Craft Category: Strategies

To help students recover unfinished learning time, teachers spend twenty-minute blocks teaching a specific standard to support student mastery.

Liberty Public Schools grounds instructional decision making in developing graduate competencies in five areas. Leaders used this profile to advance deeper learning models as well as to create virtual, personalized learning opportunities.

Liberty Public Schools district leadership established communication channels with school-based practitioners. This allowed teachers and instructional coaches to share insights into day-to-day challenges with district leadership. This also provided a way for district leaders to more effectively rollout initiatives.

At Mt. Vernon Elementary School, mastery-based grading was implemented to support and encourage students to easily determine their own mastery guided by teacher feedback.

Liberty Public Schools math teachers piloted a mastery-based learning model to support student self-direction and personalized pacing. Elementary school teachers built lessons around a continuum of standards and allowed for students to attend classes based on their interests and/or needs for their learning pathways.

When schools closed for in-person instruction and students shifted to remote learning, they became more responsible for managing their work and schedule. Teachers noticed students struggling with self-management skills and adjusted their social emotional learning scope and sequence to focus on development to support independent learning.

As a result of the pandemic and changing class sizes for students returning in-person, elementary schools shifted from single grade level classes to multi-grade level classes. This allowed creating even class sizes with frequently shifting numbers of students attending in-person.

Students were guided to explore their individual identities and reflect on how their identities influenced their ability to learn and leverage their strengths. To celebrate this work, the school held an Identity Day assembly.

Teachers work together to create interdisciplinary, project-based experiences that span seven weeks and are organized around a common “big” inquiry question, with content-area driving questions and specific “concept” activities that are aligned to and build towards mastery of specific standards.

Teachers opt-in to a specific track of professional development based on their interest in a certain domain of Chicago Public Schools’ Personalized Learning Framework.