The Quill team sits down with teachers at EdSurge Summit: Baltimore.
February 22nd, 2014
On Saturday the Quill team spent six non-stop hours speaking with hundreds of educators at the EdSurge Summit: Baltimore. It was an incredible opportunity to speak with teachers interested in new ways of engaging their students. The EdSurge team did an excellent job creating an environment focused on honest discussion. Instead of simple and impersonal booths, teachers and entrepreneurs were provided with tables and chairs so that they could sit down together and intimately discuss products, problems and solutions. This environment produced challenging questions and thoughtful feedback.
One particularly engaging question centered on the role of feedback and scaffolding learning. Students using Quill are required to write complete sentences. For example, if a student forgets to add punctuation the sentence is marked as incorrect. At the moment Quill does not explicitly tell students why the sentence was marked as incorrect, and this is an intentional decision so as to encourage students to closely review their work. Teachers understood our perspective, but they also insisted that their younger students may need more feedback. These discussions culminated with the decision to start building a refined, scaffolded system, in which students will receive extra feedback during their initial lessons, and those supports will be taken away as the student progresses.
Another interesting discussion centered around the value of mastery based learning. Quill employs a mastery based system of green, yellow, and red scores to focus in on where students succeed, and where they need help. Teachers were enthusiastic about these new methods of assessment, but they also desired thorough data to provide grades for each student. This lead to a thoughtful discussion about how a mastery based system and percentage based system can complement each other.
We are deeply thankful of EdSurge for creating the space for communities to come together. It’s amazing how you can find great partners when given a shared space. The Quill team is now looking forward to partnership with Springpoint, a nonprofit incubator of student driven schools. During the conference we met Liz Curtis-Bey, a program associate at Springpoint. Springpoint is incubating schools in the Summit style of education in which students choose their own learning experiences. We share that mission of engaging students in their education, and we look forward to partnering with another NYC based nonprofit.
There is a real excitement in the air, manifested at the summit, in which innovative educators are coming together to re-imagine education. The Quill team is proud to take part.
