The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Manager, Voice of the Customer, Hayley Browning.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Focusing on Progress Over Mastery with Dr. Derek Briggs
What if a “wrong” answer tells you more than a correct one? In today's episode, we sit down with Dr. Derek Briggs, professor of educational assessment at the University of Colorado Boulder, to unpack why assessment should go beyond testing, and instead focus on progress over mastery. Derek shows how context and thinking processes matter just as much as outcomes, and why mastery is not always simply laid out.
To support a deeper understanding of progress, we explore a roadmap for measuring growth throughout your day-to-day. Start with a clear baseline, define where students are headed, and chart the route with smart, formative checkpoints. Derek shares an approach to “triage with intention”: use periodic measures to inform flexible grouping, then rotate focused attention across groups so support stays equitable. Derek also shares the power of strategic questioning, including entry and exit tickets. Over time, these small insights into a student's depth of knowledge add up to a clear picture that guides instruction.
Derek goes on to discuss the power of community. Inside the classroom, heterogeneous groups help students model strategies, language, and persistence for one another. Across the school, teachers who bring open-ended student work to the table can discuss expectations, co-create rubrics, and see patterns that single classrooms miss. And when families understand the learning goals and what quality work looks like, home practice becomes purposeful and encouraging. The result is a culture where curiosity replaces judgment, students take ownership of growth, and assessment becomes a daily driver of learning.
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Curriculum Associates, an education technology company and the makers of iReady, presents the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Join host Haley Browning to hear tips, best practices, and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We believe all educators are extraordinary, and we are here to support you. Hi everyone, welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Derek Briggs. Derek is a professor in the Research and Evaluation Methodology Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as director for the Center for Assessment, Design, Research, and Evaluation. In today's episode, I talk with Derek about how we can better understand that our students are actually learning, taking a deep dive into assessment and why it should go beyond testing to focus more on progress over mastery. It's a really powerful episode that's full of great ways to support your students and ensure you're giving them what they need as an educator. Before we dive into the episode, I just wanted to give our listeners a heads up that we are approaching our winter break for the podcast and are taking some time off come 2026. We hope you've enjoyed listening to this season so far. And with that, we hope you also enjoyed today's wonderful episode with Derek. Hi, Derek. Welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Hi, Haley. It's nice to be here with you.
SPEAKER_00:We're so happy to have you. And Derek, I know you wrote an incredible blog that we'll make sure to link in the show notes for all of our listeners. And in this blog, you were talking about this idea of why assessment should go beyond testing and instead should focus more on progress over mastery. So we're going to dive into that a little bit today. But before we really dive in, I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. I'm a professor of education at the University of Colorado Boulder. And my area of expertise is generally speaking in educational assessment, but also in sort of teaching research methods that relate to how professionals do education research. And it's always interesting to give yourself an origin story. Uh when we look back, what always makes it seem much more linear than it really is. But I suppose for me, it's it's one in which when I was in high school, I benefited from a lot of great uh teachers, you know, and I can still remember my the names of my elementary school teachers, like most of us probably can. But I went to school in Southern California, and I don't want to date myself too much, but this was in the late 80s. And at the time, my teachers were actually going on strike uh related to salary issues. And so I attended a school board meeting to give an emotional plea for the the value of my teachers and to get them out of out of strike. And I was retreated very in a very patronizing way by the school board members. And from then on, I decided I would never enter a situation like that with just anecdotes, but I would always make sure that I had good data and hard numbers to make to support my arguments. So um that's part of my magical origin story that's that led for me to go and get a degree in economics and then make my way to graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, where I studied education and methods of assessment and statistics and psychometrics. And then I took my job at the University of Colorado Boulder and I've I've been here 22 years.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, you really have covered all of the board, it sounds like. And it's also really interesting how you kind of stepped into this even in high school and recognize that the power of data really can sway people and become powerful in these conversations that you're having. So that's really, really great to hear. Thank you for sharing, Derek. And with that, Derek, I want to go ahead and dive into our topic for today. So just to kind of kick us off, in your blog, you talk about how mastery is seldom black and white. Can you explain what you mean by that and why it might be important for teachers to understand that as a concept as they start thinking about how to incorporate this in their own classrooms?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Yeah, you know, in the blog, I give the just a simple example of just imagining, like we all kind of remember, you know, for me it was probably third grade. I remember having to learn my multiplication tables. And there's a way to learn your multiplication tables. I remember one afternoon my mother sitting me down and just drilling me on the various multiplication tables until I just had them memorized, right? But, you know, um, you can memorize them, but not actually understand why. It works that way, right? And I think what we really want for students is to go beyond just recalling and being drilled to actually understand what they're doing. And so I give the example in my blog of a student being asked to solve the question, what is nine times eight? Right. And you can imagine a student getting that wrong with an answer of 71. If you just decide, well, does that mean they've mastered or not mastered the multiplication tables? A simple way of thinking of that in black and white, this student has not mastered their multiplication tables, right? But what if it's quite different potentially from a student who just randomly answers 65 or 90, right? Because what what the student might have been doing is actually a process of coming to the answer with a student who's really thinking it through and saying, wait a minute, I don't remember from from just recall what the answer is. But what's an easier way for me to figure this out? You know, what if I ask, what's 10 times eight, right, instead of nine times eight? And 10 times eight is 80. And I say, well, you know, I'm going by nine, so let me subtract nine, and that gets me 71. So it's the wrong answer, but it's very sophisticated reasoning and potentially better reasoning than a student who just was able to recall because their mother happened to drill them the day before the question was asked, right? So that's what I mean by mastery is seldom so straightforward. We, you know, we need to know more than just whether a student gets an answer right or wrong, but we care how they come to the answer and how they actually understand the concepts. So that's a short answer. I could even also give a very another one that's related to briefly to sort of my expertise in measurement and educational measurement. You know, one of the reasons why we give students tests with more than one question per concept is that we know that understanding is very fragile when it's tethered to a particular context. So think about reading comprehension. You know, you could give a student a reading passage and ask them a question about what was the main point of this passage. And maybe that passage is one the student was really engaged with and had actually it was in a genre the student had read before. And so that made it very easy for the student to go about the process of saying what the main point was. But if you asked slightly different genres, maybe the student's not quite so good. So if you thought mastery was black and white based on a single question, right, uh that would you'd be mistaken. And I think teachers know that intuitively, um, that you need to know more than just the answer to one question to establish mastery.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it also comes back to this idea of teachers know their students and they have to look at their students as a whole and recognizing that each day is different, they're bringing different things to the table each and every day. Yes, maybe their mother did work with them the night before, but you know, there are also those students that are having these conversations and thought processes through their head in order to show and work through that mastery. And I think that that's really powerful to have both of those examples that then can be applied for our listeners as they're thinking through all of the work that they're doing with their students. And with that, Derek, I'm wondering, you also had talked about this idea of student progress. And so if a teacher is grappling with this idea of focusing on student progress rather than mastery, what might that look like? What can teachers do to dive into focusing on progress over mastery?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I wouldn't position them as being sort of one or the other. So what we obviously care about things like mastery, but if by mastery we mean attaining some level, desired level of proficiency that might be laid out by content standards and like, of course we care about that. But I what I what I really want to emphasize is that you need to know where students are when they arrive in a classroom. And I think we appreciate the need for that baseline. But what's most interesting and what's most malleable is where a teacher can get a student from there. So what's more important is establishing from what you understand that a student can do, what influence you can you make to help them go further. I think the fundamental thing that I would emphasize that if a teacher is focused on first establishing where is a student now, where do I want them to go in terms of mastery, and what does progress like look like on the route? The number one thing that I would say that a teacher would be attending to is curiosity, right? And that's curiosity. And I give the story of, you know, have you ever watched uh Ted Lasso?
SPEAKER_00:Of course. I love Ted Lasso.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, okay. So um there's a wonderful, there's a wonderful scene in Ted Lasso, right, where he's baited this other guy into a duel uh in playing darts. And so they have this competition to play darts, and he, you know, makes it seem like he's a novice at playing darts. It turns out, you know, we learn later that Ted, you know, for six years played darts and actually really, really good. And so this great scene where it looks like he's about to lose, but he hits three incredible shots. And as he's right before he does that, he gives this little monologue where he says, you know, um, people have always underestimated me, right? And I I've always wondered why. And I realized the problem wasn't me, it was them, that they were never curious, right? And so the motto is be curious, not judgmental, right? And I think the same idea here uh goes into working with students, is that not only do we want students themselves to be curious as learners, as teachers, we need to be curious about what they're thinking about and what they're doing and not judgmental. And I think a focus purely on mastery is fundamentally judgment, right? Is the student mastering this or not? And not necessarily about curiosity, right? And I think we need to be curious. And so in that great scene, he says, you know, if you had just asked before we challenged me to this duel of darts, if you had asked me, hey Ted, have you ever played darts before? You would have found out that, yeah, in fact, I'm really, really good at darts, and that would have changed, you know, what you were willing to wager. And I think the same thing in the in a microcosm might be true with teachers, you know, in that question I uh example I gave about multiplication. If instead of just marking the question wrong, we asked the the student, why did you choose 71 as the answer? Right? That curiosity could lead us to a real insight that could lead us to help the student learn multiplication in a deeper way.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's really powerful. And again, it's coming back to this idea of understanding your students on all levels, digging into the way that their brain works and not necessarily thinking, oh, just surface level. But it also I think is important to recognize that teachers are busy and we all know this. And digging into these different aspects and demonstrating this curiosity may take some time for teachers to, you know, set aside time. Um, and I'm wondering, Derek, do you have any recommendations on how to kind of interweave this into their day-to-day as we want to respect the time that they have?
SPEAKER_01:Sure, of course. I mean, I think this is the way in which we we have to sometimes do some amount of triage when we're teachers, especially if we have a lot of students. You know, we unfortunately can't give one-on-one attention every day to every student. But that's one of the values, I think, of having some form of a standard assessment that you're you're giving at a regular basis, where maybe the assessment, and it could be something along the lines of the IRETII inform, where at a high level, it does give you a rough sense of some groupings of students. Um, and you might say, Oh, you know, I have students that, given that they're in this grouping, I might worry about or wonder about these kinds of concepts, right? And I have that knowledge then going forward about students, and that might inform the ways that I group students, either homogeneously based on what I know about, what I think I know about their understanding, or heterogeneously to let students help each other. And when I then create activities that students are working on in class, I should go in strategically and know, oh, this day I'm gonna focus on this particular group, and I'm gonna spend a little bit more time with that group, and I'm gonna focus in on certain students in that group that I have some knowledge about where they're might be struggling and where I could help. And you do that strategically. The next time you have an activity, you have a different group that you're spending some time with. So I think it's this idea of always making sure you're trying to be as equitable as possible in terms of your attention and making sure that students that really need the help, the most help, are maybe getting a little bit more of your attention, but making sure that you're circulating. Um, but it's always with the this idea of I'm curious about what's going on here, right? And I wish I had the time for every student, but um, I'm gonna at least give focus time on a regular basis spread across small groupings of students. And then of course, occasionally you will identify a particular student where if you've really gained an insight, you know, how could we not take the extra steps of, you know, and I think one of your questions might be later about the notion of community, right? And and if we notice something about a student, it's not all on the teacher to work on that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and Derek, that's a great segue into our next question. Community is really key to student growth. And you talk about this in your blog. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, thinking what can teachers do to really help build this community to support their students and their classroom.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I think being being very transparent with students about sort of what learning goals are, this is especially important as we get into the older ages of students, um, because you want students to have agency and you want students to take some ownership of their own learning. So for example, if you're doing things where you have a particular learning goal in mind and you have questions that you're asking that would demonstrate movement towards that goal, you want students themselves to have an idea of what is a high-quality response to questions that are being posed. So that, and I mentioned the idea of heterogeneous groups. Sometimes we tend to think of the groups only being homogenous, where you have students that are all struggling in the same group. Well, especially as you get into middle school, there could be some students that are further along and they're helping their colleagues, right? So some of that community uh could just be within the own classroom community, but it's enlisting students as um actors and agents in their own education, right? So that's that's one form that I think um we, you know, we could benefit from. The other form of community is with other teachers. So so far you can see I'm moving out first from the enclosed classroom space with teacher and students, but then there's the community within a school. And I think that sometimes we we unfortunately have teachers working too much in isolation and thinking that what they do with students is only while the students are with them, as opposed to the idea of, you know, the students that are with me this year, they're gonna be with different teachers the next year. They were with other teachers the previous year, right? How can I enlist my colleagues to help me understand what's going on with students that, you know, knowledge of what they were doing in the past and also give them foresight for what's gonna happen in the future. Another really important form of community. And if your focus is on progress, it's all the more important because you're not actually just focused on mastery in one grade, but it's progress. If you're in the elementary grades, is progress all the way through elementary school. If you're in middle school, it's progress through middle school. If you're in high school, it's progress through graduation. So there's another form of community. And the last and maybe most important is making sure that parents are and caregivers are brought to the table uh so that you're you understand that you're all working towards the same goal. Parents can do a lot and can make a really big difference. And so the more information you can share with parents, they'll be grateful.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, 100%. And it really becomes very clear how important this community can be. I like how you mentioned that you are all working towards this same goal. And I think that that can be lost, you know, in the depths of this time of year, teachers are tired. And sometimes you might forget about the fact that you are all going towards the same goal. You want your students to succeed. That I think is really crucial in this day and age of teaching. Um, you had mentioned that we are kind of in this space where teachers are working in isolation. And so kind of taking a step back and reflecting on how that's working for our listeners, how that may be working for you in your classroom and your schools, consider how maybe you want to start incorporating community more across the board and what you can do to bring that back into your classrooms. Um, and Derek, I do want to wrap us up with one last question. And so you had mentioned this idea of good assessment in your blog, and I want to touch on that a little bit. So, can you expand on what exactly good assessment may look like in the classroom and how it can help support our teachers in this, as we know, ever-changing world of education?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, a point that I'm making in the blog is that assessment is much more than testing. And unfortunately, I think the two have become a little bit conflated. It's become almost that assessment just means that we're giving a test, but it doesn't have to mean that. And sometimes the best assessment we do is in the moment where we just know good questions to ask as teachers, right? And the more expertise we develop in our domain, the better we are to tailor those questions. And a good assessment question is sometimes very hard to arrive at because if you're asking a good assessment question, you're gonna get variability in responses. If you ask a question, all the students give exactly the same answer. Not a very informative question that you've just asked there, right? So figuring out what's one good question I could ask that can really help me understand differences and how students are thinking about a problem, where their levels of mastery might be, information about their progress, what are questions that I can pose? One good question to start a class, one good question to end a class. Those are all things that can be incredibly valuable. And to circle back to one of the points you made about teachers working in isolation, in my own work, one of the things that I have found to be the most powerful tool for professional development is when teachers across classrooms, either in the same grade, but teaching different classes, or across grades, are bringing in examples of how their students went about answering an open-ended question they gave. And then asking, hey, what do you notice about the differences in these responses? Here's how I would group them. Here's what I think a better response is. Here's a student I didn't here are students who didn't respond the same way, but this is really interesting. Why do they respond that way? How would you score this? Right? Those conversations with colleagues are incredibly powerful and formative, right? And that's a great example where you could be something that you're doing as an entry question or an exit ticket, not necessarily for the purpose of grading or testing, but just in a formative sense to understand where students are coming from, how they're thinking. And again, not to make the argument that testing isn't important, it certainly is, but there's more to assessment than just testing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that all makes sense. And I 100% agree. The idea of bringing the open ended responses across classrooms, across grade levels, I think is so powerful. I hadn't even thought about that. So for our listeners, I hope that you take that into your schools to help you build this better understanding of your students across the board. Um, and with that, Derek, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up for today. But I do just want to thank you again for your time. This was really wonderful. And for those listening, again we'll have Derek's blog linked in the show notes.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Haley. It's my pleasure.
SPEAKER_00:Get inspired by following us on social and please tag us in your posts on X at Curriculum Association and on Instagram at My IReady. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest, or want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducators at caink.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to help more educators like you join the conversation, please leave us a review. Remember, be you, be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators Podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Curriculum Associates believes that with the right supports, all children can reach grade level. We provide evidence-based high-quality instructional materials and world class implementation services to classrooms across the United States. Editing completed by Shane Lowe, social media by Attsidi Hannon, guest booking and production by Haley Browning. This podcast is copyrighted materials and intellectual property of curriculum associates.