- Who are we?
- What can Mastery Portfolio offer our school?
- What does Mastery Portfolio do for Teachers?
- What do we do?
- How does Mastery Portfolio do standards-based grading differently?
Arguably the most valuable step to implementing standard-based learning is organizing your school standards or deciding to adopt existing state or national standards. It's a big step and how they are set up has implications that carry over the whole school year. That's why, in the Mastery Portfolio, standards are nested. This provides a more intuitive way of organizing your curriculum and understanding student progress.
The interactive demo below shows you how standards are diosplayed for both students and teachers.
Mastery Porfolio was built by teachers. Not former teachers, but currently active teachers who use the product themselves. We understand what teachers need and want and we've truly built the tool to make our jobs easier.
The demo below is just a sample of one of our favorite features. Custom inputs allow teachers to enter grades that are automatically associated with a comment. As you can emagine, this dramaticaly decreases the amount of time spent entering qualitative data.
Constance Borro
Chief Executive Officer
Constance Borro is Mathematics Department Chair and an Instructional Coach in Columbus, OH. After earning her B.A., (Yale 2008), Constance began her full time teaching career in New York City as a Teach for America
Corps Member. She became a Math for America Early Career Fellow in 2011 and renewed as a Master Teacher in 2015. In 2012, she joined the faculty of The Young Women’s Leadership School of Brooklyn, a diverse public NCGS member school.
This year she co-designed a course entitled “Mathematical Modelling for Environmental and Social Justice.”
Amanda Bunten
Chief Operating Officer
Amanda Bunten graduated from Agnes Irwin School in 2011 and earned her degrees in Special Education from Vanderbilt University in 2015 and 2016. She teaches third grade and has helped redesign the math and literacy
curricula to support a mastery-based approach to to teaching and learning. She also serves as a mentor teacher to new faculty.
Benjamin Nockles
Chief Technology Officer
Benjamin started teaching as a Math for America Fellow in 2008. (He later renewed as a Master Teacher in 2012 and 2016.) In 2012, he began to create his own efficient solutions for managing teaching-related tasks by
developing software. During his tenure at Brooklyn Technical High School, he began publishing his software on the App Store. He has released lesson planning software, a mathematical diagrams editor, and an attendance/data colleciton
app under his company, 'Solutions for X'. Benjamin resigned from teaching in 2018 when his wife, a Navy dentist, was deployed. He and his family now live in Iwakuni, Japan and he now enjoys working remotely.
Mastery Portfolio is collection of web-based tools and professional development materials designed to improve education practices, both pedagogically and practically.
Our services aim to achieve this through assisting schools in implementing standards-based grading strategies. To that end, we design technology that is simple to use, embodies the pedagogy behind standards-based learning, and is powerful in the information it provides for students and families.
Right now we have one product out, masteryportolio.com, which is a web app that functions as a standards-first online gradebook that gives students specific feedback about what skills they have mastered and what skills they need to further develop. As of winter, 2019, our online gradebook has been adopted by two schools, dozens of teachers and hundreds of students. We are currently building a portfolio of professional development offerings to make a transition to standard-based grading more achievable.
You can check out demos of some of our tools here or you can read a few of our testimonials from early users. The specifics of upcoming features can be read about in the “Upcoming” section of this page.
While we love designing solutions that can improve any and all elements of teaching and learning, Mastery Portfolio is primarily focused on standard-based grading. Our gradebook software is "standards first", meaning standards-grading is our number one consideration in every one of its functions.
Mastery Portfolio currently offers professional development and grading software. What we can do for your school depends on the degree to which you have implemented standards-based grading practices.
Professional Development
Mastery Portfolio is currently building a professional development catalgue. Our goal is to publish free PD modules that schools leaders can conduct for their teaching community. We also want to offer customized workshops and support for the schools that need that. The objective of all of our workshops is to help schools in their transition from traditional to standards-based grading. Our professional developments are a separate from our other products. While we can include training on how to use our software, the use of our grading software is not prerequisite to participate in our courses.
At this stage, we are planning our scaffolding and workshop sequence. Our development team is comprised of teachers who have experience in public, charter, and private schools K-12. We understand that every school is different and we strive to differentiate our workshops to address the needs of all schools. We hope to publish these PD modules by early 2020. Until then, if you'd like help leading PD for your school, we invite you to contact us! Please send us an email using the link below. Include your phone number and the times when you are most available to receive a call. A member of our team will reach out to you to discuss where you are at and what you need.'
Online Gradebook
Currently, our gradebook is standards first, meaning we are trying to move away from the traditional letter grades and illustrate student progress using performance indicators and 'summary bars'. If you'd like to see this in a very limited demo, check out the 'About' section of this page.
We have also opened registration for schools that are interested in becoming "beta users". Beta users are free users who get all the benefits of our existing software, plus they get to "weigh in" with recommendations for feature requests. Our beta users are an important part of our development process! If you are interested in enrolling your school with a beta account, please check out the registration page:
Student View
Custom Inputs
Intuitive Organization
Standards-Based Gradebook
- Physics
- (PA) The student will demonstrate an understanding of how scientific inquiry and technological design, including mathematical analysis, can be used appropriately
to pose questions, seek answers, and develop solutions.
- (PA.3) Use scientific instruments to record measurement data in appropriate metric units that reflect the precision and accuracy of each
particular instrument.
- (PA.4) Design a scientific investigation with appropriate methods of control to test a hypothesis (including independent and dependent
variables), and evaluate the designs of sample investigations.
- (PA.3) Use scientific instruments to record measurement data in appropriate metric units that reflect the precision and accuracy of each
particular instrument.
- (PB) The student will demonstrate an understanding of the principles of force and motion and relationships between them.
- (PC) The student will demonstrate an understanding of the conservation, transfer, and transformation of mechanical energy.
- (PA) The student will demonstrate an understanding of how scientific inquiry and technological design, including mathematical analysis, can be used appropriately
to pose questions, seek answers, and develop solutions.
- Computer Science
