I want to make what follows as practical as I can. I understand that standards, curriculum, and instructional approaches (e,g., mastery) can drift into the realm of what some regard in a negative way as theoretical, but I think I can frame what I have to say here in terms of some questions teachers must answer all of the time.
Let me begin with the question of what you regard as the essential knowledge and skills your students should acquire. I would suggest that you in one way or another address this question by answering a series of questions.
What content and experiences will I use with the students in my class?
What will I do to evaluate student mastery of these experiences and content?
What will I do with the students who perform poorly on the methods of evaluation I have applied?
My proposal is that this sequence of questions provides a way to look at the label of essential? Some experiences and content were essential enough to provide. Some experiences and content were essential enough to evaluate. It is this third question I am most interested in because all educators face this challenge. It really gets at the core of the designation of “essential”? What happens when skills or knowledge are not developed? Is the answer “I move ahead to new content and new skills”? I refer some students for outside help? I take students or small groups aside and work with them in an effort at remediation.
Old school mastery proponents (e.g., Bloom, Keller) addressed what must be mastered in a fuzzy way. Rather than identify specific things that must be known, they hedged. Bloom proposed a group-based mastery system. Imagine a textbook chapter and related classroom contributions to be mastered over a two-week period of time. Bloom proposed that teachers first focus on essential skills and knowledge (not really clear to me how this material was identified). At the end of maybe a week, students completed an evaluation related to these materials that Bloom labeled a formative evaluation. Those learners who “passed” this evaluation went on to supplemental goals and those who failed to achieve mastery received further help with the essential goals. At the end of the time set aside for the unit, students completed a summative evaluation over the essential goals and everyone moved on essential goals met or not.
Keller’s PSI (personalized system of instruction) focused heavily on written content as a way to allow personalized progress – think textbook again. Reading is an individual way to confront new information. When students felt they were ready to be evaluated on their mastery of a unit, the asked a tutor to provide an assessment. Pass/not pass was based on an overall score so what was mastered was not really determined at the level of specific elements of understanding. Those who passed went on to the next unit and those who did not pass continued to study the chapter yet to be mastered with some assistance from a tutor.
Modern mastery (Kahn Academy, Modern Classroom Project) advocates confront the question of essential more directly. Before I try to address how, I will try to answer my original question – “Mastery of what?” I would suggest essential means a) knowledge or skill is necessary for learning some other essential knowledge or skill or b) knowledge or skill the system has a responsibility to develop and this development is expected of the course or grade level I teach.
For example, double digit subtraction is essential to being able to master long division. The “North Dakota Studies” course is likely the one time you would learn why the Red River Valley has some of the richest farmland in the world. Okay, maybe this is not essential, but it matters to those who live in this area and depend on agriculture. Essential is a squishy thing and one could argue that a cellphone would allow anyone to perform long division and explain the soil quality of the Red River Valley without knowing how to subtract or basic geological facts. However, I assume there are essential things we teach that are a subset of all things we teach.
The Kahn Academy uses a complex model of the content with multiple strands identifying which skills/knowledge are prerequisites to what other skills. Students make progress across strands and must show mastery of prerequisites when identified within a given strand. Kahn complained about “Swiss cheese knowledge” that can be generated when students advance without prerequisite knowledge leaving gaps in skills and understanding that make future learning more difficult.
The Modern Classroom Project suggests educators identify differences in the importance of specific knowledge or skills using a triage of sorts – must do, should do, and aspire to do or need to know, good to know, and aim to know. This approach allows classroom educators to differentiate objectives in a way that allows more uniform progress within a group and still requires an extended focus on some prerequisites.
My long-time interest in mastery learning more recently combined with my interest in the classroom benefits of technology allow what I consider improvements in both the value and the practicality of mastery approaches. The value concerns a way to address the difficulty of new learning when past learning does not provide important existing knowledge. The efficiency associated with technology comes from the tracking of what has been learned and what should be learned next on a far more specific and individual student level. As I hope my analysis has made clear, the specificity of what should be learned next sometimes matters and sometimes does not. “Just in-time learning” is always possible, but this concept still requires a method of identification and application that group based approaches to teaching/learning do not make practical. Using teacher skills in a different way (tutor, coach) in combination with the value of technology in tracking individuals and delivering learning experiences seems a productive alternative to group-based approaches.
As a final comment, I wonder if big data will provide a way to address the issue of necessary prerequisites in a more specific way. Would there be a computational way of creating the strands of knowledge/skill units Kahn has identified based on intuition?
References
Bloom, B. S. (1968). Learning for Mastery. Instruction and Curriculum. Regional Education Laboratory for the Carolinas and Virginia, Topical Papers and Reprints, Number 1. Evaluation comment, 1(2), n2.
Khan, S. (2012). The one world schoolhouse: Education reimagined. Twelve.
Keller, F. S. (1968). “Good-bye teacher”. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1, 79–89
Modern Classroom Project – https://intercom.help/modern-classrooms/en/articles/5261634-must-do-should-do-and-aspire-to-do
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