Laying the Foundations
One teacher's journey
It is the spring holidays here in Australia. We are experiencing a burst of gloriously sunny days. Yesterday, I dusted off my bike, squeezed into my lycra and went for a ride through the rolling hills of the goldfields were I live. Despite having not ridden since last summer, my skills came back to me: I knew when to change gears, when to get out of the saddle, how to navigate the bends in the road, to listen out for cars that were approaching, and managed to have a conversation with another rider I met along the way. The idiom 'it's like riding a bike' rang true as skills that I haven't used for the best part of a year came flooding back to me. I was even able to navigate the swooping magpie as it hit my helmet four times. Riding a bike is a skill that I have mastered. I didn't have to consciously think about each skill as I did it. If I hadn't mastered these skills then it would have been much harder to deal with the angry magpie as I would have needed to think about how I could watch its shadow out of the corner of my eye, duck at the right moments while pedalling, changing gears and steering. Mastery learning has an essential place in education. However, it wasn't a term I had come across until I was trained in Direct Instruction. The idea that we want students to understand concepts "as well as their own name" became transformative in my teaching. Through mastery learning I expect my students to learn many things without the need for conscious thought. As I learnt about cognitive load theory, the importance of mastery learning became more obvious. Mastery learning allows us to free up our working memory because we have stored things accessibly in our long term memory. If students are able to recall knowledge and concepts without active thought then it allows them to concentrate on applying this knowledge in more complex ways. A student who hasn't learnt their phoneme-grapheme correspondences automatically will struggle to read fluently or comprehend what they have read. A student who hasn't mastered their times tables will struggle to solve a problem that requires students to identify factors. I never truly mastered my musical scales and know how hard I had to think about each one before I played it. Meanwhile my friend who mastered his scales now plays for a world class orchestra. Teaching to mastery also means that students are less likely to forget things. This is enhanced by implementing regular reviews in the class. Reviews can be fast-paced if students have mastered concepts. Reviews allow students the opportunity to recall previously learnt material and the more frequently they are given this opportunity, the stronger the pathway to this knowledge is. While Direct Instruction remains an epitome of mastery learning, Ochre Education is creating new resources for Australian teachers to implement mastery learning through explicit instruction in their classrooms. AERO has put out a guide about Mastery Learning and there are many UK-based resources on this topic as well. It is easy to forget how important it is to learn things to mastery. The claim that we need to move away from facts-based education to broader concepts such as critical thinking is typical of this amnesia. How can you think critically if you don't have fundamental knowledge to base it on? I know that I could only analyse Debussy's Nocturnes because my music teacher took the time to teach us about the impressionism movement that occurred in the visual arts. A similarly condescending cry is that we can 'just google it' (or 'just ChatGPT it'). The ability to access a vast array of information actually emphasises the need for a good grounding in common knowledge, otherwise we are unable to understand which links are useful, accurate or relevant. Our students deserve to be taught to mastery. Our students are capable of understanding concepts and knowledge to a level of automaticity that they know it 'as well as their own name'. Let's ensure that every child gets an education that empowers to build on this knowledge. Image by Moshe Harosh from Pixabay
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I'm JamesI am a father of two (8 & 5), married to a future Early Childhood Educator. Archives
September 2023
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