Mastery “Learning” – a few brief thoughts
January 18, 2011
Like many other things I used to take for granted in education, I recently began to question my blind acceptance of the term “mastery learning”.
Here are a few thoughts . . .
The notion of “mastery learning” is actually a wild concept when you step back from it. What do you really learn so completely as to master it? I don’t know of a single competitor in any field who would consider themselves as having “mastered” a field, be it tennis, golf, baseball, piano playing, or video-game playing. Those who succeed continue to practice and learn and push themselves. Mastery learning implies that you can reach an end with something – you’ve mastered it – now move on to the next thing. What a crazy notion!
Can a student in high school really master social studies, or chemistry, or French II? For goodness sakes, many of the things we think we would like them to “master” don’t even really exist. There is no such thing as Spanish III for instance, and there really isn’t any such thing as 7th grade math or even 8th grade algebra. All we have is a collection of items that an individual teacher or group of teachers has said compose a certain course.
I also am hard pressed to think of many things worth learning that are finite. I guess you could say that a student might “master” knowing the list of states and their capitals, or the alphabet, or the ability to put the numbers 1-100 in proper order, but aren’t the things we really want kids to master usually open ended? Could any college freshman “master” freshman composition?
While the concept of mastery learning may seem to focus on the learner, the way I have always understood the term actually turns out to be another example of our deeply embedded teacher-centered system. Mastery learning is used to describe a learner who has successfully responded to a narrow set of skills or concepts picked out by a teacher. It’s mastery responsiveness, not mastery learning.
I wish teachers would value mastery wondering above all, and its companion, mastery questioning. “Mrs. Smith, how far will the circles spread out from a pebble I drop in the lake behind my house?” “Mr. Goa, I know that on a summer day the sky looks really blue when I look up, but I can’t see any blue between my face and my hand, why not?” “Dr. Snow, can you help me figure out a way to get my rocket to soar an extra 100 feet so I have more time to use the remote camera I strapped on it?” Mr. McCue, I was wondering if poems about rockets are more popular if they subtly evoke rocket sounds.” Mrs. Cates, why do the hills in my neighborhood stop all of a sudden at Clark Street?”
Let’s move from talking about mastery learning and start encouraging mastery wondering.
