Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, provides an overview of how the school has broken Common Core State Standards into micro-objectives to deeply diagnose needs as well as understand student mastery progressions.

Transcript: Jon Hanover: across all of our content areas, a level three corresponds with the end of your kindergarten; a level six with the end of your first; a level nine with the end of your second. And what that enables us to do is have more kind of steps along the way to Common Core, as opposed to just grade level and then grade level. And so, we built out our own standards that have, for each strand, kind of what mastery looks like at each level building up to level three, then corresponding with Common Core, end of your kindergarten and level six corresponding with first grade. So, kind of smaller standards along the way to get to the end of your – it's been great. I think it enables you to do – just get a much clearer picture about exactly what kids know and what they don't. And like, you know, the way I taught, where we would have our end-of-year kindergarten summative of assessment that would cover all kindergarten standards, and then you'd have a – you know, in fall, and around winter, and around the spring, and right that in some ways, those were built like little steps to get to the end of your year. But, what you do is you'd give the test to all of your kindergartners regardless of what level they were at, and you'd say okay, this scholar got a 50 percent, this scholar got a 95 percent. Well, like, if a scholar got a 95 percent, that doesn't tell you anything about what they're actually capable of, or what they don't know yet, right? And if a scholar got a 50 percent, that also doesn't really tell you much what they know and what they're capable of. It just tells you that they didn't get this, right? So, you know, by having the kind of leveled assessments as opposed to seat time-based assessments, what that does is, for every scholar, we know exactly what they know and exactly what they don't know yet to get to the next level.

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