Preface

In the relentless and seemingly endless journey to “raise standards” the next train to roll into the DfE station is the 7.52 to Mastery which will no doubt be stopping at a school near you on its journey towards its ultimate destination of educational excellence.

So what is mastery? According to the Oxford dictionary it is a “comprehensive knowledge or skill in a given subject”. I am assuming the government cannot expect that the introduction of the word into the educational vocabulary will cause teachers to slap their foreheads, cry “doh” and wonder why they hadn’t already been trying to move children towards a position of gaining “comprehensive knowledge” already. Of course teachers have always striven for excellence in children it is part of the DNA that causes them to enter the profession. So if the debate is not about semantics, what is the rationale behind the current initiative?

The current conceptual understanding of mastery has been “borrowed” from the Asian countries with an especial focus on the area of Mathematics. The government, noting that our scores in the PISA league tables show a great disparity with many of the countries in the Far East, have looked at their teaching principles and sought to elucidate those that would benefit students in the England. They have noted that these “successful” countries use a form of teaching known as “mastery”. So Nick Gibb the school’s minister is encouraging the teaching profession “to learn from teachers in one of the best systems in the world (Shanghai), and implement teaching for mastery in your schools” (Speech on Maths Reform 27th March 2015).A message he repeated in his speech “The purpose of Education” (9th July 2015) when he stated “England is now raising standards by helping primary schools to deliver the highly effective Asian-style mastery approach”

The government’s present understanding of the mastery pedagogy hinges on the belief that standards can be raised in all children if they are taught corporately as a whole class. This is an element they believe lies at the core of the Asian success, due to a greater emphasis on whole class teaching in these countries. So the new curriculum states that;“The expectation is that the majority of pupils will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace” The emphasis then becomes one based on teaching depth in a given idea rather than progressing the more able onto new concepts.This is a radical departure from the heavily differentiated curriculum that schools have been challenged to implement in recent years under the “personalised agenda.”

If this is the new dawn of educational enlightenment then it begs the obvious question: Why have we not seen all this before? Well, the simple answer is: We have.

The Historical Background

The concept of mastery is not new. Indeed, many of its principles date back to Aristotle and the other ancient Greek philosophers. But leaving ancient historyaside, a reincarnation of the theory surfaced in early years of the 20th century through the work of Washburne (1922) and it became popular in many American schools at this time. However, the real impetus came through the work of Benjamin Bloom in the 1980’s. Whilst he is more well known for the “Bloom’s Taxonomy” his major work came in pioneering the mastery principle and indeed it his theory that the DfE cite in their own rationale for developing mastery.

Bloom noted that the “conventional” (his word) method of teaching involved teaching a class of 30 a given concept at the end of which the children would be assessed on what they had learnt. The results from any assessment tasks would logically result in a customary bell curve distribution based on the fact that some children would attain higher levels of understanding than others with the majority of children clustering around a centre point. However Bloom noted that earlier research by Anania (1981) and Burke (1983) had compared progress of children taught in a “conventional” class of 30 with the progress of those taught in a one-on-one tutoring situation. They found that the one to one scores were two standard deviations above the control class i.e. 98% of the students outperformed the control class. They also found the time spent on the task was greater in the tutor scenario 90% compared with 65% in the classroom.

From such data he wrote “My major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning”In this he was challenging the current educational thinking of the day, which was based on a fixed view of academic ability. Bloom believed that this placed a glass ceiling on children’s ability and that with the right learning environment all children could achieve to the same level. Acknowledging that one-to-one tuition “is too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale”he set about exploring how he could close this two standard deviation gap between the two teaching styles.

In 1984 he published his seminal work “The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring.”Whilst he acknowledged that he was unable to replicate the two standard deviation of individual tutoring he did claim that “The average student under mastery learning was about one standard deviation above the average of the control class” He believed thatover time 80% of the mastery students could achieve what the top 20% achieved with conventional class teaching. Pictorially it was represented in the following graph:

His philosophy was underpinned by one important concept which revolved around time. The prevailing thinking in his day was that academic ability was innate and therefore fixed. So teachers assessments after a unit of work on a given concept would show some children had achieved well and others less well. The explanation for this would be down to the fact that some children had natural ability that allowed them to move faster through the material than those who struggled to take the concepts on board. Bloom sought to challenge this and offered an approach that was a paradigm shift in thinking. He reasoned that if it was possible through individual tutoring for more children to attain similar standards to the control group then the issue cannot lie in the child’s intelligence it must rely in the teaching style.

Working on this premise he developed a teaching model that kept the curriculum constant and allowed time to become the fluid element. So whereas traditional teaching keeps time constant and permits pupils’ ‘mastery’ of curriculum content to vary. Mastery learning keeps learning outcomes constant and but varies the time needed for pupils to become proficient or competent at these objectives. On the basis of this he divided the curriculum into a series of concepts to be learnt. These were then be taught to the children, not in a given time frame but taught until all the children had acquired the concept. For those who achieved this earlier than others they would move on to extension material that would develop depth in the concept before moving on to new material which once again would be introduced to the class as a whole.

In short Bloom’s differentiation was not based on what the children had achieved because “slower learners do succeed in attaining the same criterion of achievement as the faster learners… they (just) learnt with more time and help than was given to the others” Carroll, another forerunner in the principles of mastery concurred with Bloom saying “aptitude is a measure of learning rate, i.e. a measure of the amount of time the student would require to learn a given level under ideal instructional conditions"

The acceleration in learning was down to one key factor. Bloom noted that the key to learning in the tutorial sessions was related to the instant feedback that the student received. As soon as mistakes were made they were corrected and therefore erroneous learning was not allowed to root within the child and instead a secure foundation was laid upon which they could build further understanding. Bloom’s premise was that “group instruction produces errors in learning at each stage – no matter how effective a teacher is” So the key for Bloom was that “teachers and students reveal the errors in learning shortly after they occur... (and that) appropriate correctives are then introduced” This he says is “the essence of mastery learning strategy: group instruction and individualised help as students need it”

Initially Bloom suggested that weaker students required approximately 10-15% additional time to achieve the same results as their peers but in later research he suggested that over time the gap closed “so that students became more and more similar in their learning rate until the difference between fast and slow learners becomes very difficult to measure”

Can it all be that simple?

I suspect that any discerning reader will have asked themselves the obvious question; if it is this straight forward why are we only just implementing this style of teaching now?

As with all research Bloom’s findings are hotly disputed. Before we turn to the dissenters it is worth noting, in the name of impartiality, that there are many supporters of Bloom’s work but the dissenting voice is fairly strong. The greatest of these was probably Slavin. Interestingly he agreed with the principles of mastery and lauded the concept of providing secure and robust feedback for students but to his initial surprise his own research failed to support the notion of dramatic academic gains. He found that when the philosophy was dropped into a whole class setting that the “group based mastery learning has modest to non-existent effects on student achievement”In a later article he sought to qualify his view saying “my critics imply that I am opposed to mastery teaching in principle. I’m not… my only quarrel is with group based mastery learning…the year-long study showed no greater effects for mastery learning than traditional methodson standardised measures”

The Sutton Trust produces documents related to the current thinking on educational research but even they remain healthily sceptical of the gains that mastery teaching claims to elucidate. In their EEF toolkit they note that; “There is a large quantity of research on the impact of mastery learning, though much of it is relatively dated and findings are not consistent”One of the EEF projects into mastery concluded that; On average, Year 1 pupils in schools adopting Mathematics Mastery made a small amount more progress than pupils in schools that did not. However, the effect detected

was not statistically significant, meaning that it is not possible to rule out chance as an explanation.” They also quote Slavin saying that there was “little evidence that effects maintained over time”

So where does that leave the debate?

I am happy to leave the academics to argue over the validity of research results my main concern is to seek to evaluate the philosophy underpinning the government’s current move towards encouraging schools towards mastery teaching, especially in Maths where it really seem to have taken hold through the work of the Maths Hub and the Shanghai-English project being funding by the DfE.

My instinctive reaction to the mastery debate is to pose the obvious question that every classroom practitioner would ask: How is it possible to teach the full span of abilities in one class lesson without dumbing down content for the more able or losing the less able in a morass of challenging concepts?

The complexity in the debate comes in the fact that the DfE have married a philosophical concept to the teaching style adopted in some countries on the other side of the globe and unfortunately the two cannot always co-habit successfully. As I have sought to study this issue it is evident to me that whilst the mantra from government is “Mastery is the model of the high-performing Asian systems such as Shanghai, Singapore and South Korea. It delivers a meticulous approach to arithmetic (through) whole class teaching” (Nick Gibb’s speech on Maths Reform 2015) this is slightly disingenuous on two counts. Firstly as I will shortly show the Chinese in Shanghai are not class teaching all the time but have provision for children at both ends of the academic spectrum. Secondly to call “whole class teaching” mastery is not something that Bloom advocated because even he concluded that there would always a small percentage of children in any class who would not be able to access a class based lesson. So in both the case of replicating Shanghai and in the purity of the mastery model the current mantra being delivered falls well short.

So what is the truth?

(i)Bloom’s Theory

For myself I believe Bloom’s work has much to commend it.

He was advocating what Carol Dweck came to articulate later as a “growth mindset” and in many ways he was ahead of his time in this regard. His research took place in the days prior to all the brain research we have access to these days. So whilst we now know that the brain has greater plasticity to learn than anyone previously thought it would now appear that Bloom’s ideas were prophetic in nature. He was right to challenge the assumption of the fixed mindset and definitely right to challenge the notion that intelligence was innate.

He was also right in his assumption that feedback is the key to successful learning. Again something that John Hattie in his meta-analysis study “Visible Learning” came to conclude many years later. Once again Bloom was ahead of his time in this regard a forerunner to Wiliam and Black’s “Inside the Black Box” and all of Shirley Clarke’s work on formative assessment that followed it. Thomas Guskey, an advocate of Bloom’s work said “a far better approach, according to Bloom, is for teachers to use their classroom assessments as learning tools, both to provide students with feedback on their learning progress and to guide the correction of learning errors” As we said formative assessment ahead of its time.

For Bloom the issue was never about “whole class” teaching in fact it was the antithesis of this he was seeking to replicate the concept of “individual tutoring” in a “whole class” setting. So far from advocating teaching the class as a whole he was advocating a balance of whole class teaching underpinned and indeed driven by an individualisedprogramme of feedback and learning that supported the child. This is somewhat different from the current message being delivered which leaves many with the feeling that differentiation is a thing of the past and that teaching the class with uniform content is the way forward. Slavin’s criticism of Bloom is relevant here, you will remember he was critical not of the concept of mastery but critical of its use in a “group setting”. Slavin’s critics take him to task not because of his findings but because he limited his study to “whole group settings”. I don’t wish to draw conclusions from an “argument of silence” but it would appear that those supporting Bloom did not argue with these conclusions they just argued with the fact that his research was skewed through selectivity. But this does leave us with the question; is mastery teaching appropriate in a whole class setting?

Certainly Bloom acknowledged that there were some in the school population who could not access the whole class element of the curriculum. He put them at 2-3% of the population. We may wish to argue over the percentage but the truth is that even he acknowledged that additional provision needed to be made for these children. The other aspect aligned to this was his assertion that he recognised that there would always be children that would need “additional time” to acquire concepts. Indeed this was the key principle of his theory in the sense that he saw “time taken” as the differentiating concept rather than the material delivered in the class. He wrote therefore “Using the concept of mastery teaching I sought to find ways in which the slower learners could be given the extra time and help they needed, outside of the regular class schedule”He was quite clear that whole class teaching would not suffice to make the progress required for these children and that additional support outside the lesson, or intervention as we might call it, would be a necessary part of the learning process. It is therefore disingenuous to claim as many do presently that all children can make progress within the one class lesson. Bloom did not expect this nor (as we shall see) do the teachers in Shanghai.