How and When to Set Up Guaranteed Mastery on an Assignment

I don’t know about you, but I often feel like there is a large thought cloud hanging over my head, swirling with strategies, tools, types of assignments and assessments among other things. The trick is for me to know what to pluck out of this cloud in each situation. Am I wanting to see if my class as a whole has an understanding of a topic or concept? Do I need specific percentages of mastery toward a particular goal? Does a student need repetitive practice for a skill? Is this a situation for a guaranteed mastery assignment?

What do I mean by a guaranteed mastery assignment? This is when a student can’t actually complete the assignment without doing it correctly, with 100% accuracy.

So, how do I even set up this kind of assignment? It is possible to do in Google Forms, but I generally use a free site, www.flippity.net . This site is one of my go-to tools for all kinds of interactive activities for my students. It takes Google Sheet templates and makes them into hangman games, a concentration matching game, bingo boards and more. The one activity I would like to share with you is the Flippity Virtual Breakout. Students click on a lock and have to correctly answer the question or respond to the prompt in order for the lock to open. I generally have 3 -5 locks for the students to solve, based on the difficulty of the task. During the set up process, I can choose to receive an email notifying me that a student has successfully opened all the locks as well as how long it took for the student to do so.

One of the benefits of this type of assignment is that students get immediate feedback on their answers. As the teacher, I have the opportunity to catch and correct mistakes with students in the moment. I can hear a specific sound when the lock doesn’t open. If I hear that sound over and over from a student’s Chromebook, or if I see them getting frustrated, I know to step in and see where that student needs more instruction or practice.

Another benefit to this assignment is that I can see if students are making progress in how quickly they can complete the tasks. I might send a Virtual Breakout through Google Classroom each day as a bellringer in a class. The questions change, but the skill remains the same. If the time it takes the student to complete all the locks decreases throughout the week, I know the student is becoming more proficient with this particular skill or topic.

I also differentiate the practice based on the level of student. For example, I have used the Virtual Breakout to have some students type the correct ending punctuation for a sentence while others have to retype the sentence, making corrections for capitalization and punctuation errors. Everyone is working on a breakout assignment, but at their own level.

I tend to use Virtual Breakout anytime we are working on a skill I think students will try to get by without doing their best. It is easy to turn in a paper after rushing through the work. That doesn’t fly when you have to make a lock open with a correct answer. I also think this works well with a skill I want a student to do more automatically through repeated practice.

If you haven’t ever checked out Flippity.net, I highly encourage you to do so. This is one of my favorite items swirling in that cloud above my head! By the way, Flippity.net has no idea I’m writing this blog post. I just love the site!