NPR just published a post on personalization in education. I encourage your reading of this presentation as it covers some territory I have not seen examined in most current coverage of this topic. The piece begins with a focus on mastery learning which has long been a topic that has interested me. I first published on mastery learning in 1978. The NPR post focuses on the technology-enabled forms of mastery learning using the Kahn Academy as an example and does a reasonable job of explaining what the Kahn Academy makes available to K12 students and the support for this effort by wealthy technology donors.
The article then turns to the critics of Kahn and the idea of understanding personalization as attempting to adjust to differences in the time required to learn. The alternative view of personalization as I would describe what is presented in this article is “learning what you want”. I say “alternative view” as I see these goals on different dimensions rather than as education should be one way or the other. Some might describe my perspective as that of blended learning – educational models exist that personalize both opportunities to learn at different rates (mastery learning) and to explore topics of personal interest (20% time project).
Anyway, in the either/or presentation of the NPR piece, there are several perspectives offered by educational thinkers and classroom educators. Here is a statement provided by one of the educators.
“It works really well, like, the first month,” Finn says. Then, students started to progress at different speeds.
“So I have the kids who are on pace, and I have the kids who are perpetually, always behind. And it got to the point where I had 20 kids in 20 spots.”
This point offered as the source of difficulty in using a mastery approach by a classroom teacher captures the challenge, but also the opportunity of a mastery approach. I would suggest that these 20 kids would be at 20 different spots whether exposed to a mastery approach or not. It is the teacher who would be at one spot in a traditional approach. Student achievement varies greatly and this variability increases year by year. To treat everyone as if they were at the same point limits the opportunities of those who could go faster and frustrates the students who can’t keep up. Worse, moving on when many do not understand or are unable to perform the expected skills often increases the difficulty of these students going forward. The way human motivation works, we tend to give up at some point.
The Kahn approach might come across in the NPR description as 20 kids working in a computer lab for hour after hour. One might ask where is the teacher and what is he/she doing. I have read most things available on Kahn Academy and I would suggest that this is hardly the approach that is encouraged. This environment allows the educator to monitor where different students are at and to recognize precisely which students are stuck trying to deal with a given concept or skill. I suppose the teacher could ignore the student’s plight, but I would think this situation would also allow the teacher to work 1:1 as a tutor. The reality of the 20 student classroom the anti-Kahn educator describes provides limited opportunity for tutoring as educators would be spending their time presenting and assessing.
What I am proposing is that ideas such as mastery learning not be understood in some unnecessarily extreme form. There are variants of mastery approaches applied in many settings and several have been investigated multiple times by researchers. Technology offers opportunities to address several of the challenges that limited the practicality of these previous humans-only implementations. Understanding the role of technology and educator should be the goal not painting a picture that pits one against the other.
I provide a more detailed explanation of mastery learning as part of a different source.
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