Whose Curriculum? Mastery
or Personalisation
Steven Kolber
As teachers, we all stand below a broad curriculum umbrella as
well as a subject area umbrella, yet how we approach these big concepts is the
realm of the ‘enacted curriculum’. It’s informed by our own personal beliefs,
views of our content, context and our broader worldview.
In this piece, I will explore two different approaches to
curriculum and their enactment: mastery and personalised learning. Personalised
learning has been criticised as being the ‘edu-babble’ de jour, so it is timely
to explore it further and compare and contrast it against mastery learning.
In his presentation at RESCON 2018, Steve Griffiths (@sciencesteveg)
described two different views on Mastery learning: firstly, in the sense of classical
artists and secondly in the more commonly held view of achieving a high
standard (say 90 or 100%) before being able to progress. I will address the
first conception of this later in the piece when I illustrate an example from
my own practice. But as a short value proposition, mastery recommits and
focuses on the curriculum and expects all students prove they have mastered
each concept before progressing.
Personalised learning is an approach that fundamentally changes
the curriculum for each student, it lends itself more to passion projects,
student interest and self-led exploration, crucially it is almost always
mediated by technology. Personalised learning is something that technology
companies have put great stock in, because true personalisation for all
students in commonly sized classrooms is all but impossible for a single human
teacher. One key component of personalised learning is the now widely-derided
concept of ‘learning styles’, which should bring pause to most informed
educators. The
short value proposition is, change the content to excite the learner.
As noted above, the discussion that follows is limiting
these two ideas to curriculum. The quality of the curriculum that we work
within is something generally beyond the control of most teachers, yet it is these
documents that may provoke either of the two approaches to be adopted. If faced
with a boring, outdated or out-of-touch curriculum, a teacher may choose the
approach of personalisation. If working within a curriculum that is modern, dynamic
and ever-changing, a teacher may be more willing to take the approach of
mastery learning.
It is worth pausing momentarily to consider the concept of ‘scale-ability’,
the idea of taking one idea that has worked in one class, school or region and ‘scaling’
it up for use at a broader level than where it began. This is too often the
presumed goal of educational interventions and also educational research, a
good idea in one context is rarely allowed to stay as such, and often the expectation
is that such an intervention should be ‘scaled up’ and ‘rolled out’ more
broadly. The ‘scale-ability’ of Personalised
learning is high, because it is typically a form of digital technology hinged
on learning analytics with aims for a wider roll-out implicit in its design.
Mastery learning is so closely tied to curriculum documents, the teacher,
teacher-student relationships and to a master teacher that it would score very
low in regards to ‘scale-ability’.
In my view, ‘scale-ability’ is a false idol that need not be
chased in teaching, there ought to always be ideas that are formed and remain
within their context, and mastery learning definitely fits that bill. Mastery
learning is often supported by a flipped learning approach, yet some would
suggest that each of these ideas have difficulty being ‘scaled up’ due to their
reliance on teacher’s high level content and technological expertise. This is
not to dismiss either of these ideas, it is always important for there to be
approaches and pedagogies that may not be achievable for all teachers, just as experienced
doctors may practice methods that a rookie doctor may not be able to achieve. Mastery
learning requires a master teacher and is so much richer for that fact. If you
put aside the concept of scaling up an intervention, this frees up teachers to
pursue ideas and approaches with high skill ceilings to best extend their own
practice and the learning of their students.
It behoves us as teacher to problematise each new ‘edu-babble
buzz word’ in the following way, by asking simply:
Does this intervention have human relationships at its core?
Does this approach allow me to spend more time engaging with
my students?
If, by contrast, an approach that places technology,
learning progressions, students learning or data at its centre the initial
instinct ought to be one of refusal and challenge from our profession.
Shifting to mastery, two core tenets underpin the approach: firstly,
not all students start at the same place and secondly, all students are expected
to end up in the same place. These tenets are crucial because the aim is for
all students to complete school with similar shared concepts and it presupposes
that the curriculum itself is viable, valuable and meaningful.
These tenets can be expanded upon from what we know of
evidence. Graham Nuthall in his book ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners’ notes that “on
average, around 50% or content presented to students is known before it is presented”.
The argument for all students ending up with similar or the same knowledge is one
of community expectations, shared communal ideas and beliefs are part of the cultural
encoding process of school.
The common conception of mastery is expressed through the
learning areas of maths and science, these learning areas have discrete
knowledge components and clear skills and knowledge that can be tested. My area
is English (or ‘Language Arts’, if you prefer) and developing students formal
and analytic writing, where Steve Griffiths idea of mastery is most important.
I am not expecting my students to reach the same level, but I am expecting them
to master the content to the level that they are able. In fact, the process of
achieving mastery in this context is without quantitative data, it is purely experiential
and qualitative and crucially mediated by relationships.
Let me illustrate how this is done for a greater context. Students
are completing a unit on ‘Language Analysis’ which asks them to look at a piece
of opinion-focussed persuasive writing and note the way that the authors
attempt to position the reader to support their ideas.
This is a type of writing and a series of tasks that students
have completed in the majority of their years at high school. The presumption
of most teachers is to begin at ‘square one’ each year. Teach the students the
techniques that they are looking for, teach their students the structure of the
response again (sometimes for the 5th, 6th or 7th
time in their high school career). This assumption is called a ‘tabula rasa’ or
blank slate, but pushed to the most extreme, because all teachers are aware of the
very ‘un-blank-ness’ of their student’s slates.
So, in short, my approach is to break the task down into discrete
elements, not arrayed in a progression, or given number values, but simply
presented as a cohesive artefact. Students display mastery by completing the
task for which they are to be assessed on, their written response. They can
choose to write whole pieces, which is encouraged, or to complete small
components of their fuller response aiming to achieve each element in
isolation. By progressing in this manner, students are able to generate their
own responses and clarify their understanding of the written form in a variety
of different ways.
My experience of a mastery approach has been
transformational, students have been called upon to conference with me, their
teacher, far more often than they normally would have. They are also being called
upon to exhibit the very skills that we expect of them as burgeoning adults
about to be cast into the ‘real world’. In this sense, it is not the content
being learned that is the greatest element of mastery learning, rather it is
many of the incidental factors that are most valuable.
Hattie and Timperley (2007, 2011) note four forms of
feedback provided to students:
1)
Task or product
2)
Processes
3)
Self-regulation
4)
The Self
A recent 2006 study noted that most teachers struggle with
providing direct instruction to their students around self-regulation and their
conceptions of ‘the self’. This is a task that a mastery approach to curriculum
is most able and apt to support. Students are told not only how close they were
to the target, but they are asked to reflect on their own self, the core
processes that led them to producing their work. The teacher moves from being a
‘sage on the sage’, to a ‘guide on the side’ and then finally to a coach of the
self-as-learner. Not all teachers will be comfortable with these shifts, but
for me I’ve found the process liberating!
In closing personalising curriculum too often leaves us with
little common curriculum, whilst a mastery approach allows students to learn
and grow as learners whilst engaging deeply with the content. I challenge you
to try both!
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