Meet Grace Gilmour, and her proficiency-based classroom.
“Oh yay. I was like: yay, my heart.”
This was Grace Gilmour’s response to a student’s honest appraisal of her class: “I love it in here because I always feel like I know the next steps on the road to improving.”
Grace teaches social studies to 7th and 8th graders at Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury, Vermont. Like teachers across the state, she has been working hard to implement proficiency based learning in her classroom.
If you ask her how it’s going, Grace will likely smile and whisper, “it’s working.”
In Sam Nelson’s classroom, students choose what they learn, and how. Through the use of learning scales and targets, Nelson sets guidelines for students to demonstrate proficiencies in whatever they choose to study. Between the two systems — flexible pathways and proficiency-based learning — students negotiate a curriculum that keeps them engaged and satisfies their curiosity about the world around them.