This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 165 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, we're going to learn how to set up mastery-based grading in your classroom.

I have had Kareem Farrah on my podcast three times in the last year.

That should tell you how highly I regard what he's doing in education.

Along with his team at the Modern Classrooms Project,

Farrah has developed an instructional system that came along at exactly the right time,

even though he was working on it long before the pandemic hit.

Here's a very simple description of the system.

Students work through course curriculum at their own pace,

only moving on when they've reached a certain level of mastery.

The direct instruction is primarily delivered through screencast videos,

which frees the teacher up to work one-on-one with students,

build relationships, give timely feedback, and continue to refine and plan instruction.

This episode is the third and final part of a three-part series.

The first was episode 144, where we learned how to make good quality screencast videos,

the building blocks for this kind of instruction.

Then in episode 158, he taught us how to set up a self-paced classroom.

In that episode, he answered lots of questions teachers often have about this kind of system,

like how to prevent one student being way ahead and another being way behind.

In today's episode, we wrap the whole thing up,

looking at how to grade students for mastery.

In other words, not just letting them move on to the next thing

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