’” Now in her Modern Classroom, not all students have time for these tasks, but those who are mastering content and looking for a greater depth of learning are.

In the classroom with younger students, Dave and Emily structure their lessons and learning tasks very differently. They don’t use must do, should do, or aspire-to-do tasks. “We find that at this age level, most of our kids can do most of the work most of the time,” Dave said. As a result, they aren’t differentiating the learning tasks so much as they are differentiating along the way. Kids can power forward through lessons if they are achieving mastery, but both Dave and Emily work with students who are falling behind to get them up to the pace of their classmates all the time, while also determining which content students can skip over on an individual basis.

Tips for a Modern Classroom

Karla uses “class pauses” to help students be more mindful in their learning. “Like today, I paused my class midway through as I was conferencing with a group of students, because I could just see some kids were almost lost.” So she stopped her students and said “I want you to pause and think about what you're doing right now. What is your body doing? What are you physically doing? And are you meeting your goals of what is expected right now?” These questions help to re-center students, especially when they fall out of routines after school breaks.

All of the educators on the show recommended individualization for their students. Understanding the roadblocks each student is experiencing and helping them to see their learning path as manageable is essential to helping students move forward and own their learning. Karla said, “A lot of this could be because of their profile or because they're just having a rough week or whatever the situation is. But I can go in and say, you know what, ‘I'm going to take this out for you. And just to help get you back on pace.’” The Modern Classrooms model allows her the ability to do that.

Emily ensures she is not so heavily tied to the model that she can’t respond to whole-class needs. Sometimes she responds to the needs of many with a mini-lesson, or an opening activity or conversation related to what much of the class will be studying that day. This engages students in a novel method of learning that doesn’t keep them tied to technology or the standard routine.

Self-Pacing Trackers

The pacing tracker has been an important piece of all three teachers’ self-paced classrooms. Karla started at the beginning having all her lessons laid out in a table on a Google Slide, but that eventually became too cumbersome. Now she uses the auto-updating pacing tracker for her own tracking purposes and a gameboard tracker for each student, which has also been pivotal - it not only allows students to see where they are going, but they can also see any potential may do or aspire-to-do tasks.

Dave and Emily have tried the gameboard tracker before, but right now use a self-paced tracker that is more of a checklist. The students have a checklist that has all the standards written up at the top that goes sequentially. They modeled this checklist and the behaviors around it regularly to make sure their students are actually checking and going through everything they need to. Emily uses a teacher tracker in Google Sheets, allowing her to mark grades and how many attempts students needed to achieve mastery. This lets her know if a student needs more support on the next concept to help them achieve mastery more quickly.

Grading a Modern Classroom

Karla has gone all-in on innovation in her classroom this year by going fully gradeless. She started by reading Ungrading by Susan Bloom over the summer, and now she looks at student work as whether they are approaching the task, met the task or exceeded it. And because she has to have grades on student report cards, she allows students to self-grade. She asked them to self-assess and come up with a number of where they think they are. “I would say that 97% of my students were like, bang-on and the other 3% were too hard on themselves,” Karla said.

Dave and Emily focus more on progress in their classrooms, although they do still use a traditional grading system. They don’t focus on the number of attempts or the time it takes students to master content - they simply know that a student is struggling to understand the concept and they're not ready to move on.

Advice for Starting Your Own Modern Classroom

Our teacher experts recommend knowing and accepting that you are naturally going to have students that are going to fall behind pace and responding to their needs to help keep them on pace. Understanding what is causing them to fall behind pace and being consultative in your approach is how you truly differentiate and respond to student needs.

For even more information on tools can support a Modern Classroom, we recommend checking out the free online course for educators or the Virtual Mentorship Program, to explore the model with the help of a mentor!

Our Guests

★ Karla McEachern is a grade eight teacher at Irma Coulson Public School in Ontario. She is in her 20th year of teaching, currently teaching everything - math, science, art, English, history, geography. She stumbled upon Modern Classroom when it was brought to a group of educators called “The Shift In Halton.” She went through the mentorship program in the fall of 2021 and started implementing right away. She recently earned the Distinguished Modern Classroom Educator distinction and is pleased to be part of that collective.

★ Emily Johb teaches grade four at Traditions Elementary School in Saskatchewan, Canada. She has been teaching for about nine years, and grade four for the last seven years. In the past five years, she has been working toward a self-paced classroom, but started implementing a Modern Classroom in January of 2021. She has completed the Virtual Mentorship Program and is now working through the application for the Distinguished Modern Classrooms Educator. 

★ Dave Read is Emily's teaching partner and has been teaching for about 13 years in Saskatchewan. He has taught grade three, four, five, and six, but has spent the most time in grade four. He has been working towards self-pacing for a while and stumbled into MCP  in December of 2020. 

Our Host

Zach Diamond studied Music History and Theory at Oberlin College and received a Masters of Music in Music Education from Boston University. He taught music for five years in Lima, Peru, and is currently a Middle School music teacher at DC International School, a language-immersion school where he teaches in Spanish. He began implementing the Modern Classrooms Model in the 19-20 School Year and enthusiastically continues his work with the organization as a mentor and podcast producer.

If you like what you hear in this episode, share it with a friend or subscribe to get updates when new podcasts are published.