what's the clearest path to
Building equitable and lasting MBL systems? 

Greetings and best wishes as summer recess beckons!

How did that happen? Another school year has sped by. Along with celebrating our graduates, wishing students a wonderful break, and making plans that involve hammocks and time with friends and family, we are reflecting on the year we’re finishing up . . . and already thinking about all we hope and plan to get done with learners and colleagues next school year. 

MBLC member schools have been immersed this school year in working toward realizing their goals for 

1) culturally responsive-sustaining mastery-based learning (CRSE/MBL)
2) pandemic recovery
3) school wide professional learning
4) meaningful, ongoing youth input into all this other work.

We're also—already—thinking about what we can do next year to continue down a path to building high-quality, lasting, and equitable MBL systems in our classrooms, schools, and districts. 

After working for almost 10 years with dozens of schools on MBL practices and systems, I'll share my thoughts on that here. As you head out for a richly deserved summer break, here's a post that can be food for thought to enjoy and experience along with your iced coffee or tea.

What is CRSE and how does it connect to MBL?

MBL and CRSE share a primary focus on academic excellence. MBL supports students to become hands-on, independent learners who exhibit growth mindset and agency across disciplines. Likewise, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings names Student Learning as Pillar 1 of CRSE. She asks us to support students in building expertise in literacy, numeracy, social and political skills—and also to foster love of learning, and to invite young learners to focus on and to develop skills and knowledge that are meaningful and important to them.

Student Learning, CRSE's first pillar, is the most familiar and time-tested purpose of schooling. MBL—with its emphasis on agency, hands-on/interest-driven learning, responsive supports, and authentic assessments— is a powerful path to realizing CRSE Pillar 1, Student Learning.

As essential to our purpose as Student Learning is, we can't stop at Pillar 1! Building capacity with the other two pillars can enrich school significantly for each student, and for our wider communities, who benefit from the presence of culturally competent, critical thinkers who are able to gather and interpret information and can work together successfully to solve small and more complex problems.

Both MBL and CRSE seek to put learners at the center of our intentions. But how are we, how are you, getting to know learners we work with? More specifically, how are we getting to know learners who we (and perhaps they) experience as most different from ourselves? This requires cultural competence. 

Pillar 2 of CRSE, Cultural Competence, is a set of social and personal awarenesses, practices, and skills that allow us to form and sustain effective and supportive relationships with others that are not based on familiarity/likeness. 

Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, tells us about the power of  “teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the students know to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing."

“Cultural competence refers to the ability to help students appreciate and celebrate their cultures of origin while gaining knowledge of and fluency in at least one other culture, “ Dr. Ladson-Billings tells us. Cultural competence means both understanding our own and others’ racial, cultural, and social identities, and working effectively with others who are not like ourselves. 

As practitioners of learner-centered practices, cultural competence can help us answer this important question: Who are the learners we put at the center of our work? * Cultural competence helps us connect effectively, affirmingly, respectfully, and comfortably—and in a way that supports cognitive and academic growth—with students we experience as being different from ourselves. The "mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” we can offer not just in texts, but in our work with students and families we serve, build our relationships with students, and our students' ability to learn.

* Shout out to Dr. Leah Q. Peoples, who led a team of researchers at New York University Metro Center in a study about CRSE/MBL, and sparked me and colleagues in NYC to ask this central question as a foundation of our practice.

Pillar 3, Critical Consciousness: From whatever vantage each of us occupies, it's clear that we face complex and existential social and environmental challenges. More than ever, our world calls for people who are equipped to name and analyze complex problems, join forces with others to envision and a better world, and to make sometimes life-saving changes. Students tell us that school feels most meaningful and exciting when they as learners get to grapple with issues that matter to them and affect them in their school, community, or the wider world—when learners grow their abilities as change agents, as world changers.

Students, and the rest of us, too, benefit when they can bring all their expertise—from their families, communities, peers, histories, and other experiences and spaces, to inform their schooling and to develop their critical lenses and world-changer skills. Students build these skills when we adults make space for them to bring their wisdom and knowledge from everywhere and offer them chances to practice and build their skills of naming injustice, and analyzing and addressing it, in small and larger ways. We can learn with and from student how to support their work without impeding them as we support and teach—critical consciousness is a powerful and subtle set of skills that requires our commitment to learning and unlearning, and our own critical consciousness, as well. As adults, our critical consciousness is bound up with learning from and with young people as well as each other.

How do MBL and CRSE amplify each other’s power?

MBL and CRSE are two interlinking, learner-centered approaches that can promote equity, healthy school culture, and high quality teaching and learning. Why are these practices so powerful when used together?

MBL developed from an intention to be responsive and equitable in working with students as learners. This is wonderful, and much-needed! MBL has a stated goal of equity, but the field is, frankly, fuzzy about specifically how to get to know, value, and incorporate students’ racial, cultural, and social identities, ability status, families, community realities/histories, and other aspects of the learners we put at the center of our efforts. MBL practitioner teachers and schools told us: We need guidance, skills, insight, capacity-building.

This is CRSE. When we implement MBL together with high-quality CRSE, we meet our young people as who they are, where they are.

Developing a strong CRSE practice can power your MBL implementation. 

In working closely with dozens of K-12 public schools in NYC over nearly 10 years, my colleagues and I saw a pattern: Schools with a strong CRSE practice developed MBL much more easily—it fit right into their established approach to supporting Pillar 1: Student Learning. And, they already had a habit of rethinking their practice to stay responsive to students. However, schools that started by developing MBL systems without CRSE had a much harder time understanding the value of and the “how to” of CRSE—they saw the disproportionate data that let them know they were not serving all their students successfully, and wanted to “do something about it,” but this felt like adding complication on top of complication—so many things to change. 

After years of working with schools on both MBL and CRSE, it’s become clear that the clearest path to developing strong, lasting, equitable MBL systems in your school or district is to start with . . . the three CRSE pillars.

MBL and CRSE flourishing together gets us to the goal we work so hard toward: Students who tell us they feel the satisfaction and joy of significant academic growth and achievement across the disciplines, including what is most important to them.

With gratitude for the schools across Washington engaged in this important work—and for the Washington State Board of Education, whose vision for and active support of this work is unique and powerful, and already fueling meaningful transformations in how learners experience school across the state. What an amazing first full school year it’s been.

Rest well, and see many of you at the Summer Institute August 7 & 8 at Green River College in Auburn! Meanwhile, have an awesome summer and thanks for reading.