Students' Thoughts on Summit - a 5th Grader's Perspective

by Noah Kalter
Yeshivat He'Atid

I thought for this post, it might be interesting to have my students 'talk." I can tell you that as their teacher, I know they LOVE Summit! They always were ready to work, and became masters at the platform. They loved the friendly competition and camaraderie that developed through the use of Summit - for example, seeing who can get the highest score on a content assessment test. Then, for those who aced it, happily helping the other classmates who might be having a bit of trouble passing their content assessments.

They also love the fact that in Summit, you NEVER fail. That word does not exist in the summit terminology and philosophy. There is no such thing as fail. If you don't pass an assessment, it just means that you have to go back, brush up on a couple of things that you didn't quite master or fully understand and try again. They would tell you that Summit is purely about learning - not about the grades.

My students loved the fact they they became the masters of their own education - they knew what they had to work on for that day and they knew how to get started without me, their teacher and mentor. They knew how and where to navigate the system on their own, and how to complete their assignments and projects - without me on top of them or micro-managing them. And they loved the independence - an independence that they would have never gained or experienced in a traditional school setting or philosophy.

They especially knew that that were lucky - lucky to be the first in their school to pioneer the summit learning platform. And, they often bragged about it and were so proud to share their experiences with others who wanted to understand what the summit learning platform is. They became summit's biggest advocates and even fans. And, I know that they are beyond excited to continue with summit in the upcoming 6th grade year. But, why take my word for it? Here they are, in their own words:

Tani: I go to a school that’s trying Summit Learning for this year. It is only for fifth grade.  Every year my school adds on one grade. If we like it, we will use this program next year. So I’m going to be honest with you guys. I like Summit Learning. So anyways, let me tell you a bit of how I use it.

We have about 7 subjects a day. That includes English, Social Studies, Math, and something called PLT.  So let me tell you about PLT (Personalized Learning Time). Everyone in the class goes at their own pace. The class chooses a subject; English 5, History 5, Integrated Science, or Math 5, and then learns it, takes a content assessment, and then they either master it with an 8/10, 9/10, or a 10/10 or they go back and learn it and take it again. There is something called a diagnostic. You can take a diagnostic to see what you know and what you don’t know. There might be some of the same questions in the content assessment.

Now I’m going to talk about how we use Summit Learning during English class. In English class we work on the units in English 5. We work together as a class. We are working on a unit now called “Break A Leg." We have to submit all the checkpoints and then we submit the final products.  We do the same thing for Social Studies. Social Studies is the same as History. In History 5 we are now working on a unit called “Examining multiple perspectives."

In math we go on the computer to do a unit called “Egyptian fractions”  and we already worked on the previous units. SO ANYWAYS, I THINK SUMMIT REALLY HELPS ME LEARN!

Avraham: I am a student at Westchester Torah Academy. I will be talking to you about my experience with summit. First, I will be talking about the pros of summit:

  1. I can learn what I am most interested in
  2. There is a lot of resources to help me with the content assessments
  3. Before the content assessment, there is a diagnostic assessment to see what you need to learn.

I would also like talk about how summit has improved my learning. Summit gave me the chance to have more resources to help me learn the objective efficiently. The focus areas have helped me with learning, because it has resources to help me with the work. I hope you have learned about my learning journey.

Shane: I think summit is an awesome program. I learn independently, with  my teacher monitors. I like learning new things. and I think summit is really good because it can teach you something new every day. Well, it is awesome.  It is missing something - foreign languages. I think summit should also teach us Hebrew, Spanish and much more. It should also teach us our history .Like, if your school is Christian than your teacher should be able to choose that religion to teach on summit. Thank you for your time.

So, as you can see, my students love Summit. Not only are they excited to continue their learning journey through Summit, but would like to learn even more subjects in the platform. As Shane suggested, perhaps languages, religion, etc! And why not!