How do students move from the process of learning to the goal of “knowing?”
A few weeks ago, I was working with a group of struggling readers in middle school. Most had given up almost entirely on learning because they did not know how to read. While each student had spent hours “learning” in school, they had not mastered the important literacy skills along the way. The consequence? The effort to keep up just became too difficult.
Mastery happens with small, achievable milestones.
Students achieve learning milestones at different rates and in different ways. So, when students are only evaluated at the finish line, they miss those critically important mid-way opportunities that reveal their unique barriers to knowledge or skills with enough time to bridge the gaps. The result is that too many students do not master important foundational skills — like reading — exacerbating their learning challenges later.
But how do you approach “mastery” with a highly diverse class so that no student falls through the cracks?
Start with clear objectives and frequent feedback.
The idea of “mastery” traces back to Benjamin Bloom’s groundbreaking work in the late 1960s. Bloom argued that nearly all students can achieve high levels of understanding if given clear objectives, regular formative assessment, timely feedback, and opportunities for reteaching (Bloom, 1968).
What Bloom and his collaborators discovered is that when teachers use performance — not as a final judgment but as a tool for guiding learning — they open doors for all students to succeed (Block, 1971).
Use student “performance” to guide the learning process.
Achievement gaps close when schools embed performance and feedback into the learning process, and do not focus so much on the final grade (Guskey, 2007).
For literacy and language development, this means that teachers need to build in abundant opportunities for students to show what they know as they go: reading aloud to demonstrate fluency, listening and discussing to show comprehension, writing reflections to consolidate meaning, and speaking to apply new vocabulary in context.
Include all modalities.
As students read, listen, speak, and write, they reinforce and reveal understanding using different modalities. Breaking complex skills into smaller, observable performances can allow teachers to track growth of smaller steps toward proficiency over time (Marzano, 2007).
Not all students demonstrate mastery similarly. Some students may reveal deep comprehension through oral storytelling, others through writing or drawing. Flexible performance tasks ensure that mastery is accessible to every learner, with as much differentiated support as possible to scaffold learners (Tomlinson, 2017).
Motivation matters!
Allow students to demonstrate what they know in multiple ways.
Ultimately, it helps to think of “mastery” not solely about accuracy—but also about the active effort of students to use and transfer their existing knowledge and skills. For example, a student who can read a story, talk about its themes, listen to a peer’s perspective, and write their own response is demonstrating robust, transferable knowledge across a variety of modalities—a demonstration of “mastery”.
This is why StoryWorld provides abundant differentiated opportunities for students to engage all modalities so they can demonstrate their mastery of both language and literacy at each level and milestone.
Bottom line: encourage performance in all modalities with timely feedback.
By embedding performance across different modalities into daily instruction along with frequent feedback, teachers ensure that mastery is not a distant goal measured only at the end of a unit or semester, but a lived, visible and engaging process that truly takes students from learning to knowing.
Cynthia Harrison Barbera
Cynthia Harrison Barbera is President and CEO, StoryWorld International. She served as VP Educational Technology for Scholastic and is the recipient of two US Presidential awards for educational programs. An Emmy-award winner for a television series on education, she has taught English to native-speakers and ELL students in the US and overseas.
References:
- August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Bloom, B. S. (1968). Learning for mastery. UCLA Evaluation Comment.
- Bloom, B. S. (1984). The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13(6), 4–16.
- Block, J. H. (1971). Mastery learning: Theory and practice. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
- Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power and pedagogy. Multilingual Matters.
- Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
- Guskey, T. R. (2007). Closing achievement gaps: Revisiting Benjamin S. Bloom’s “Learning for Mastery.” Journal of Advanced Academics, 19(1), 8–31.
- Marzano, R. J. (2007). The art and science of teaching. ASCD.
- Pane, J. F., Steiner, E. D., Baird, M. D., & Hamilton, L. S. (2017). Informing progress: Insights on personalized learning implementation and effects. RAND Corporation.
- Tomlinson, C. A. (2017). How to differentiate instruction in academically diverse classrooms (3rd ed.). ASCD.
Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10.