The Early Players
At the turn of the 20th century,
Carleton Washburne would have appeared an unlikely hero. Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1889, Carleton
led an unremarkable life. His school
career was reasonably average for the son of well educated professionals, but
he did not excel. Plodding through life
and looking for a path to follow, Carleton turned to his father’s love and
attempted to follow in his footsteps by studying medicine at the University of
Chicago. Things did not go well. His grades fell and his interest waned.
Now frustrated with his life at University of
Chicago and left with very few options, Carleton gravitated instead to his
mother’s interests.
Carleton’s mother was a strong willed, politically
active woman, untypical of the age. She
was a friend to the famed progressive educator John Dewey and would regularly
engage with him over many issues. The
parlour would buzz with passionate debate about the purpose of education and
how it might be bettered as the young Carleton listened eagerly while he played. From the very beginning, Carleton’s life was
one steeped in education theory and policy.
Carleton attended a Dewey school, Francis W.
Parker School, in Chicago as a young child and would later go on to become a
founding member of the John Dewey Society and president of the Progressive
Education Association.
Carleton dropped out of UoC and headed to a
new university that was starting to establish itself in California:
Stanford. No longer pursuing medicine,
he chose to study education.
As with all young men in the final year of a
degree course, Carleton would have needed focus and dedication to his course to
be truly successful. However, in that
same year, Carleton fell deeply in love with Heliuz Chandler and all thoughts of studying
took second place. Their first child was
on the way. Despite this, Carleton did
manage to scrape through and graduate.
A mediocre university degree in hand and with
no real direction in life, Carleton turned his focus to becoming an
entrepreneur. Enthused by what he
believed to be a sure fire business success, Carleton borrowed money from any
source he could and invested it all in his new idea. It failed. Badly.
Now unable to support his family and with no
other options in life, Carleton was faced with only one route out of penuary:
he reluctantly became a teacher.
Carleton’s first post was as a teacher of
science in an underachieving school in the poverty stricken city of La Punete,
California. The experience changed
Carleton forever.
Unlike the comfortable, educated and
supportive family life that Carleton had experienced and thought the norm, he
was now faced with disengaged children from families failed by the education
system. He began to see that the model
of schooling prevalent in the United States acted as a harsh filter: the entire
population was pushed into the system at the beginning, but year by year, the
system ‘filtered out’ huge swathes of children, which it destined never to
become educated. The system and society
at large truly believed that some children were capable of learning whilst
others, of low ‘aptitude’, were not.
This had a profound impact on Carleton. He began experimenting with his approaches,
drawing on the experiences of his own Dewey education and the regular espousing
of a progressive education he absorbed as a child, Carleton questioned whether
it would be possible to create an education system that resulted in every
single child being successful, rather than just the small 5% who appeared to be
the result of the filter that he saw as the US education system.
He became obsessed with conceiving and
implementing an approach that could achieve what he saw as the best practices
of teaching an individual in a one-to-one tuition scenario but applied at scale
to a group of students.
***
Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, but following
Plato’s death in 348 BC, he moved from his beliefs in Platonism to becoming
dedicated to empiricism. He immersed
himself in empirical studies and sensory experience became central to his view
of epistemology. When, in 343 BC, King Philip
of Macedon asked Aristotle to become the tutor of his son, he carried this view
of epistemology into the methods he deployed as a tutor, knowing that he
required multiple approaches for teaching any particular idea so that the young
boy in pupilage would always, in time, be able to learn the fact or skill at
hand.
The son was to become, of course, Alexander
the Great. As his tutor, Aristotle was
afforded great wealth and opportunities to establish vast amounts of
educational resources. He established a
library at the Lyceum and brought about the publication of many hundreds of books,
including tomes on the nature of knowledge and approaches to tutoring and
pupilage.
The methodologies of Aristotle and Plato
formed the basis for the approach to be widely adopted in delivering a classical
education. A one-to-one tutoring, where
the tutor and pupil are intricately linked such that the tutor is always aware
of what the pupil’s level of knowledge is and how to build upon the knowledge
or to correct wrong thinking before moving on.
This approach to individualised instruction
remained the dominant model for teaching for centuries to come.
***
Carleton was well aware of the success of the
Aristotle approach. He recognised that
individualised tuition was the best method of teaching a child. It was clear that the ability to notice a
pupil’s misunderstanding immediately, such that the tutor could take action in
the moment, was key.
But how could this be achieved when a single
teacher is faced with not one individual following a pupilage, but a large
group of children, all with different backgrounds, in a classroom setting?
Carleton began to trial approaches in the
classroom aimed at integrating aspects of individual instruction, such as
immediate feedback and intervention. He
was determined to educate that ‘whole child’.
***
Adaptive Learning has become an important
phrase in education in recent years. Around
the world, venture capitalists and large education publishing companies are
investing billions of dollars into trying to build distance learning web
applications that can guide students through a course without the need of a
teacher. The technology is in its
infancy, despite the rather outrageous claims from some EdTech companies to the
contrary. Nonetheless, the need for
large scale individualised instruction grows ever more as the world’s
population increases and the demand for education seem insatiable. 60 million children in the world today do not
go to school and will never meet a teacher.
Frederic Lister Burk was born in 1862. Following a career as a journalist in the San
Francisco Bay area, Frederic paid for himself to attend graduate school at
Stanford University by taking on temporary teaching jobs in a variety of
private and public schools throughout San Francisco, before embarking on a full
time career in education.
Throughout the 1890s, Frederic refined an
innovative model for self-instructed learning, in which the student received
only very minimal input from a teacher.
A staunch progressive and follower of Dewey, Frederic believed the
school system that had emerged in the US and much of the Western world was
failing students and needed to be overturned.
He devised new pedagogies for working with students that aimed to adjust
to their personal needs and progress – instructional materials were created to
allow students to move forward without the assistance of a teacher.
Along with Mary Ward, Frederic conceived and produced sets of
self-paced, self-instructional learning materials aligned with extensive and
intelligent self-assessment materials, which allowed their learners to progress
at a rate that was completely individual.
Frederic Burk had invented distance learning
a century before it would capture the imagination of return-hungry investors.
The model proved such a success that it
piqued the interest of educators across the State. Frederic and Mary tried to spread the impact
of the approach by publishing their findings and the materials that supported
the programme, but were stopped from doing so by the California Courts with a
ruling that only the State Board of Education could publish printed
instructional materials.
An entire and complete curriculum, proven to
be successful, with all the materials already authored and available, which
would have saved countless teachers countless hours of work and research, was
prevented from spreading and becoming embedded at scale because bureaucrats at
the State Board of Education could not stomach the fact that Burk and Ward had
produced instructional materials without their input. This smallminded act would hold back the
growth of an important model for schooling in a way that those public servants
had not even considered.
Frederic would later go on to become
President of San Francisco State University, but it was in 1914, when Frederic
was President of the San Francisco State Teachers College, that he spotted the
work of a new teacher in a run down school in La Punete.
***
Carleton Washburne admired Frederic and was
keen to accept the job offer that he made.
Carleton left La Punete and headed to the San Francisco State Teachers
College to work alongside Frederic Burk in an associated elementary school
linked to the college. He spent five
years at the school as Head of Science, whilst also studying for a PhD in
education at University of California, Berkeley, making Carleton one of the
first ever recipients of a doctorate of education.
***
When wooly mammoths migrated across what is
now modern day Illinois in the last Ice Age, the hunters who occupied that area
12,000 years ago used the Green Bay Trail to track and kill their prey,
feasting on the plodding giants. The
Potawatomi tribe continued to use the Green Bay Trail for thousands of years
before the arrival of Europeans, when early settlers moved West towards
Chicago. In 1832, the trail became an
official post road by an Act of Congress.
In 1836, Erastus Patterson and his family
arrived from Vermont and opened a tavern to service passengers on the Green Bay
Trail post road between Chicago and Green Bay.
The first houses were erected and the birth of the new village of
Winnetka had begun. Winnetka,
incidentally, means simply “beautiful place” in Potawatomi.
The village grew into the affluent town of
13,000 inhabitants that it is today.
Winnetka is the second wealthiest town in the United States and at its
heart stands the Carleton W Washburne Middle School.
***
In 1919, Frederic Burk became aware of an
opening for superintendent of Winnetka School District 36. He recommended Carleton for the role and so
began Carleton’s leadership of Winnetka’s schools, which lasted until he
finally resigned in 1943 to help the war effort by opening schools for
displaced children in occupied Italy.
Carleton now had the opportunity he needed to
implement his ideas at scale. As
superintendent, he was able to develop a new model for schooling and roll it
out across the schools in the district.
He called it The Winnetka Plan.
The Winnetka Plan
Inspired by John Dewey’s work at University
of Chicago Laboratory School and those formative experiences in the troubled La
Punete school, Carleton set about developing a model for schooling that would
bring success to all children. He drew
on Aristotle and the work that Mary Ward and Frederic Burk had done on
individualised courses, creating his new blue print for education.
The Winnetka Plan set out a system of
individualised instruction in an ungraded setting, which aimed to develop the
‘whole child’. Carleton split the
curriculum into two strands: the “common essentials" (reading, writing,
number skills, history, and geography) and "creative group
activities" (such as art, music, literature, and physical education). The grade work divided into specific tasks to
be learned by each child individually.
Subject material was arranged in a journey through the learning, with
distinct steps to be taken. Only when
students showed 100% success on tests could they move on to the next step in
learning the subject. Carleton
recognised that in an Aristotle model, the student would always be progressing
at a pace unique to themselves and that Ward and Burk had already created the
means to make this possible. The “common
essentials” tests could be taken at any time and the student could continue
their journey towards, what Carleton termed, mastery.
Carleton was convinced that every single child
could be successful in the “common essentials” in this “mastery model for
schooling” because he could use Frederic’s instructional and assessment
materials to ensure that all students at all times could progress with minimal
input from the teacher. Rather than putting "gifted" students into
higher level classes, the students struggling with schoolwork were given
special ‘corrective’ support to immediately address those individual problems.
Most of the time, the struggling student received one-on-one help from a
teacher. Carleton had finally created a means for freeing up the time that a
classroom teacher needed to work in the tutor-pupil manner, so favoured by
Aristotle and millennia of educators.
It was clear to Carleton that, rather than
accelerating a small group of so-called gifted children, the purpose of
schooling should be to ensure that every child is extended and successful.
The program would present learning material
in a logical and tested sequence, with the course broken down into small
steps. After each step, the student is
given carefully designed questions, which test their understanding and
knowledge. The materials are designed
with complementary solutions and explanations such that the student receives
immediate feedback, allowing both the student and teacher to notice and act in
real time, rather than allowing deep-rooted misconceptions to go unnoticed and
fester. This approach later became known
as “programmed instruction”. Carleton
wrote, “With the development of the achievement test movement, we may now make
units of achievement the constant factor, varying the time to fit the
individual capacities of the children.”
Henry Clinton Morrison was a contemporary of
Carleton’s, working at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, who was
particularly influenced by the Winnetka Plan.
Morrison further developed the idea of immediate intervention, formulating
"a variety of correctives” which included “re-teaching, tutoring,
restructuring the original learning activities, and redirecting student study
habits".
Morrison continued to test and iterate on the
complete curriculum materials developed by Frederic and Carleton. He worked with numerous schools for many
years, refining the model and producing more and more materials, which could
easily be adopted by schools at scale.
By the early 1930s, the model was becoming
mature.
It is important to note that this “mastery model
for schooling” only applied to the common essentials, which Carleton believed were
the bedrock of leading an autonomous and fulfilling adult life. The creative activities had no achievement
standards: each student did as much or as little of these as they chose and no
tests were ever given.
Carleton implemented the Winnetka Plan from
1921 across all schools in the district.
He observed, measured, tweaked and improved the model year after year,
with the help of Morrison and others.
Attainment in Winnetka schools rose and rose and rose.
Soon, Winnetka and Carleton began to draw
national attention. Not only was
attainment rising, but pupil engagement and satisfaction also soared. For the first time, ‘aptitude’ was not defined
as whether or not a child had the capacity to learn, but instead viewed simply
as how long that child would take to learn.
Every child would, always. Increasingly, schools imitated the approach
that Carleton had developed and mastery became a dominant model for
schooling across much of the United States throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
The Formulators and the Validators
Benjamin S Bloom passed away in 1999 at the
age of 86 in Chicago, Illinois. I met him only once, but his enthusiasm and
wisdom were immediately infectious. In
his lifetime, his work became one of the single biggest influences on educational
models and policy. In 1981, a survey of
educators found that Bloom was already a significant influence on curriculum
structures and approaches to delivery.
Unfortunately, this influence largely stems from Benjamin S Bloom’s work
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The
Classification of Educational Goals, outlining a classification of
learning objectives which he began writing in 1956, with many volumes to follow
throughout his life. Known as Bloom’s
Taxonomy, this weighty tome was repeatedly reduced to a single pyramid
diagram. The tiers of the pyramid strike
a chord with most people – they feel
good – and so, as is so often the case in education, schools and teachers en masse implemented their own versions
of the Taxonomy from simply reading the titles on the diagram without once
reading the book. The trouble is,
Bloom’s Taxonomy, wonderful though it feels, is somewhat bunkum!
Many in education belittle Bloom because of
‘that bloody pyramid’, which sadly means that a large number of educators have
gone no further with his work.
But Taxonomy
of Educational Objectives is not Bloom’s magnum opus. His greatest
work lies elsewhere.
In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Bloom
became increasingly interested in the seminal work that Carleton had carried
out some decades earlier and was keen to build on the success shown in those
schools throughout the 1930s. It was in
1963, when Bloom read an article by the Harvard University professor, John B
Carroll, that led Benjamin to formulate a clearer view of Carleton’s mastery
model. Carroll’s article, “A Model for
School Learning” debunked the widely held belief that some children are good learners
and some are poor learners. He argued
instead that student aptitude more accurately reflects an index of learning
rate. In other words, that all children
can learn well but differ in the time that they may take to do so.
Of course, this was not a new way of
thinking: Aristotle would have recognised it and it was a principle commonly
held by Comenius, Herbart and Pestalozzi.
Bloom was encouraged by a model in which, if
a child was allowed the right amount
of time, and spent that time ‘appropriately’, then the child would always attain the required standard.
At around the same time, the American
psychologist and behaviourist Burrhus Frederic Skinner had further developed
Carleton’s work and coined the phrase ‘programmed instruction’. Other behaviourists took the work even
further, creating a program similar to Carlton’s mastery model, with a focus on
the role of feedback and individualised learning, allowing students to
move at their own pace and receive instant feedback on their current
performance.
It was Fred S Keller, in the mid-1960s, who
took the behaviourists’ ideas and theories and applied them practically. The Keller
Plan (often referred to as Personalised System of Instruction or PSI), is
reminiscent of the work that Frederic Burk and Mary Ward had carried out years
before in that Keller and his team actually produced the instructional
materials required to implement the approach with real students. Keller created written texts, which were
broken into units of content that were arranged so that the student engaged
with prerequisite content, new learning, then elaboration of sufficient
complexity as to be effectively infinite in its scope. The units would be studied at the student’s
own pace, much like the units that Burk and Ward had authored. Each unit required students to demonstrate
that they were ready to proceed to the next.
A proctor would certify whether or not the student had achieved the
required level of understanding before moving on. These proctors were often teachers or other
expert adults, but Keller also suggested that older, more expert students could
act as proctors for their younger peers.
The nature of some of the key influential
works that led Carleton and Benjamin to their formal setting out of the model,
often leads to the misconception that a mastery approach is one in which the
teacher plays a minimal role.
Researchers have often read the individualised and self-paced nature of
the work of Frederic Burk and Fred Keller, with often no teacher input, to
imply that Carleton and Bloom’s models must follow suit. This could not be further from the truth. Both Carleton and Bloom fundamentally recognised
that, in order to make a mastery model successful, the teacher – like an
Aristotle tutor – is the key.
***
The scene was set: Bloom was poised to
formalise and codify mastery.
What followed in the coming decades was not
only Bloom’s true magnum opus, but
also one of the most important lifetime’s work of any educator to date.
A Mastery Model for Schooling
Benjamin S Bloom pulled together the
essential features of the mastery model and spent much of his life refining the
instructional and assessment materials, the pedagogies and didactics, and the
methods of deploying the model at scale in a practical way (for example,
through non-graded schools). He
continually tested its efficacy and integrated advances in technology for
achieving greater impact.
Just as Carleton was driven to develop the
model by an emotional experience – teaching deprived children in La Punete – so
too was Bloom determined that his work in education should achieve good.
Knowing that, while students may vary in their
learning rate, all students could learn well given the right amount of time,
Benjamin was heartbroken that what he saw around him was an education system
that consigned the majority of the population to a life of subordination.
He knew that if teachers could allow the right amount of time for each student to
learn and could provide all students with the appropriate conditions to learn,
then every student could learn well.
Benjamin was a pragmatist. He knew that there was little point in an
educational model that could not be embedded at scale and, in the US system of
the day, that meant a system where students were taught in group based
classrooms. Looking around, he saw that schools
would break curriculum journeys into small units, which would be delivered at
the students and then tested. The
results of these tests would be used to grade and rank students. The next unit would then be served up.
***
Giving a speech for Cambridge University some
years back at the British Library, I described my sadness at the fact that
England, as with most North-Western cultures, had firmly embedded what I coined
as a ‘conveyor belt model for schooling’.
The conveyor belt starts when children enter
schooling. Identifying the age of the
children, the conveyor belt serves up content determined correct for that class
– these children are aged 8, so they get aged 8 content – regardless of where
those individual children actually are in their development in learning the
subject. This conveyor belt is rigidly
expressed in national curricula and often strengthened by school inspection
systems.
When a unit of content is complete and the
students are labelled with a grade, the conveyor belt simply keeps on
rolling. It takes no account at all as
to whether the student was successful in learning the unit or not and, because
the conveyor belt cannot be stopped for teacher fear of ‘falling behind the curriculum’. The student never has the chance again to demonstrate what they have learned.
***
Benjamin noted the same sadness decades
before as he observed that the end of unit assessment marked the end of the time that
students were required to keep working on a concept or idea. The assessment, used only to rank and label,
brought nothing at all to the learning of the student.
Just as Carleton had rejected the ‘filter’,
Benjamin recognised (and proved) that this approach resulted in only a small
number of students learning well. He
represented the population of students as having attainment very close to a normal
distribution curve.
Bloom knew of the success of the Winnetka Plan. His friend, J H Block, had already been exploring the results of the Plan and would later report on the impact of the 1930s schools in his 1971 book, Mastery Learning, Theory and Practice. So, Benjamin set out to document and further
refine Carleton’s work. He knew that the
model would have two key features:
- the crucial, successful elements of one-to-one tutoring, which could be transferred to a group based environment
- the dispositions of academically successful students in a group based environment
Excellence is never an
accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and
intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives -
choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
–
Aristotle
It was clear that both one-to-one tutor and
classroom teacher could, if they chose, use assessments as real opportunities
to enhance the learning process rather than to simply label students.
Washburne, Burk, Ward and Morrison had all
shown that carefully designed assessment materials could be used to identify
specific areas of misunderstanding.
Furthermore, they had shown and developed ‘correctives’ that could be
deployed by the teacher that would close those gaps in knowledge or skill.
This is precisely how an expert tutor works
with a pupil.
Bloom noticed that academically excellent
students regularly follow up on their own mistakes that they have made on
quizzes or assessments. They seek out
their own correctives by asking the teacher to explain again and help them see
where they have misunderstood. They
often look up work again in textbooks, try questions over and over, search for
other sources of information and repeat work so that they will not make the
same mistakes in future.
Beginning to pull everything together, in
1968, Benjamin S Bloom published a strategy that combined the use of feedback
and corrective procedures, entitled “Learning
for Mastery”
The Core Elements of a Mastery Model
Aristotle himself would have recognised the
features of the model. Thomas Guskey presents a really useful summary of the core elements of a mastery model, which also provide the foundation for other models for schooling. Guskey (2005) summarises mastery models as having the following core elements:
Diagnostic Pre-Assessment with
Pre-Teaching
Key to learning a new idea is the underlying
knowledge and skills to enable one to do so.
In a mastery model, teachers use carefully designed questions, surveys,
quizzes or activities to reveal the readiness or otherwise of each individual
child in the class.
These questions are incredibly difficult to
design, as Burk and Morrison discovered – each taking many, many years to
refine their materials. But, given that
the body of knowledge for many subject areas is, in large, unchanging, once the
questions have been created, schools can re-use them. Question design of this type – where the
question or activity itself is carefully structured to reveal misconceptions or knowledge gaps – therefore becomes a key skill for the profession as a whole.
Where gaps or misconceptions are identified,
the teacher directly and purposefully teaches the individual or individuals the
knowledge or skill where they are deficient.
The intention is to ensure that all students,
before the group teaching of a new idea commences, have the foundations for new
learning.
Leyton (1983), Deshler & Schumaker (1993) and Vockell (1993) all confirm the positive impact of even relatively brief pre-teaching
for students whose prerequisite knowledge and skills are deficient.
When first beginning to implement a mastery
model for schooling, teachers often express concern that those students who
demonstrate they are ready to proceed with new learning could be held back by
the fact that the teacher must spend time directly teaching students whose
skills are deficient. This concern stems
from teachers existing in a current system, where concepts or ideas are limited
in scope by national curricula or state-wide programmes of study. However, given that ideas are infinitely
broad in their scope, it is appropriate for the student who is ready to proceed
to spend time instead taking the prerequisite idea beyond the curriculum. In a mastery model, many students find that
they spend a great deal of their time on what would, in a conveyor belt system,
be thought of as extension or enrichment work.
A student's readiness to proceed would be
determined by their attainment on the prerequisite quizzes or tests. Carleton had argued that students should attain
100%, but Bloom more reasonably set the threshold at 80% to account for normal human
fallibility, which does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding, knowledge
or skill.
High-Quality, Group-Based Initial Instruction
A mastery model for schooling emphasises the
importance of engaging all students in high-quality, developmentally appropriate,
research-based instruction.
To ensure the highest chance of impact across
a group of students, the instruction should be varied in approach, resource,
task and metaphor. The subject specific
knowledge and pedagogy of a teacher is central to the success of a mastery
approach, since they now need to have multiple ways of communicating and
teaching each and every concept or idea.
Teachers adapt their instruction according to the knowledge, skills,
dispositions, and background characteristics of students.
The teacher models approaches to solving
problems or addressing ideas. They also
give students extensive materials for deliberate practice so that they are able
to embed and consolidate what took place in the classroom.
Progress Monitoring Through
Regular Formative Assessments
The key reason that the teacher asks
questions or requires students to undertake activities or tasks in the
classroom (in their presence) is so that they can notice and act. The type of assessment does, of course, vary
with subject, but at its heart a formative assessment is any device that a teacher uses to
gather information about an individual student’s level of understanding or lack
thereof.
The assessment process itself also serves to
reinforce what the expectations are of the students, giving them the
opportunity to identify what they have learned well and what they need to
improve.
The teacher carries out formative assessment
continually, using carefully designed questions, prompts, quizzes and so
on. As they notice something about a
student they then are able to act and intervene immediately. It is this immediacy that drives the impact
of the approach. Feedback is in the moment
and contextualised. Rather than waiting
a term or so and then administering an exam, teachers are noticing in real-time
the needs of the individual students in the class and immediately intervening
through the use of high quality correctives.
Regular, low-stake quizzes also provide students
opportunities to practise and consolidate knowledge and skills.
High-Quality Corrective Instruction
It should be self-evident that moving on with
teaching an idea that relies on one or more ideas that students do not yet
understand will only result in failure, but as Bloom noticed (and as is still
prevalent today in England), that is exactly what was happening. A mastery model for schooling uses formative
assessment extensively to notice gaps.
The teacher then provides high quality corrective instruction, designed
carefully such that it will remedy the issue.
Correctives are not the same as simply
re-teaching an idea, where teachers often deploy precisely the same practice to
teach a concept, skill or knowledge again but more slowly. Re-teaching is ineffective because the approach
did not work with the student before – they were not able to ‘meaning make’ –
and so, is highly unlikely to work as a repeat.
Correctives are mindful of the way in which a student was taught a concept
previously. The teacher considers their
own practice, thinks about how they acted previously and then, with deep
subject specific pedagogical knowledge, is able to deploy different practice to
address the issue.
In a mastery model for schooling, whether a
student is successful in learning or fails to grip an idea is not seen as a
result of some inherent capacity to learn. Here,
the student learning or not is an outcome of the teaching. All students can learn all things, given the
right time and appropriate conditions – those conditions include impactful
teaching. So correctives are a key tool in
the teacher toolbox. Clearly, there are
great implications for teacher training, but I shall turn to those later.
Block, Efthim & Burns (1989) showed that
corrective activities typically add 10-20 percent more time to a learning unit
than a teacher would predict (having previously been using a conveyor belt
approach). This can be disconcerting for
teachers when embedding a new a model for schooling, but Bloom argued that this
intense, individualised assistance, offered early in an instructional sequence,
would drastically reduce the time needed for remediation in later units.
Again, this appears self-evident. When the teacher wishes to introduce new
learning, the students will now be in a position that the prerequisite knowledge,
ideas, concepts or skills are far more likely to be secure and able to be built
upon. Thomas Guskey (2008) showed that initial
instruction in later units can proceed more rapidly, allowing teachers to cover
just as much material as they would do when using more traditional methods.
It is common that small groups of students
within a class will have the same identified needs, which means that corrective
instruction can often be carried out in small groups. Recent studies exploring tutoring have
confirmed that one-to-three tutoring can be as impactful as one-to-one.
Again, the issue arises about what students
who do not require corrective instruction will be doing while the teacher is
engaged with those who do. This is where
deep subject knowledge becomes important once more, so that there is an
understanding within the teacher that any given idea, concept or skill they are
teaching is infinite in its scope. One
does not ‘master’ anything in life, but one can become increasingly more expert.
Although the 10,000-hour rule does not really
stand up to rigour, the idea behind it, that an individual must spend a very
large amount of time on any given skill before becoming an expert, is a useful
analogy here. Taking my own subject
area, mathematics, it would be easy for a teacher in a conveyor belt system to
convince themselves that a student can do
some mathematical skill. For example,
that a child understands counting. But counting
is, for practical purposes here, pretty much an infinitely broad topic (I, for
example, teach undergraduates the pigeonhole principle). Without needing to move on from the idea at
hand, the teacher is able to extend students well beyond the demands of the
year group or school curriculum, so there is always something for the students to be engaged with. As mentioned earlier, in a mastery model,
most students will find themselves engaged in extension material at some point.
Similarly, most students will also find that
there are occasions when they are in need of corrective instruction. This is to be celebrated. In a mastery model, there are no thick kids
and bright kids. Because human beings ‘meaning
make’ in different ways and the time to learn any new idea is a variable (but
all will in time), then moving from learning unit to learning unit will
typically see different students learn well quickly and different students need
support. Teachers explicitly tell
students that making a mistake on the regular, low-stake quizzes, tests or
activities is not a cause for dismay, but one to celebrate – “I, the teacher,
now know something about you and I can help you nail it right here, right
now. You will always be successful in
time.”
Second, Parallel Formative
Assessments
Unlike conveyor belt systems, where students
get only one chance to show how well they have learned, in a mastery model,
assessments are ongoing and everyone involved – teacher, student, parent – is aware
that they help the student to learn well.
Following corrective instruction, the teacher will carry out a further
assessment of the student in order to work out if the new approach to teaching
has had the desired impact. This gives
the student a new opportunity to show they have learned well and the teacher a
new opportunity to celebrate their success.
If the student still has not gripped the idea, then the cycle repeats. Imagine the analogy of learning to drive – an
excellent example of a mastery model – where the learner fails the driving
test. They are not then consigned to the
scrap heap; they try again, they learn again, they listen to different
approaches and they take the test again (and again and again) until they have
passed. Once they do pass, they are as
valid as every other driver on the road.
Teachers treat learning the same in a mastery model for schooling – all
will pass eventually and when they do, we celebrate it. There is no penalty for taking more than one
attempt to pass – they deserve the same standing as the student who flew
through the tests first time.
The driving test is also a useful analogy in highlighting the fact that the intention is not that a student masters a skill, but that they achieve a level of understanding or competence that they can reliably build new learning upon. We all know that passing the driving test does not indicate one has mastered driving! It is merely a step in becoming more expert in driving – a journey that continues throughout one’s life.
The driving test is also a useful analogy in highlighting the fact that the intention is not that a student masters a skill, but that they achieve a level of understanding or competence that they can reliably build new learning upon. We all know that passing the driving test does not indicate one has mastered driving! It is merely a step in becoming more expert in driving – a journey that continues throughout one’s life.
Enrichment or Extension Activities
The cyclical nature of the unit delivery in a
mastery model means that the teacher is engaged in different activities with
different students – they may be teaching, assessing, correcting or stretching.
This means that teachers provide activities,
tasks or questions that allow students to take the idea into much greater depth
and well beyond the expectations of the statutory school curriculum.
These students gain additional insight into
the subject and are able to build new schema for exploring the idea. Learning is not a linear process and all
students benefit from extensive deliberate practice and consolidation, which
can also be part of the enrichment process.
This type of approach allows the teacher to
remain within the same instructional sequence, but at the same time extend the
learning to much higher levels. The enrichment
and extension activities take a great amount of time to devise and develop – it
is a complex process to ensure that an enrichment activity is truly valuable. Again, this becomes the collective responsibility
of the profession and these activities should form part of the professional
body of knowledge for each subject area.
It is crucial that weak activities are
rejected – having students, who are ready to learn more, simply biding their time
is both damaging and morally objectionable.
A Diagrammatical Summary
In 2015, I produced this diagram that summarises the steps detailed above, which Oliver Caviglioli kindly made into a poster, which you can download here. The
cyclical nature of a mastery model for schooling is evident in the diagram.
To be continued...
You have made it to the end of the first 6500 words. The full blog stretches to around 50,000 words, so I thought it best to release in parts. In the following parts, I cover:
- The impact that the model has on student and teacher performance
- The research and evidence
- How to implement a mastery approach at country level and school level
- Benefits brought about by new technologies
- Initial teacher training
- Applying mastery to my own subject, Mathematics.
I am happy to address any other areas regarding mastery that you may find useful, please let me know.
