Mastery vs. Moving One

Hello everyone,

Welcome back to A track. Happy vacation to B track.

Today I wanted to consider the question of whether or not we should work for mastery before we move our students through the curriculum.

Personally, I can't take a strong stand either for insisting on current mastery or moving on, and I have a powerful impression that subject matter influences the decision. What I want to do is publicly think through the question of whether or not in given conditions teachers should insist that students master a concept before they move on, or whether the students should be pressed into the next unit without mastering the concepts of the current unit.

It seems to me that the decision can vary depending on whether you're teaching humanities or math/science or PE or some other speciality. The decisions are also influenced by which mastered concepts are basal or fundamental to other concepts (ie, can the students learn the next concept or future concepts if they haven't mastered this one?).

In general, we ought to be working for mastery; I'm not questioning that. I'm only questioning the timing of when a teacher should insist on mastery before going on, or what level of mastery the teacher should insist on before proceeding to another concept. It may also be necessary to question how many students should have achieved mastery before the teacher considers the class ready to move on.

I instinctively approach teaching as a humanities teacher. I am credentialed in English and educated in the performing arts. Skills in English can be taught as independent units (which is usually incredibly boring for both the students and the teacher), or they can be integrated into a variety of differently structured units. Assuming that I'm teaching the mechanics and structure of persuasive writing, I could construct a unit that focuses only on the writing process (and the mechanical skills necessary in editing), and I could take the students through a unit lasting six weeks or so focusing on that skill alone.

I can also integrate exactly the same skills into any other unit. I could teach literature-based units (non-fiction, a novel, poetry) or thematic units (war, animals, growing up, making decisions), or I could focus on other skills (research, MLA format, public debate/discourse), and still teach my students how to write a persuasive essay.

In fact, essay writing incorporates skills that can be explained in a relatively brief period of time--much less than a complete school year. It's the practice that takes time. Therefore, I might teach my unit on persuasive essay writing and find that my students have not mastered the skill. I could then teach a unit on non-fiction and ask my students to write persuasive essays related to the literature. They will likely improve, but they may still not master the essay, so I might continue to have them write persuasive essays in a novel unit, or and a thematic unit, or a research paper.

Somewhere in that flurry of units and essays, my students will have reached a point that I consider to show relative mastery of the persuasive essay.

If I'm teaching math, however, it may be another story completely. It's true that my students will continue to practice skills that they may have newly acquired and not mastered as they move on to other skills, but very often there are concepts that they cannot understand until they have mastered previous things. It may be necessary to stay with an early concept longer than the pacing plan requires because there is no point in going on until the current concept is mastered. (I can only speak theoretically here; my examples would be very elementary--for example, it seems impossible to learn multiplication until one has mastered addition--and the subject matter experts would know better the specifics of when to make an issue of complete mastery.)

It seems to me that we should use our best professional judgement on how to pace our students. Work for mastery, but be practical about it.

Jeff Combe