With many students needing academic intervention after the pandemic, school district officials in Columbus and Cleveland, are turning to “mastery” learning as a strategy to catch them up.

The mastery, or “competency” approach lets students learn at their own pace, making sure they fully understand key skills before moving on.

That could be a good fit when students return to school in the fall after making drastically different progress online or in very limited in-person classes.

The Columbus school district has built mastery concepts into its summer program to let teachers, students and the district test-drive them. The Cleveland school district, which uses it in a few schools already, hopes to expand its use quickly. District CEO Eric Gordon, long a fan of mastery, has named using more in schools as one of his top four priorities in the district’s post-COVID academic plan.

“Over time, [it] will actually close achievement gaps more quickly and effectively,” Gordon said.

Kenton Lee, head of secondary curriculum for the Columbus schools, said that mastery concepts have been a major topic in planning COVID recovery. Administrators, he said, are bothered by an increase in F grades in a difficult year when students may have learned material partially from home and can learn the rest now that they are back in classrooms.

“Mastery was brought up a lot,” he said. “The question is how do you operationalize it in a district that is as large as ours and to scale it.”

And leading the charge in Ohio and nationally, is the Cleveland-area Hawken School, a private school that opened a new mastery-based high school last fall to test and showcase the model, and is now partnering with Columbus as it explores mastery.

The Mastery School of Hawken had to adapt during the pandemic and couldn’t bring visitors in to demonstrate the highly-individualized model, but it hopes to promote it to private and public schools alike this fall as educators look at new ways to run schools after COVID.

Read the full article about using mastery for COVID learning loss by Patrick O'Donnell at The 74.