The Modern Classrooms Project (MCP) is a nonprofit organization, founded by two high school math educators Kareem Farah and Rob Barnett, that helps educators use technology to meet every student's needs.
MCP trains teachers to record their own instructional videos, which students can watch at their own paces in class and at home. This approach helps students achieve true understanding, and makes class time more productive for students and educators alike. MCP's work is backed by academic research, and has helped to transform thousands of classrooms worldwide.
Quick Guide to Our Model
Understand the key concepts of the Modern Classroom Model.
If you're interested in launching a Modern Classroom, our research-backed instructional model allows educators to respond to every student's needs - no matter what or where you teach.
Our model incorporates:
Blended instruction: Learners access content through teacher-created videos. This removes whole class lectures to allow students to access content asynchronously.
Self-paced structures: students control the pace of their own learning. Learners can pause, rewatch videos, and move ahead if they have mastered concepts. This allows educators to meet the needs of a variety of students.
Mastery-based learning: students progress from one lesson to the next when they demonstrate mastery. This prevents learning gaps and allows educators to better track students' understanding of concepts.
Learn more about how our model works:
To date, the Modern Classrooms Project has reached over 40,000 educators in 150+ countries through our innovative Virtual Mentorship Program & comprehensive Free Online Course. We continue to support and empower new educators every day.
The Evidence behind Modern Classrooms
The Evidence behind Modern Classrooms
The Modern Classroom model is based on academic research about how students learn, and supported by rigorous program evaluation. Learn about both kinds of research below.
Background Academic Research
In 2020, we commissioned researchers at Johns Hopkins University to conduct a comprehensive literature review on blended, self-paced, mastery-based learning.
Because we work with practicing teachers, not academics, we've distilled that literature down to key points for our teachers:
The feedback which we provide to the teachers we train, through our Virtual Mentorship Programs, are also based on best practices from the academic literature.
Program Evaluation
Since our founding, we have worked with researchers at Johns Hopkins University to measure the impacts of our model on both teachers and students.
In their most recent study, which surveyed teachers and students at three schools in the Washington, DC area, these researchers found "overwhelming positive support for The Modern Classrooms Project from the perspective of both students and teachers...who participated in the program…with the strongest effects on teachers’ abilities to differentiate instruction to individual students and students’ abilities to engage in self-directed learning.”
Among other statistically significant effects (p < 0.001), and compared to their peers in non-Modern classrooms:
Students in Modern Classrooms were 19 percentage points (p.p.) more likely to learn technology use in class, 7 p.p. more likely to feel capable of teaching themselves new content and skills, and 11 p.p. more likely to enjoy learning.
Modern Classroom teachers were more than twice as likely to feel able to serve students at all levels of understanding, more than four times as likely to work closely with each student during class, and more than nine times as likely to help students who missed class catch up.
We will continue to work with academic researchers from Johns Hopkins and other universities to study our impacts as our pool of teachers and students grows.
Here are a few ways you can learn more about our movement and model:
Enroll in our Free Online Course. This course has it all: exemplars, templates, and other resources to help teachers launch Modern Classrooms of their own.
Join our Facebook Group. Discuss blended, self-paced, mastery-based learning with a community of over 5,000 educators worldwide.
Subscribe to our podcast. Every week, our educators discuss the successes and struggles they've encountered in transforming the way they teach.
We're glad you've found us and hope we have something to offer you.