North Ottawa County Schools

Question: What are “Power Focus Areas” and why does Summit Learning use them?

What?

Each Power Focus Area is a ten question quiz a student must pass to show content knowledge related to a specific course. Each course is made up of multiple Power Focus Areas, and each Power Focus Area has a number of multimedia resources for a student to learn from so that they pass the ten question quiz. A student may take the Power Focus Area Content Assessment as many times as they need to pass it (by scoring at least 8/10); however, if a student fails an assessment more than a few times, his or her teacher or mentor will intervene to help him/her determine how to move forward.

A full description of Power Focus Areas can be found here.

Why?

• Students need to have foundational content knowledge of a subject. For example, they need to know the causes of the American Revolution before they can complete a Project where they make a presentation that argues whether or not the war was necessary.

• All students learn in different ways, so Power Focus Areas give students multimedia resources to choose from so that they are learning in the way that is best for them.

• Before Summit Learning, if a student didn’t pass a quiz, they would just forget it and move on to the next thing without actually learning the content or being held responsible for their work habits.

• Learning science has shown that a large percentage of learning happens in letting students persist through struggles and challenges.