Mastery-based Learning with Launch School

It’s a new week, so we have a new podcast episode for you. Matt and I spoke with Chris Lee of Launch School about his approach to online education. We discuss the different tradeoffs and considerations that come into play when a curriculum is being put together.

To my mind, mastery-based learning — where you don’t advance to the next stage until you’ve really mastered the topic at hand — really shines for things where you have some kind of longer-term goal. Just because it’s a good approach doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. In Chris’ words:

We started this to try to figure out education. It was not a money making endeavor. So to us, teaching became the engineering problem to solve. I was not a proponent of Mastery Based Learning before Launch School. Mastery Based Learning or Competency Based Learning is not unique to Launch School, it’s a well known pedagogy in academic papers. But it’s really hard to implement.

Think about a physical classroom. Mastery Based Learning means that a student gets to occupy a seat in that classroom for an indefinite amount of time. That’s a really hard promise to make when our schools are tasked to usher through students. It’s not about training students and making sure they understand every topic, but getting people through.

You can download and listen to the episode over on the main Sources & Methods website here.

Actual Fluency

I was interviewed by Kris Broholm on the Actual Fluency podcast last week. This was a real pleasure to do, since I've been listening to that podcast more or less since it first started.

You can listen to the interview/episode here. Our conversation was fairly wide-ranging, covering topics like whether to start Arabic by learning the spoken or written form first, how to learn languages when there isn't much in the way of materials available, and what kinds of meta-skills I've found useful in my own language learning journey as well as that of the students I coach.

Classical Arabic and a Sources and Methods Recap

The new Arabic podcast I started has three episodes out of the Jordanian dialect series. Today I'm adding to those with a new series exploring classical literature. I'm extremely pleased to be joined by my friend, the erudite Talha Ahsan, someone who has a strong appreciation for the subject matter and who teaches Arabic online and in person in the UK. Read some of the testimonials from his former students here.

In our first episode, we discuss Ibn al-Muqafaa' and Talha's interest in classical literature. We get into Ibn al-Muqaffa's relevance to the modern age and explain what we hope this podcast series will do.

Sources and Methods has a new podcast out today, too. This is an 'inbetweenisode' in which Matt and I discuss the past year, what we've been up to recently and some of our future plans. Let us know if you enjoyed this style of episode. We were thinking of doing more of these conversations between us where we take a deep-dive into a particular topic.

The ways memory skills augment your life

I released a new episode of Sources and Methods today. This week I spoke with Lynne Kelly, author of ‘The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments', a fascinating exploration of the intersection between history, archaeological sleuthing and memory techniques. We delved into the contents of her book as well as the practical applications she found for these ancient skills.

I’ve been fascinated with the work that Lynne has been doing on the history of memory and her own personal memory ‘experiments’. If you need some inspiration as to things you might learn (or ways you might learn them), head over to her blog and the page entitled ‘My 33 Memory Experiments’. She generously includes photos and explanations of how the various systems work. Her latest groups places them in even further context. As someone who’s been following her memory experiments for a while, I found the book really useful to understand why she was picking a certain technique over another.

She’s about to start a new project involving memory skills, education and schools (she discusses that in the podcast around the 34-minute mark) and I look forward to reading about the outcome.

New Year, New Arabic-language Podcast

This year, in combination with my publishing a book about getting from intermediate-advanced level in Arabic, I wanted to find a way to stay committed to improving my own language. So I’ve started a mostly-Arabic-only podcast.

There are two episodes up already, both from the ‘Jordanian Dialect’ series. This series is recorded with co-host Lina Obeidat, my good friend and Arabic teacher of several years. (Book lessons with Lina on iTalki here. She’s also a regular contributor to talkinarabic.com’s Levantine materials).

During the first episode, we talked about the winter and the rain in Jordan (where we’re both based), and I learnt about the existence of a period of 40 days when the weather is much colder. In our second episode, we talked about taxis in Amman. We struggled to find many positive things to say about the system or the drivers of taxis, but tried to see things from their perspective. At the end, I learned a new proverb that was appropriate to our discussion.

In the coming weeks I’ll be adding more shows to the podcast. There will be a show focusing on Classical Arabic texts. There will be a show on Modern Literature. Potentially we’ll have a show for Egyptian Colloquial (sigh!) but that depends on my finding someone to host it (let me know if you’re interested).

I’m looking forward to recording more episodes. Please leave a comment over on Soundcloud with any feedback you might have. Also, subscribe on iTunes by clicking on this link or search my name and you should find it. The podcast is also available on Overcast. Just search the name and it’ll show up.

Misquoting Mohammad meets Sources & Methods

Matt and I were lucky to get Jonathan Brown on the podcast for an episode that came out this week. Check it out for his work on authority and sourcing in the Islamic tradition, a discussion of how he picks the examples that end up in his books and the current state of Islamic studies.