Mastery?

 Education post, incoming...

We overuse the word "mastery" at my school. We've got mastery of abilities, mastery sessions...hell, we even have a Master Teacher (lol, what a weird title). And while we don't have control over what trickles down from above us, I think we can all take a step back and understand that what our students are doing is not so much as becoming masters, but becoming more competent. 

Benjamin Bloom first foisted the mastery learning model on us back in the 60s. (Yes, that Bloom, the taxonomy guy). It was a response to the wide variety of student achievement Bloom was noticing (aka the achievement gap). In his paper "Formative Classroom Assessment and Benjamin S. Bloom: Theory, Research, and Implications," Thomas R. Guskey notes, "Bloom argued that to reduce variation in students’ achievement and to have all students learn well, we must increase variation in instructional approaches and learning time."

This is what we do! We empower students to go at their own pace. We don't move on until they're ready. And when are they ready? When they've proven to us that they've "mastered" a particular skill or concept. 

Mastered? Well, Gladwell's 10,000 hours is largely debunked. New research is more interested in the quality of the practice rather than the quantity. Still, are we so bold to think that our students are showing their understanding at a MASTER LEVEL? Well, no. That's one reason we aim for at least 70% mastery at Fusion, which can be interpreted as "good enough." And I think that's the key for us. We're not creating little masters. We're not in the business of perfection. We're in the business of competence. 

Going back to Bloom: his research blazed the trails for a focus on FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT. This type of assessment is the magic of our "mastery model." Its focus is on process, not end product. And we're there each step of the way to document those glimmers of understanding, or adjust as needed. Good enough is not a pejorative. In fact, I'd argue it's the beginning of a sentence: "Good enough...for now, for this component, until we need to review." It implies our students are human and that perfection is an asymptote (for my math peeps). 

I think it's our job as teachers to show students that learning is messy, recursive, and imperfect. 


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