In post one of this series on mastering the three skills of the classical trivium, “How Do You Measure Mastery?”, I compared classical homeschooling to Indy car racing and defined the finish line, the driver, and the crew. In “Diane’s Must-Know Mastery Checklists,” I compared the content to the Indy car and shared my personal “must-know” checklists for teaching language, critical thinking, and communication skills. In this final post on mastery, we’ll look at pit stops and how to evaluate your child’s progress towards mastery.

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The Pit Stop

Indy Cars enter the pit for one reason: maintenance. Periodically throughout the race, the driver pulls into the pit for fuel, tire changes, and for other engine or body work. The experienced pit crew member assesses the situation and prescribes a solution. Personally, in the “Lockman Racing League,” we like regular pits! I probably reassess the kids’ progress about every 12-18 weeks. I use my “must-know” checklists as a gauge and adjust the schedule and content accordingly. Weaker areas get more time. Sometimes I’ll even table all other work and do a quick intensive to make sure they are getting the concept. We’ve been known to stop everything and do a “grammar camp” or nothing but algebra until I was satisfied that they “got it.” Feel free to use my content “must-know” checklists as a guide to help you develop your next 12 week strategic plan.

The Score

Indy Car drivers accumulate points over the racing season as they compete in multiple races around the country. You need criteria for judging mastery, too.

How will you evaluate the learning?

In our home, we have one performance philosophy: do it well or do it over. We don’t accept mediocrity. Once Connor was performing poorly on his math lessons averaging about a 60-70%. My husband took control of the situation and started grading his work. Instead of circling the errors, he simply told Connor how many he missed and told him he had to find them. Basically, he had to do every problem again to find the errors. Although it was a painful lesson that took a couple of weeks of endurance, Connor learned to take his time, check his work, and master the material.

Although I do use letter grades for recording high school level work for the transcript, I prefer to evaluate mastery using a scale that I found in John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching. Basically, you pick a skill and answer the following question. For instance, how much do you know about analogies? punctuation? bibliographies?

• I know nothing about…

• I am somewhat familiar with…

• I can generally describe the steps to…

• I can illustrate and explain how to…

• I am beginning to understand the deeper truths of…

• I am changing my behavior because of…

When they reach the changing behavior status, you know that they have mastered the material. Additionally, I really like to have them teach others the concept. You cannot teach what you do not know, and there is nothing like having to prepare a lesson that clarifies your misunderstandings or weaknesses. By the way, the word “master” is defined as “one who has such extensive knowledge and comprehensive skill that he is able to teach others his specialty.

The Training

Alas, mastery is hard work for both parent and child. Parents who may not remember (or maybe never learned) the “rules” of the race need refueling to restore long-forgotten knowledge. Thankfully, a rusty parent can come up to speed rather quickly with a little review. The child, however, begins each of the three skills of the trivium as a novice, and consequently, his or her journey towards mastery will take years of learning and practice before language, thought, and communication skills are finally conquered. To continue with the race analogy, the parent runs a sprint while the child runs a marathon!

Mastery of the three skills is not consecutive; the skills are usually built concurrently over time. In other words, your child doesn’t master language then master critical thinking then master writing then master public speaking. In fact, your child can work on mastering all three skills at the same time. Consider the child who is learning about multiplication. As he learns the vocabulary like factor and product (language), he makes ordered stacks with the colored tile manipulatives (critical thinking) and sings the multiplication songs to his little brother (communication).

Additionally, you may find that your child has substantially mastered one skill (like the spelling component of language) but is still working on another skill set (the grammar component of language). Instead of drilling the spelling rules, devote that time to diagramming sentences.

The good news is this: if you have dropped the 12 year public school paradigm, then you are free to spend as many years as it takes teaching only 3 major skills: language, thought, and communication. In some families, mastery of these three skills takes 6 years; in others, it takes 8 years. Even if you spent the first 8 years guiding your child toward full command, that still leaves 4 years for your teenager to dive deep into the study of subjects and, in the process, compile a very impressive transcript. Don’t worry about how long it takes; teach them language, thinking, and communication until they are able to teach others and become masters of their skills just like Indy Car racers!

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In Adopt a Radical Position…Be Counter-Cultural, I discussed four qualities that need to be nurtured in classical Christian home school kids: (1) mastery, (2) self-reliance, (3) interpretation, and (4) influence. Now that we’ve covered mastery, it’s time to examine the rising scholar’s level of self-reliance, independence, and responsibility, all of which are the subjects of my next post.

Have you watched my free parent tutorial yet on The 7 Laws of Teaching? In this free ~30 minute flash presentation, you’ll learn more about mastery for you, the parent! You can take your own assessment and see what areas of language, critical thinking, and communication you need to work on to teach your kids. Let me know if you enjoy it, and please leave any suggestions for improvement by taking the online survey. Thanks!

Tags: "must-know" checklist, classical homeschooling, classical trivium, communication skills, critical thinking, grades, high school, home school, mastery, teaching language, The 7 Laws of Teaching, Transcript

When I pulled the kids out of public school in order to teach them at home, I decided (with David’s blessing) to postpone the traditional grade accumulation process until they began to tackle high school content. The primary purpose of report cards is to notify the absent parent of the student’s progress, and I was no longer detached from their education; so, I decided to avoid the extra work until it was absolutely necessary. I was fully in tune with their progress in every area of learning, so there was no need for busy work. Every homeschooling mom will agree with me that we have plenty of work to keep us busy day and night!

 

Fortunately, my state department of education does not require grade reporting; however, if your state requires report cards, you’ll have to comply. Check with the HSLDA or click on the map to discover the legal reporting requirements for your state.

Most employers, colleges, and universities require an official transcript outlining the high school curriculum and grades, so I began to keep track of grades once each child began high school courses. I recommend starting some high school level work during the 7th or 8th year of homeschooling if you think your teen is ready. For instance, in our home, the kids started high school Debate and Latin before the 9th year, so I started accumulating official grades during the middle school years. In the example below, you’ll notice that there is no grade for Algebra 1 because Connor hasn’t started this yet.

 

How you decide to gather grade info is really your personal choice. You can pay for software like Edu-Track, or you can shares forms with other parents on email loops like the Yahoo Group, Homeschool Form Share. My personal favorite tool for accumulating grades is a Microsoft Excel form called Grade Tracker that you can download for free. Here’s a screenshot of my customized summary for Connor:

There are two great reasons to use Grade Tracker: it’s free, and the excel spreadsheet automatically calculates the cumulative GPA! If you’d like to go behind the scenes, I’ve prepared a quick video tutorial to explain how I use Grade Tracker.

Our philosophy of learning has always been “master the material, or do it again” which means that we strive for excellence. Sometimes rework cannot be avoided, and sometimes we just don’t “get it,” but generally, we don’t move on to new material until we have mastered the old material. Fortunately we have the luxury as homeschoolers to set our own pace, and we can stop and work on a particular weak area of knowledge until we master it. We’ve had to do this several times with math which is a good reason to start the kids early on high school level work if you can.

Some courses like Literature or Art History are fairly subjective in nature; David and I generally grade these courses through Socratic Dialogue, narration, or written essays. Objective courses like Latin 1, Laboratory Biology, and Introductory Logic include written examinations which can be graded more precisely.

I try to keep up with the grind of recording high school grades on a weekly basis although I have to admit this task is one of my least favorite chores of homeschooling! Usually by Friday afternoon, I am ready to start entering information about the course content and the related grade into the spreadsheet. Over the years, I have kept all of the kids’ work; at the end of the year, I pull out all the best examples and create a portfolio (really more like a scrapbook) and put the rest in a labeled box which I store in the attic. In some respect the annual portfolio serves as proof of each child’s homeschooling “grade” or progress that year until they get to high school when I then begin to keep official grades.

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Are you keeping grades yet? Please take a minute to share your methods in the comments section below.

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