Earning Credits

Mastery is a Process

In our learning environment, failure isn’t feared but embraced as an essential stepping stone towards mastery, much like Thomas Edison’s perspective, who viewed every setback not as a failure but a step closer to discovering what works.

Deep, enduring learning stems from perseverance, particularly through instances of unplanned outcomes, offering rich moments of collaborative problem-solving, adjustment, and forward planning. We purposefully use words like "iterate," "reflect," and "generate," our methodologies are meticulously crafted to guide learners toward persistent mastery through a continual cycle of feedback, reflection, and iteration.

This approach doesn’t only enhance the educational experience, making it more practical and beneficial, but also mirrors real-world scenarios, ensuring that when challenges arise in higher education or professional settings, our learners confidently utilize feedback, refine processes, and enhance outcomes.

No Grades, Just Growth

Telos Micro School is built around the concept of mastery — which boils down to the simple idea that learning should be deep, enduring, creative, and transferable. As a student, you’ll grow as you build a running record that accurately captures the best of what you’ve produced and achieved.

Instead of grades, we use “Mastery Credits” that you earn through presenting evidence that demonstrates your skills, knowledge, and abilities — or what you really know and are able to do. Mastery Credits allow you to show what you can do in ways that grades simply cannot.

Mastery Credit Areas

The Mastery Credits you’ll earn fit under what you’ll recognize as our competency domains. You’ll also see that these Mastery Credit Areas describe skills, mindsets, and knowledge that you’ll need in order to master our four competencies:

  • Applied Knowledge

  • Personal Skills

  • People Skills

  • Workplace Skills

How do you generate evidence to earn credits in these Mastery Credit areas?

That’s where the signature learning experiences come in.

Within each of these four Mastery Credit Areas, you’ll find a variety of Credits. There are two kinds:

Foundational Credits are the floor. Everyone must earn the baseline credits, which include mastery in skills such as Critical Thinking, Communication, and Curiosity.

Advanced Credits are the wide open sky. They allow you to demonstrate the depth of your skills in the areas that matter the most to you and to show off your unique profile of interests and strengths.

Why Mastery Credits?

Not everyone learns the same things at the same time and rate. Mastery Credits put you in charge by allowing you to decide when the time is right to present your best work in a credit area. You may master some skills quickly and take more time with others. All the while, your collection of curated evidence is growing as you continue to practice skills in the various competency domains.

As your portfolio grows, these credits capture your knowledge, skills, and abilities in an entirely new way — via a graphic and interactive digital transcript.

With the Mastery Transcript, you’ll have a digital showcase of your demonstrated abilities. Think of it as a deep portfolio of your work, complete with a homepage that offers a high-level overview of your achievements that college admission officers or hiring managers can get their heads around in just a few minutes.

Want to learn more about the transcript? Check out the Mastery Transcript Consortium.