Mastery-Based Learning

more traditional schools—a challenge that many innovators are aware of and are actively seeking solutions.” Providing teachers and school personnel with professional training in competency-based school models, trauma-informed care, and culturally responsive pedagogy—while asking them to continue operating in a traditional school mindset—is ineffective in bringing sustainable growth and lasting change. Putting more things on the plates of teachers and principals without evolving the existing educational construct is, ultimately, futile.

Educators are just beginning to grasp that trauma and toxic stress are detrimental to brain development and deeply understand their role in the origins of many diseases. Thus, there is a professional need for educators to continue to leverage the most current science to inform the creation of innovative school structures and classroom instructional strategies to reduce the impact of toxic stress on children and to mitigate its negative effects on development and health across the lifespan. As such, a teacher’s role is to become an expert in learning and the brain, as well as in the factors that can either enhance or inhibit learning.

Becoming doctors of learning rather than purveyors of content is the ultimate challenge of every educator as the world and the profession continue to evolve into the future. When a school or district offers professional learning sessions in areas such as SEL or culturally responsive instruction, but doesn’t revise or evolve the overarching system , it only adds more to teachers’ already full plates. The school wellness wheel provides the framework in which schools can accomplish this new vision. This model for success focuses educators’ cognitive energy. As the education research becomes more robust, schools and teachers can adopt it into the school model as appropriate.

If we encourage ourselves to approach the critical issues from a different perspective, it can open up a new world of unlimited possibilities. This is about the humans and the learning. It’s not about the curriculum and the content. By understanding and responding to students’ past and current experiences with trauma and stress, school administrators, teachers, and staff can break the cycle of trauma, help reduce its negative impact, prevent retraumatization, support critical learning, and create a more positive school environment.

Until we create schools that actively focus on the overall health of the brains, bodies, and psyches of the humans in the building, the quality of the curriculum, instruction, and assessments is irrelevant. Thus, the adults in the educational system have a critical responsibility to adjust their professional orientation away from simply delivering curriculum, providing instruction, and maintaining traditional grading systems, to adopting and growing within a humanized educational model that recognizes students’ individuality and helps them grow to the greatest capacity possible.

A Powerful Solution

Ultimately, by educating educators on the diverse and complex pathways through which children develop, engage, and learn, the school wellness wheel can help align schools and instructional design with students’ individual capacities and needs. This alignment can better facilitate the healthy development of the whole child, enhance culturally responsive approaches to academic mastery, and personalize high-level learning for every student.

We believe that the solution to educational inertia lies in integrating the school wellness wheel as the foundational layer in the educational evolution process. Humans adapt to stressful environments in ways that can undermine learning and can also foster their involvement in unhealthy or high-risk behaviors (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Martin & Liem, 2011). However, research on neurogenesis and neuroplasticity speaks to the power of developmentally robust environments that promote resilience and improve learning outcomes (Hunter, Gray, & McEwen, 2018; Masten & Coatsworth, 1998).

Education centered on healing and resilience allows teachers to focus first on internal factors, such as healing damaged brains and tired bodies, building resilience through validation and human connection, and actively responding to students’ personal contexts. Based on these practices, healing- and resilience-centered schools relentlessly focus on learning, mastery, connection, and empowerment. Poor behavior is seen as a result of internal dysregulation that can be addressed in an effective manner. In healing- and resilience-centered schools, teachers start from the inside. They become experts in the learning process and understand the corrosive effects of personal and historical trauma on cognition. They know that helping students move toward mastery is, in itself, healing.

As such, it is important to reconfigure schools around a different perspective and to employ language specific to the new model. Thus, we assert that healing- and resilience-centered schooling happens best in the context of mastery-based learning, the effective use of trauma-responsive schooling, and culturally responsive teaching. These three evidence-based constructs have the immense power—when combined—to transform the entire educational model.

Once the school wellness wheel is effectively implemented, higher levels of wellness, learning, and mastery of college and career skills can be achieved through strong instruction and curriculum along with high-quality assessment protocols. If