In a Matchbook School, every student starts each subject not at their age or grade level, but at their unique competency level for that subject which could mean they are ahead, behind or at their grade level when they start. So how exactly do students navigate down this personalized learning path and know what to do next when? We describe this personalized pathway using our “GPS Board” similar to how a car or smartphone’s GPS system navigates you to where you want to go from wherever you are, step by step. Our GPS system has four navigation steps in a student’s continual but personalized learning pathway.

Preparing for the Learning Cycle
 

Learn

Our academic lead and our specialist collaborate with teachers on our curriculum units & standards reviews during professional learning communities (PLCS). We utilize data to inform our standards planning template which is aligned to common core standards and conceptual practice that allowing for both procedural and application based learning.

Find

We use formative assessment lesson samples from the Shell Center and modules from the Literacy Design collaborative to match unit standards and then we upload into Fuse Box (Mini-tasks as Practice Pieces & Module Tasks as Unit Apply)

Plan

During unit planning creation, we work together in PLCS to develop small groups based on data & aligned with literacy design collaborative and math design collaborative modules.

Assign

We organize and curate all into SPARK and then we assign units in Spark to students in order to personalize standards "bundles" via our playlists.

Implementing the Learning Cycle
 

Learn and Practice

We define our instructional blocks in timed segments to introduce content standards through "do nows" and engage students in formative assessment strategies for learning and practice on our SPARK platform.

Conference

Takes place 1:1 with teachers, in peer groupings, and for intervention purposes related to our curated playlists and bundled standards.

Apply

We want our students to be able to show an understanding of procedural tasks. We also want them to show how to apply a given standard or set of standards via conceptual understanding of "how" to think about solving a given problem.

Assess

All of our assessments are aligned to PARCC or Smarter Balanced exemplars in order to build stamina and familiarity with nationally normed assessments.