When we made the decision to homeschool, I went into it with a fair amount of confidence that I had enough basic knowledge to teach my then-preschooler and 2nd grader what they needed to know. That confidence shattered about 20 minutes in as questions were hurled at me by these small humans who actually expected me to have all the answers. I quickly came to the dismaying realization that there’s a helluva lot I didn’t know.
Which is funny, because in school I was always considered smart. I made the honor roll every year, aced enough AP classes in high school to earn a substantial amount of college credit, and scored high enough on the SATs to earn me a full academic scholarship to Cal State Los Angeles, where I went on to graduate with honors. Yet despite these “academic achievements,” when I look back I honestly can’t say that I learned very much.
As a matter of fact, I can barely even remember which classes I took, a realization that hit me when I requested my college transcript and thought they had sent the wrong one because I swear I don’t remember taking oceanography my sophomore year. Apparently I passed?
Those gaping holes in my own knowledge, made painfully obvious by the innocent inquiries of a 5 year old, forced me to acknowledge the fatal flaw in our education system: students are not required to master the material they learn. Instead, they’re expected to hold onto information long enough to pass a test, after which it’s allowed to fall right out of their heads as they push on to the next subject.
Perhaps we’re going about this all wrong.
An Alternative Approach
Mastery learning is an educational method that requires complete understanding of the material, and enough systematic review that it is not forgotten, even years later.
In an interview with Education Week, Scott Ellis, founder of MasteryTrack, a company dedicated to helping schools implement mastery learning in the classroom, explains:
“Mastery learning is an approach that empowers students to move forward in their learning at their own pace as they master content. This contrasts with the traditional structure of the education system that is based on time and focuses on how long a student has been learning something or a teacher has been teaching it. In mastery learning, we don’t care about either of these things. Instead we care exclusively about what the student knows.
Revolutionary, right?
The idea of learning with the goal of actually retaining knowledge seems like common sense, and when we look at examples of educators and students who adopt a mastery mindset, the results are hard to ignore.
If you’ve ever heard a Suzuki-trained violinist, you know what I mean.
Under the Suzuki Method of music training, students methodically practice a piece of music until they’re able to play it perfectly. Then, as they learn new pieces, they continue to practice the old ones daily. This pattern continues with each new piece until students can play an entire repertoire from memory, with minimal errors, even years after the songs were originally learned.
The method is incredibly effective, and its applications extend far beyond music.
My Mastery Learning Experiment
Back in 2020, my kids and I, like everyone else on lockdown, found ourselves with rather a lot of time on our hands. So I made the executive decision that this would be The Year We Learn Poetry. Having done quite a bit of research about mastery learning during that time, I chose a poetry memorization program based off of the Suzuki Method as an experiment to see if it really worked.
It started us off with something nice and easy:
Ooey Gooey
Ooey Gooey was a worm,
A mighty worm was he.
He stepped upon the railroad tracks
The train he did not see.
Oooooey goooooey.
We recited this poem every single morning until we had it memorized, then we continued to recite it every morning while we learned a new poem. Rinse and repeat.
We continued this daily practice over the next two years, learning a total of 27 poems of increasing complexity that culminated with Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. I’m proud to say we can still recite almost all of the poems on demand to this day (which is a great trick to pull out at family gatherings when relatives start quizzing the homeschoolers).
While being able to recite a few poems might not seem like much, as someone who has always struggled with memory, seeing firsthand just how much our brains are capable of holding when given the chance profoundly changed the way I think about learning, and the way I approach teaching.
If Mastery Learning Works, Why Don’t We Do It?
I was recently listening to a lecture given by Andrew Pudewa, a popular homeschool writing instructor and speaker on education, based on the Japanese proverb “Ten Thousand Times and Then Begins Understanding.” Recalling his time spent as a student studying violin under Dr. Suzuki in Japan, he shared how students were instructed to practice a piece 10,000 times. And he was actually serious. When the students came back to class the next week, Dr. Suzuki could tell immediately whether or not they had actually practiced, and if they hadn’t, they were once again told to practice 10,000 times.
This concept seems almost incomprehensible to many of us in America. Pudewa jokes that in the United States we live in the land of, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” In other words, we try twice and then give up. Nothing is ever mastered this way.
It’s almost expected that once a student passes a class, most of the material will be forgotten. And as long as that credit is earned for the transcript, no one complains. But if the knowledge gained is lost just as quickly, what is that credit actually worth? If our students haven’t truly learned the material, in the end aren’t we just wasting our (and their) time?
Maybe we need to raise our expectations, and stop selling our students short.
Making the Shift
I’ll admit, there are very real challenges to implementing mastery learning methods, especially in a traditional classroom setting where time is a precious commodity. While there are some schools out there making it work, in most educational settings the logistical nightmare of individually assessing each students’ understanding of concepts and then pacing lessons to accommodate differing needs is enough of a reason to keep things as they are, especially when much of the extra work falls on teachers already stretched beyond capacity.
Not to mention the fact that to be successful, mastery learning requires consistent, intentional effort on the part of students who may or may not be motivated to put in the work, and a level of administrative cooperation and support that, unfortunately, just doesn’t exist in many school environments. Even those who homeschool specifically for the purpose of providing individualized learning can find it hard to sustain.
These challenges are significant, but the even bigger obstacle is the mindset and cultural shifts required to fundamentally reshape how we think about education as a whole, and what we’re actually trying to accomplish as educators. That’s not going to happen all at once.
But it can start with me. And you. And each person who chooses to step into the role of educator knowing that the decisions we make and the effort we put in to teach those in our care has the potential to have a huge influence on what their life trajectory will look like.
Kids typically spend 13-14 years in school. Let’s make them count.