A diagnostic assessment is a pre-instruction evaluation used to identify learners' prior knowledge, skill gaps, and misconceptions before teaching begins. Its purpose is not to grade performance, but to inform decisions about teaching, pacing, and support.
At its core, the curve of learning represents how quickly proficiency increases through experience. The learning curve theory shows that improvement is not linear. At first, people might feel confused and make mistakes, which can slow progress. After some time, though, they start to improve faster. Eventually, as they approach mastery, progress may slow again.
When I shared the reasoning behind this decision on Instagram, my DMs exploded with messages from thousands of parents quietly navigating the same issues. Watching their capable, intelligent children crumble and wondering if they're the only ones considering alternatives. Many of them told me they feel like failures for even thinking about stepping outside the system. But we're not failing ― the system is.
Collective learning is how a group or system creates, improves, and keeps knowledge. This knowledge lasts beyond any one person or cohort. That is the most practical collective learning definition, because it shifts the focus away from individuals and toward the learning system itself.
Being thrown into a group of new strangers each and every year, as is typical in so many American public school systems, is deeply evolutionarily unnatural. Under ancestral conditions, humans did not encounter strangers with nearly the same frequency that we experience now. And guess what? Humans have an entirely different way of interacting with strangers (including appropriate levels of hesitation and skepticism) than we have when interacting with others whom we know well.
