You're reading: Teaching for Mastery

Luke Woodruff Director, Kyiv International School

“What do you call a medical doctor that got “Cs” in medical school? Wait for it…a DOCTOR.” This joke never gets old, but typically hits home in a different way for me, as an educator. The humor brings to light the fact that in most educational programs, students can move up from level to level and year to year without demonstrating full understanding of the material or the ability to synthesize it. For many primary and secondary schools, a “C” or even “D” is the lowest passing grade. Depending on the school’s grading scale, this means that the child may be moving to the next year or course having only demonstrated 60-70% proficiency. You have to wonder how important the missing 30-40% will be for the student moving forward.

Mastery Learning
Mastery Learning (ML) is not a new concept, but is starting to become the model for schools looking to reach all students in a more engaging and meaningful way. The idea behind mastery learning is simple. ML schools care about the 40%, 30%, 20%, 10%, and even the 5% that might be missing. They believe that these gaps in learning are important and, if left unchecked, turn into deficits, difficulties, and frustrations in learning down the road. Traditional education systems often identify the gaps without any plan or process to fill them. Mastery learning adheres to the principle that students must demonstrate proficiency or mastery in knowledge, content, and skills. If a student is not able to demonstrate mastery, he or she is provided with additional and differentiated support to first re-learn the material, and is then reassessed on it. This cycle continues, similar to one-on-one tutoring, until the learner has achieved true mastery.

Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, gave a great TED Talk concerning mastery learning in 2015 and spoke at length about the need for such a system. He said the following in comparing traditional education systems to building a home:

“So we bring in the contractor and say, ‘We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation. Do what you can.’ So they do what they can. Maybe it rains. Maybe some of the supplies don’t show up. And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around, says, ‘OK, the concrete is still wet right over there, that part’s not quite up to code …I’ll give it an 80 percent.’ You say, ‘Great! That’s a C. Let’s build the first floor.’ We have two more weeks, do what you can, inspector shows up, it’s a 75 percent. Great, that’s a D-plus. Second floor, third floor, and all of a sudden, while you’re building the third floor, the whole structure collapses. And if your reaction is the reaction you typically have in education, or that a lot of folks have, you might say, maybe we had a bad contractor, or maybe we needed better inspection or more frequent inspection. But what was really broken was the process (emphasis added). We were artificially constraining how long we had to do something, pretty much ensuring a variable outcome, and we took the trouble of inspecting and identifying those gaps, but then we built right on top of it (emphasis added). So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite.”

When you think about it like that, it makes a lot of sense; yet parents, teachers, and students often get drawn into the traditional and antiquated benchmarks for education.

Time Mind Shift
Most education programs have some system of separating students based on academic achievement. It is acceptable for most school systems to teach all students the same things, to give identical exams to assess student learning, and then to observe, record, and report the difference in student achievement. In this scenario, performance becomes the focused variable. In mastery learning, time becomes the focused variable, and changes with the intention of increasing all student performance. Time is not an indicator OF success, but a tool FOR success. As such, it becomes one of the most valuable tools for students and teachers. All students are different and enter the classroom with varying levels of language fluency, emotional intelligence, work ethic, curiosity, aptitude for their studies, and degrees of content comprehension. It stands to reason that not all students will be able to reach a high standard of performance at the same time. As a result of varying the time indicator for success, more students are able to demonstrate proficiency and achievement at higher levels throughout the year. As the quality and quantity of time work together to provide a positive learning environment, there is a shift in the perception of time. It is now used as a tool FOR learning, that simultaneously develops and promotes a growth mindset. This shift in mindset leads to a solid foundation of learning and a healthy perspective of success that will benefit students throughout their education and careers.

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