“Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.” – Robert Greene
The creation and adoption of the new Common Core Standards has phases such as, “All children can learn,” and “Students should be able to demonstrate competent levels of achievement.” Discussing the new Common Core Standards with Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), at the Kentucky Association of Assessment Coordinators conference in October 2012, stated that students need to master each standard at a high level in order to prepare them for life after graduation. But, only a small portion of teachers, schools or school systems have adopted Mastery Learning as a strategy to accomplish this. And those that are using mastery learning make one or more of the common mistakes: (a) passing a mastery test is conceptualized as the endpoint instead of the initial stage of the learning/memory process; (b) there is no requirement and related grading incentive to go beyond initial mastery; (c) mastery testing is embedded in an overall grading scheme that contradicts the goal of achieving mastery by all (a criterion-referenced purpose);(d) demonstrations of mastery are limited to objective tests at the knowledge/recall end of the thinking continuum (e.g., Bloom’s 1956 taxonomy); and therefore (e) students are over tested and under challenged (Gentile and Lalley, 2003).
Students often forget a great deal of what they have learned, or what educators thought they had learned. It is often the case that only 20% of students in a typical classroom master the standard (Bloom, 1986). The cure for this problem can be solved in three steps: (a) Require all students to attain initial mastery of the objective; (b) provide enrichment activities for students who attain mastery before the rest of the class, allowing students to revisit the objective through a different learning activity; and (c) continue to revisit the objective at a later point in the curriculum. So, mastery of the unit, then, means being able to do at least all of the processes to some reasonably high standard, say 80% of the standards accurately solved, demonstrated, and represented, in more than one way. Such mastery demonstrates that the student is ready for more advanced analyses, transferring or applying such knowledge to other domains, or other extra-credit work (inventing their own problems or solutions). This is in keeping with mastery as the beginning level of competence on the road toward expertise.
For the first use of mastery, it is necessary to identify the mastery objectives; this comes in the form of the Common Core Standards. As consistent and clear as the standards are, they need to be developed into targets that both teachers and students can understand. Learning targets are student-friendly descriptions-via words, pictures, actions, or some combination of the three-of what you intend students to learn or accomplish in a given lesson. When shared meaningfully, they become actual targets that students can see and direct their efforts toward. They also serve as targets for the adults in the school whose responsibility it is to plan, monitor, assess, and improve the quality of learning opportunities to raise the achievement of all students. Guided by learning targets, teachers partner with their students during a formative learning cycle to gather and apply strong evidence of student learning to raise achievement. And they make informed decisions about how and when to differentiate instruction to challenge and engage all students in important and meaningful work. Students who take ownership of their learning attribute what they do well to decisions that they make, and control of these factors not only increase students’ ability to assess and regulate their own learning but also boosts their motivation to learn as they progressively see themselves as more confident and competent learners. (Brookhart and Moss, 2012).
Mastery helps students frame their learning from a different angle: the “why” that motivates them is the desire to increase their competence, to “get smarter” (Dweck, 2008) by mastering new knowledge or skills. Focused by mastery, students understand that it takes effort over time to understand complex concepts and become skilled at a process or procedure. Mastery helps students realize that they will not be experts on day one. Students who aim for mastery tend to challenge themselves to apply what they learn, to regard mistakes as inevitable, and to capitalize on errors as important sources of feedback. They judge their progress against targeted criteria, not against the progress of others (Brookhart and Moss, 2012).
Bloom, B.S (1986). What we’re learning about teaching and learning: A summary of resent research. Principal,66(2), 6-10.
Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The new psychology of success. 1st ed. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2008.
Gentile, J. R., &Lalley, J. P. (2003). Standards and Mastery Learning: Aligning Teaching and Assessment So All Children Can Learn (1st ed.). Corwin Press.
The Prepared Student 