In most areas of life, when something isn’t working, we look for a better option. In K–12 education, though, children are assigned to public schools based on where they live—and if that school isn’t a good fit, the child is generally seen as the problem. School choice is changing that by expanding access to alternative learning environments. But educational freedom changes lives only if parents and teachers know what options exist, which is why Cato’s Friday Feature highlights the schools, policies, and organizations bringing those choices within reach.
When Robert Barnett was teaching high school math at Eastern High School in Washington, DC, he ran into a problem familiar to teachers everywhere: his students weren’t all at the same academic level.
“I realized that it was impossible for me to teach one lesson per day in such a way that all my students would understand,” Robert recalls. “Some were ahead—they were bored. Some were behind—they were lost. Some were absent.”
So he changed the way his classroom worked. Robert began creating his own short videos to explain the material, let students move through them at their own pace, and required them to master one skill before moving on to the next. He’s quick to note he wasn’t breaking new ground. “I’m far from the first teacher to teach like this, but I sort of found this method that worked well for me,” he says. “It worked well for a colleague of mine; he started doing it also.”
Word spread, and more teachers wanted to try it. “We started a nonprofit, Modern Classrooms Project, in 2018, basically just to raise money to buy Chromebooks for our colleagues,” says Robert. The group trained eight teachers that first year. It was so successful that they decided to train 25 teachers at a handful of DC schools in 2019. That’s when they decided to put their materials online for any teacher to use.
Then COVID hit. “That was a tough time for the world, obviously, but in education there was sort of some excitement,” Robert notes. “Like, this is the time to shake things up, to do things differently.” While he’d created the approach for in-person instruction, it was well suited to the online era. Requests poured in from schools and districts around the world.
Six years later, Modern Classrooms’ free online course explaining how to use their method has reached about 100,000 teachers. Around 25,000 have gone through its virtual mentorship program. “We’re just trying to help teachers implement a model of instruction that we know works better for teachers and for students,” says Robert. They focus primarily on math since it works so well with the model, but they’ll support any teacher who wants to follow it.
In a typical class, the first 10 to 15 minutes might be a whole-group warm-up or discussion. Then the students move on to self-paced learning, meaning they pick up where they left off individually—whether that was at home, in yesterday’s class, or the week before. Teachers keep track of where each student stands with tools as simple as a checklist or a chart on the whiteboard. During that stretch, students can work individually or together—one might be watching a short video while another works practice problems on paper, and another takes a “mastery check” before moving on. Meanwhile, the teacher circulates, answers questions, and pulls together small groups who share similar misunderstandings.
“It’s almost like a study center in a college,” Robert says. “Students are working independently or in groups, and there’s a teacher who’s more of a tutor or mentor, sort of walking around supporting the students.” The last five to ten minutes are usually reserved for a closing activity or announcements. Screen time, he adds, is often less than people assume—less than half of class time and probably closer to 25 percent.
Given concerns about screen time, parents don’t always warm to the idea right away. “I think learning from videos is not popular. Technology in the classroom is not popular,” Robert explains. “Once parents understand that the whole purpose of this is to give the teacher time and space to work with students individually and in small groups, parents love it.”
In his experience, students respond to the individualized nature of this approach. In a conventional classroom, a student can sit quietly through a lecture without really absorbing anything, which may not be apparent until they fail the next test. But then the whole class is moving on to another unit. In a Modern Classroom, though, students must show mastery before they can move on.
“The idea of self-paced mastery-based learning is that every student will be appropriately challenged every day and appropriately supported,” Robert explains.
The Modern Classrooms Project isn’t tied to any one kind of school. “It’s everything,” Robert says. “Public schools, private schools, charter schools, online schools.” Robert emphasizes that he doesn’t think innovation should mean imposing a new instructional system on teachers. Modern Classrooms often spreads teacher to teacher, and he describes it as “ground-up kind of innovation.” When schools try to mandate the approach for everyone, he says, it often doesn’t go well.
Robert’s advice for a teacher who’s unhappy with how their classroom runs and interested in trying something different is to start small—and to check out the free Modern Classroom teacher course. “Even if this seems like a big comprehensive change to instruction, it’s really just a bunch of small practical strategies that teachers use to make life a little easier for them and school more effective for their students,” he says.
The Modern Classrooms Project isn’t the type of educational freedom we normally showcase in the Friday Feature. But it gives teachers and students more freedom in the classroom, which gives kids more opportunities to thrive.
