The Protoclassic Monitor System

Towards new communities of mutual and self-assessment

The Protoclassic Monitor System is an approach to improving learning that can be implemented in any community. It is compatible with traditional learning institutions or can serve as the basis for a completely independent learning community. It works with any learning methodology, and it can be used with or without digital tools or artificial intelligence.

What is “Monitor Learning”

Most people associated learning with schools. There, teachers provide lesson plans, instruction, practice activities, and assessment. Even after school,when many people think about diving into a new subject, whether related to cooking, foreign languages, physical education, and so forth, they start by looking for a class, coach, or teacher to teach them.

The main alternative to this is self-learning or auto-didacticism. This approach has become increasingly popular thanks to a proliferation of e-learning mobile apps and instructional video content on sites like YouTube.

Both of these are great ways to learn. And for many learners, they should remain the defaults.

But they also have drawbacks. Under a teacher-led agenda, learners can become passive and reflective, never able to become fully independent agents of their own learning. It leads to disappointment in learning progress, frustration, the subject being pursued ending up as a kind of hobby that the learner picks up from time to time. It can also be quite expensive.

Self-learning, on the other hand, often becomes overly focussed on process and the specifics of practice, with little attention paid to outcomes. It becomes an ongoing task or habit the learner has to attend to, impossibly open-ended, which may be abandoned after a time, yielding to new priorities, without much reflection on whether a particular goal has been reached.

Monitor Learning is a middle way. It places focus on the formation and development of learning objectives under the guidance of one or multiple peer Monitors, who likewise assist with assessment, planning, and finding audiences (both inside and outside the learning community). It seeks to combine the best aspects of teacher-driven and autonomous learning

Grading: A Note

The Protoclassic Monitor System makes use of a six-point grading scale, where learners can fundamentally get a score of 0-6, inclusive.

Numerical grades are often dismissed as subjective or trivial or bureaucratic, external to “real learning.” And, at some fundamentally objective level, this is true.

However, they do have their uses. Numbers provide a shorthand legibility to the learning process that can provide a sense of direction to the learner and to members of his or her audience. They act, likewise, in service of accountability.

They likewise, by means of a kind of ironic distance, oil the wheels of self-assessment and goal setting. And it’s in this property that they are fundamental to the Monitor System.

The system is based on the idea of self-assessment. All grading begins by the learner, who will give himself a grade of 1-5. The learner then receives a feedback grade (either from the Monitor or the teacher, depending on the context) of -1, 0, or 1. This number is combined with the learner’s grade to get a final grade.

When a learner completes a project, he or she will be asked to review it against a grading rubric, and self-assess. The learner then shares this with his or her teacher. If the teacher agrees with the grade, he or she can give it a 0. If it’s too low, the teacher gives it a 1. If it’s too high, the teacher gives it a negative 1. Thus, after adding these two numbers together, a student could end up with a grade of 0-6.

This grading system keeps the focus on the self-assessment process. The feedback grades, also serve as a tool for building self-awareness and knowledge over time.

How it Works

The outline of the Protoclassic Monitor System is purposefully simple, to be implemented in a number of environments.

Definitions

• A “student” or “learner” is a member of a community who wants to learn something.
• A “Monitor” is a student who acts as a peer advisor to other students, primarily by helping organize the course of study and by providing feedback on learning objectives.
• A “teacher” here is a subject-matter expert enlisted to assist with the course of study. Unlike traditional schooling, teachers play a secondary role. Their expertise or experience in a field is valued over their teaching ability.

Procedure

1. Learners begin by defining a time-period for study. Ten or six-week periods are recommended. These time periods may also be defined by the larger learning community that the student is a part of.
2. Learners determine a course of study for the time period with the assistance of a Monitor. Learning communities may also maintain repositories of curricula and syllabi that a learner can choose from.
3. Learners write statement of purpose/learning objective for the course of study. The primary goal of the learner is to refine this goal or objective as they go through the course of study. He then gives himself a grade of 1-5 against a rubric, and the Monitor then gives him or her a feedback grade of -1, 0, or 1 (as described above).
4. Learners define a set of projects for the course of study in collaboration with the Monitor. Again, a learning community may keep a repository of samples the learner can choose from.
5. Learners recruit a teacher from inside or outside the learning community, and agree on a method of instruction (in-person, video conferencing, asynchronous). They then begin the course of study.
6. Students follow the course of study, submitting projects and participating in learning activities, and submitting self-assessments of 1-5 to the teacher to receive Feedback Scores of -1, 0, or 1.
7. At the end of the course of study, learners share their revised statement of purpose with their monitor, along with a self-assessed grade of 1-5, in order to receive a feedback grade of -1, 0, or 1.

Sharing and the Community

Communities can vary in their degree of formality, but should have common rules in place governing how a person can advance from student to monitor.

The community should also define what information should be shared with whom, especially in terms of assessment. Should learners share portfolios of content with other learners? Should they share all their grades with everyone (emphasizing openness), just the feedback scores they receive from their teachers and monitors (emphasizing self-awareness), or let students share whatever they want (emphasizing agency). These rules can vary by community, but should be consistently applied within communities.

Communities can also self-institutionalize by keeping common teachers, courses of study, projects, digital infrastructure, physical infrastructure, and so on. These would depend on individual communities.

Towards New Communities of Mutual and Self-Assessment

As students approach the end of their college or graduate careers, they’re receiving assessment from some of the most successful, most knowledgeable, and most experienced experts and scholars in a field. It should be highly coveted. And the fact that we give this great privilege to people who are barely 20 years old, and who will abandon academic work for unrelated fields is perhaps a sign of our contemporary decadence.

After leaving academic institutions, learners don’t even realize what they’ve lost, and therefore tend toward a dysfunctional relationship with institutional expertise thereafter, either assigning it far too much value, or dismissing it altogether.

This is, in part, because, while receiving first-class assessment as learners, we never properly learned how to assess ourselves.

The Monitor System seeks to address this problem by providing a simplified system of self-assessment, and by empowering students to build their own effective communities of learning outside the traditional academy.

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"Protoclassic helped me both refine my writing and thinking on substantial intellectual projects all the while keeping an eye to the rapidly evolving online scene. It helped refine and then amplify my message while significantly broadening audience reach and impact." — Nicholas Gruen