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Editor's note: This story led off this week's Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers' inboxes every Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today!
In Molly Nealeigh's fourth-grade math classroom at Piney Grove Elementary School in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, students spend most of the time studying at their own pace on skills they identify that they need to improve.

Every 12 weeks during the school year, students here take assessments to gauge their progress toward mastering all of the standards in the fourth-grade curriculum. While all students take these tests, Nealeigh's pay more attention to the results than average. For her fourth graders, the test results offer a picture of their strengths and weaknesses, revealing specific skills they need to sharpen.

Nealeigh helps them glean this understanding. She makes a chart, listing each test question under the standard it relates to (like "use place value understanding to round multi-digit whole numbers to any place"). Students calculate a percentage for each standard based on how many related questions they got right or wrong. When students get 80 to 100 percent of questions related to a given standard correct, Nealeigh considers that mastery, and the students don't have to do any review. Less than that and students either have to work on the skills by themselves or, if they got fewer than 60 percent of the questions correct, with a teacher.

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"The mindset is 'Give students their own data and let them choose what to work on themselves,'" Nealeigh said.

Nealeigh's classroom uses mastery-based learning, where student skill acquisition is the priority. More traditional classrooms proceed through a curriculum based on class time. One day is spent teaching one skill to the entire class, for example, and the next day, the teacher moves on. Students who miss something do poorly on the next test, and everyone charges ahead. In Nealeigh's classroom, students keep going back to a given topic if they don't quite understand it, proceeding only once they've mastered the related skills.
Related: A school where you can't fail - it just takes you longer to learn
Because she has a two-hour math block in her school, Nealeigh said she teaches new content every day for the first 45 minutes and then students are free to work on their own for the remainder of the period. She created online "pathways" for each standard in the fourth-grade math curriculum and students decide every Monday which pathways they're going to tackle that week. Once they work through the pathway, watching videos and practicing problems to learn the skill, they take a quiz. If they pass it, they can move on.

She said students got so absorbed with completing their pathways last year that they worked on them at home, during school breaks and even into summer vacation. Nealeigh recorded one of her students explaining his thoughts on the new system and he described a sense of empowerment at being able to choose which pathway to try on any given day. He liked the freedom to move at his own pace, whether it takes a day, a week or more.

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"The mindset is 'Give students their own data and let them choose what to work on themselves.'"

Nealeigh, meanwhile, gets more time during her two-hour class to pull aside small groups of students who are struggling to master certain standards and give them a more intensive lesson.

Nealeigh saw such impressive results with her students in just one year that other teachers are already beginning to implement her system in the high-poverty school. Third- and fifth-grade teams are working together to create pathways for all the standards covered in their curricula as well.

For teachers who don't have the luxury of two-hour blocks, Nealeigh said the system could still work. She recommends spending a couple days per week teaching new material and giving students the rest of the week to work on pathways individually.

For teachers who feel overwhelmed by the prospect of a radical shift, Nealeigh recommends taking small steps.

Romain Bertrand helped Nealeigh design her system last year. He is the manager of blended and personalized learning coaching for BetterLesson, a company that offers teacher coaching and curriculum resources. He said teachers shouldn't feel obligated to do all or nothing when it comes to mastery-based learning.

"If students have full awareness of what their testing data means, if they can say 'Oh I need to work on this, I could get better at this' - even if you're not building out other things, they're self-advocates," Bertrand said, referring to teachers who help students use test results to understand what skills they need to sharpen but don't create self-paced pathways or other elements of a mastery-based system. "In other classes, they're in the dark. If someone is able to go halfway, it's already huge."

This story about youth leadership training was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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What "mastery-based" can look like in the classroom

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Editor's note: This story led off this week's Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers' inboxes every Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today! In Molly Nealeigh's fourth-grade math classroom at Piney Grove Elementary School in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, students spend most of the time studying at their own pace on skills they identify that they need to improve.

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Students take part in creating the rubric.

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Students take part in creating the rubric.

# data[].attributes.body
-students having voice and choice in the method of assessment

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The students might be less anxious about the assessments because they may have some choice in the what, when, and how of the assessment. They may feel more invested in the assessment.

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There is more student buy-in.

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More open communication between students

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More open communication between students

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More open communication between students and teachers

Openness about grading with less stress because of the various types of assessments by meeting each child where they're at

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More student engagement

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It is more skills and project based rather than paper based.

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Students are less stressed and worried about their grades and feel more ownership over their grades and testinf

# data[].attributes.headline
students have a better understanding of how they are doing.

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students have a better understanding of how they are doing.

# data[].attributes.headline
students taking responsibility for their learning

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students taking responsibility for their learning

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Students receive personalized feedback and have more of an opportunity to reflect.

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More buy in to their work and growth

# data[].attributes.headline
Students buy into the projects they are creating if they know or have a say in how they are evaluated.

# data[].attributes.subject
Students buy into the projects they are creating if they know or have a say in how they are evaluated.

# data[].attributes.body
Students are less surprised by their situation or grade in each class and have more of a say in how they are perceived

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-we would see 1 on 1 conferences between students and teachers: this could be face to face or digitally

# data[].attributes.body
Students take more ownership over their learning

Better relationships between students and teachers

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Student buy-in, more reflection, more growth

# data[].attributes.subject
Student buy-in, more reflection, more growth

# data[].attributes.body
It’s less of a burden/responsibility on us, we can share more of the experience with our studenfs

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Lack of time

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Students are participating in the whole process of their learning and growing. They understand their own growth.

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Students are participating in the whole process of their learning and growing. They understand their own growth.

# data[].attributes.headline
Students fully understanding what they are learning, and taking ownership of their learning

# data[].attributes.subject
Students fully understanding what they are learning, and taking ownership of their learning

# data[].attributes.body
Students have more trust of teachers she less anxiety over test prep.

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It’s hard to rework material or lessons to fit the model of student-centered learning when you don’t have time or brain power

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Students believing they have control over the classroom 

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Students believing they have control over the classroom 

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Students better understand how the assessment ties to their learning.

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Rubrics are based on skills and processes.

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Rubrics are based on skills and processes.

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curiosity and ownership

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More open communication within the classroom about learning

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More open communication within the classroom about learning

# data[].attributes.body
relinquishing control

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It requires more time.

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-students coming in excited to learn
-students wanting to stay after the bell rings

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Students feel comfortable and successful in their learning environment

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The flow of the class may change after understanding the feedback from the students.

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The students feel more ownership of the class and their participation in it.

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Keeping up with the work load and classroom management.

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Keeping up with the work load and classroom management.

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It can feel overwhelming to create assessments for each child.

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That we will not get the information that I am looking for.