[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader.
[00:17]
Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:19] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Dr. Tom Guske. Dr. Guske is Professor Emeritus in the College of Education at the University of Kentucky, a graduate of the University of Chicago's renowned Measurement Evaluation and Statistical Analysis program. He began his career in education as a middle school teacher, served as an administrator in Chicago Public Schools, and was the first director of the Center for the Improvement of Teaching and Learning, a national education research center. Tom is the author or editor of 25 books and over 300 articles published in prominent research journals, as well as educational leadership, CAPN, and school administrator.
[00:55]
Dr. Guske served on the policy research team of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, as well as on the task force to develop the National Standards for Professional Development. He was named a fellow in the AERA and was awarded the association's prestigious Relating Research to Practice Award, as well as Learning Forward's Outstanding Contribution to the Field Award and Phi Delta Kappen's Distinguished Educator Award. And he's the author of Implementing Mastery Learning, the third edition of which we're here to talk about today.
[01:26] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[01:29] SPEAKER_00:
Tom, welcome to Principal Center Radio once again. Thanks, Justin. It's a pleasure to be back with you. Well, I'm excited to both to speak with you again and to take a new look at mastery learning. It's one of those things that I've been hearing about for my whole life. And as the different fads and trends and pendulum swings of education come and go, we've seen mastery learning come up time and again.
[01:51]
And I'm definitely getting the sense that it has some staying power. Why does mastery learning have such staying power in our field when so many ideas seem to come and go and never come back?
[02:03] SPEAKER_01:
Well, you're absolutely right. Mastery learning originally was conceived by Benjamin Bloom in the later 1960s. Benjamin first wrote about this in an article he published in 1968. So these ideas have been a part of education now for well over 50 years. I think that one of the reasons it has had such great longevity is that it provided the foundation for so much of what has been done in education since that time. Benjamin Bloom in 1968 brought the idea of formative assessment to education.
[02:36]
He was the first one to actually use that term, described how we can use classroom assessments as learning tools rather than just evaluation devices to grade or certify the competence and students get to the end. He wrote the very first book about formative assessment in 1971, the handbook on formative and summative evaluation of student learning. So I think it was interesting. provided a foundation for ideas that many people have built upon since that time. It's just not everybody has taken the time to sort of consider that history, and in many cases, haven't granted credit to the people who actually developed the ideas.
[03:11] SPEAKER_00:
And you've actually written a whole book on Benjamin Bloom, haven't you?
[03:13] SPEAKER_01:
Yes, Benjamin Bloom was my advisor during my years of graduate studies at the University of Chicago, served as a director of my doctoral dissertation committee. And then we worked together on several projects after that, when I was appointed the Director of Research for the Center for Improvement in Teaching and Learning in Chicago, I called upon Dr. Bloom to serve as an advisor for our committee. And we worked on several projects since that time. So I was with him long after he developed the ideas on mastery learning. But it was really an important part of the work that we did together.
[03:47]
While I was working there as a graduate student, I began working with the City College of Chicago. It's a group of community colleges in the Chicago area. that we were working with their faculty to implement the ideas of mastery learning in their classes. And we developed a very huge initiative at that time in the Chicago Public Schools to implement mastery learning as well. So when he would get calls from people that were asking him about the theory of mastery learning, he was very good at responding to those. When they asked about the practice, he would give them my phone number.
[04:16] SPEAKER_00:
Interesting. So you were on the front lines of kind of the rollout of mastery learning in many settings, huh?
[04:22] SPEAKER_01:
That's true. Yes, we started really in the Chicago public schools, and then from the success that we experienced there, had invitations to go and work with other major school districts. Began programs in New York City public schools there, and then as other districts sort of caught on to that, it became more popular, and there was increasing interest in using these in various school settings. One of the things that Bloom was very, very particular about is he did not want to have these ideas expanded until there was significant and trustworthy evidence to show that they really worked well. So he was very, very careful about this, to being sure that we had tested all these ideas before we talked about really implementing them on a grander scale. And I think that too led to the increased credibility to master learning, which has contributed to its longevity.
[05:11] SPEAKER_00:
Wow. What a novel idea when the alternative is, you know, we could just throw marketing dollars at a new idea. We don't have to actually know whether it works before we put it out there into the world.
[05:20] SPEAKER_01:
No, it's a shame that it is so novel. You know, we base ideas on people's opinions. And so there seems to be a continuing press to go back to what is really evidence-based or research-based. And it was Bloom who really initiated those ideas, like I said, in the late 1960s and then continued through the early 1970s.
[05:37] SPEAKER_00:
It's been both interesting and hard to watch to see other areas of our profession. I won't name them, but to see some of the recent reporting on areas of very widespread practice that have now been, frankly, discredited because they were not built on much research to begin with. So that's a topic for another day. But it's good to know we have a solid foundation here. But let's talk by clarifying some terms. What is mastery learning?
[06:05]
Because, of course, anything that is successful and that is well-established in education gets translated into a thousand things that it is not. And probably our misconceptions about mastery learning greatly exceed our accurate conceptions. So just to start things off on the right footing, what is mastery learning? What does it actually mean?
[06:24] SPEAKER_01:
Well, you're absolutely right. Because of its popularity, the term mastery learning has been applied to many educational programs that have very little to do with the ideas and instructional strategies that Bloom outlined in his early work. Mastery learning was originally designed by Benjamin Bloom as a way to help teachers better personalize and individualize and differentiate instruction within a group-based classroom setting. At that same time, the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a lot of work being done on individualizing and personalizing instruction. But people were also coming to see some of the problems that those particular programs faced when we tried to implement them in group-based instructional settings. So Bloom looked at it as a way we could better individualize and differentiate instruction under the demanding conditions that teachers face.
[07:20]
And that is that it's one teacher in a classroom with 20, 25, or more students at a time, a fairly fixed curriculum that they were expected to teach over that period of time, and a limited amount of time in which to do it. So he came up with this idea of what he called mastery learning, which basically meant that teachers should teach as they normally would, and after they complete an instructional unit, typically about a week of instruction at the elementary level, or maybe two weeks at the secondary level, where natural breaks occur, to stop and really provide a an assessment that checks to see how well things are going, what students learned well those things, and what students are still having trouble, and what particular troubles they might be having, but then also to provide information for the teacher about how their instruction worked with the students. And Bloom called this information that we were gathering from the assessments feedback.
[08:12]
It was the first word to bring that to it, and then describe these sort of ongoing assessments as formative assessments. But Bloom also stressed that An assessment itself does nothing to improve instruction. What matters is what you do with that information you gather from the assessment. So he stressed that from this assessment, it needs to be paired with what he called feedback and correctives. The feedback was the information you gathered from the assessment, and the feedback came to the teacher about what worked and did not work with regard to instruction. The feedback to students said, here are the things you were expected to learn.
[08:48]
What have you learned really well? What do you need to learn better? And then Bloom recommended that teachers pair with that what he called correctives. But he stressed that the correctives need to be different from the original instruction. Too often we see this as reteaching, which basically translates to saying it slower and more loudly a second time and hoping for better results. Bloom says, no, these correctives need to be qualitatively different to original instruction.
[09:14]
You already have determined these things haven't worked for kids, so we need to approach the instruction differently. We need to engage students in learning differently. We need to present the material differently. And it had to be guided by the teacher. To simply put this responsibility on the students to do it on their own didn't work because they were unaccustomed to doing that. Bloom drew his ideas for the Mastery of Learning from two different resources.
[09:38]
The first was he looked at studies on individual tutoring because he tried to figure out what makes individual tutoring so very good And are there aspects of it that we could carry over to group-based instruction? And then the second thing he looked at was a group of studies on the activities of successful students when they are in group-based classrooms. And it was from those two sorts of research events that he got his ideas. And that's basically what the mastery learning does. I mean, it carries tutoring to a group-based level. I mean, when a teacher is tutoring a student and the student makes a mistake, the teacher doesn't go on.
[10:13]
The teacher stops. points the mistake out to the student, that's the feedback, tries to re-explain that idea or concept in a new or different way, that's a corrective, then asks another question to ensure the student got it before going on, that's a second formative. Similarly, very successful students, when there's an assessment given in class and it's returned, they always save it, they look at what they got wrong, they ask the tutor about those things, They look up the answers, they rewrite the problems, they don't make the same mistakes again. So what Bloom was trying to do was give us a way that we could carry over those highly beneficial aspects of tutoring to group-based instruction and then actually compel all students to do what the very best students have always done for themselves.
[10:57] SPEAKER_00:
It's so interesting to hear you describe Bloom's original research and his own thinking about how this works because I think anyone who has gone through teacher education in the last quarter of the 20th century or the first quarter of the 21st century has been exposed to these ideas indirectly because they're so baked into what we know about teaching and learning. It's difficult to disentangle them. But at the same time, it's also easy for some of the key details to get lost and for other priorities to kind of crowd out some of those fundamentals that are so well established in the research. What are some of the big misconceptions that you see cropping up these days about what mastery learning is, how it works, because certainly, you know, we're familiar with ideas that have been discredited by the research, but it's a little bit trickier when an idea is so widely supported that it gets imitated and then confused by the, you know, the thousand variations and innovations that people try to build on top of something that its core is very well established.
[12:04]
So where are we getting this wrong now that it's so deep in our profession?
[12:09] SPEAKER_01:
Well, again, you make a very important point. I recently, in preparation for a presentation that I was going to make, identified books that are available to educators today that have the word formative in the title, knowing that this actually was originally by Benjamin Bloom. And so I was able to look at all 43 of these books, and I just went to the references to see how many cited Benjamin Bloom. I mean, he kind of created the term. You would think that if it's in your book title, you should know where the term came from. Of those 43 books that had the word formative somewhere in the title, only five had cited Benjamin Bloom.
[12:48]
And so it's just astounding to me that so many people would take on this topic, express their opinions about it, give educators advice on it, but never take the time to understand where the ideas came from or even read the originals articles that describe what this was supposed to mean. So what you're saying is a very, very important point. And I think it's important for educators to understand that too. I find that one of the most basic misunderstandings about mastery learning, and Bloom talked about this in 1968, because there was another article published in that same year by an author, a researcher and scholar by the name of Fred Keller, where he talked about personalized systems of instructions. But the basic distinction was that Bloom was trying to describe a sort of group-based, teacher-based approach to instruction that he felt would be easy for teachers to use in the typical classroom setting.
[13:42]
Keller talked about an individually-based, student-based approach to instruction. Keller was fascinated by, at that time, this was again the later 1960s when computerized instruction was coming available. We were starting to use computers and Keller was under this idea that, in fact, the title of his article was Goodbye Teacher, because he felt that in some ways, computers and instructional programs that were based on computers could actually maybe replace teachers. And so Keller developed this model that was individually based and student-based, where students would go through a series of lessons. They would have to take assessments to demonstrate their mastery on those. They continued to take the same assessment over and over and over again until they finally determined, got mastery.
[14:29]
And then they would move on to the next unit. But as people tried to implement those programs in group-based settings, they started to fall apart. We found that students weren't good managers of their own learning pace. In fact, I have a wonderful cartoon that I have framed in my office that has two students talking, and it says, it's a good thing our school provides a lot of individualized instruction. At least I am falling behind at my own pace. And that's what we found, that it was accentuating the differences between students.
[14:56]
We found that it It didn't fit well with the curriculum demands that teachers faced. And it was very difficult for teachers to manage because the kids were basically learning on their own. So you might have 20 different lessons going on classroom at one time. And plus, it took away options that can be very beneficial for students to be learning together collaboratively. You know, discussing the same article that they're reading and the same piece of literature that they're reading and having classroom discussions like that. The teacher became just a monitor trying to guide kids through these individualized programs.
[15:27]
But still today, we find people writing about mastery learning, or sometimes it's called competency-based learning or something else like that, that describe these individually-based student-based programs under the title of mastery learning. So I think it's important to keep in mind that what Bloom was trying to give us, and he recognized that it was a compromise. Bloom said right from the start that the most ideal instructional conditions would be one-to-one tutoring, that if we could get it down to that, if we could you provide every student an excellent tutor who could work one-on-one with them the entire school day. In fact, he had two doctoral students that had done studies looking at this, where they were able to, through grants, get resources to provide 30 tutors to work with a classroom. And so every student had an individual tutor to work with them. He found that under those conditions, the average student in a group-based classroom would score like the 50th percentile.
[16:23]
In the tutorial-based classroom, they scored it like the 98th percentile. It was amazing. The problem was it cost you 30 times more to do that. We didn't have the resources to do it. So Bloom stepped back and said, how can we find a good way to provide similar conditions in group-based instructional settings where we have those limited resources, one teacher in charge of the group? And I still see that to be one of the major distinctions that people are confusing today.
[16:52] SPEAKER_00:
A couple of things, if I could follow up on there. One, it's been interesting to see the money being allocated to tutoring as a way of helping students who maybe fell behind during the pandemic or just were out of school and suffered academically for it. for a long period of time and to see the gains that can be made with, you know, a relatively, not untrained, but, you know, someone who's not necessarily a fully certified teacher, but, you know, has some training. And I'm going to have to check myself on this. Was it Robert Slavin who was talking about proven tutoring before he passed?
[17:26] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, Bob did write about that. The two dissertations that were done by doctoral students at Benjamin Bloom were by Joanne Ananias and Arthur Burke. And they had talked about reducing class size to one. And what would be possible under those conditions? And what would be the possible outcomes that we would see from that? It was from that, that Bloom got this idea that, you know, Bloom initially was suggesting this idea that all children can learn well.
[17:55]
All children can learn excellent what we set out to teach. Bloom's initial premise was that learning in any subject area is infinite. There's no limit to what you can learn in any academic discipline or any subject area, but a curriculum A curriculum is finite. And a curriculum specifies within an entire domain the things we really want students to learn and be able to do. As soon as we define that curriculum as educators, our responsibility becomes having all students learn that excellently. Not just some.
[18:24]
We define the curriculum as based upon what we believe all students should be able to learn well. And so Bloom set out to design a strategy whereby that could be accomplished. And so it was in that context that he said if we were going to do that, we could do it under tutoring. You know, we know that that's possible, but it's just so costly to do it. We'll never be able to allocate resources. So then stepping back from that, how could we get close to it?
[18:49]
Bloom talked about those results under tutoring being a two sigma effect. This was before we even really were enamored by the notion of effect size. Two sigmas, two standard deviations. That's an effect size of two. And Bloom showed these two doctoral students of his showed that under tutoring, you could achieve that. You know, the average students attaining a level of achievement, typically a gain by only the top two or 3% of kids in group-based instruction.
[19:17]
But then he talked about the challenge of meeting that within a group-based setting.
[19:21] SPEAKER_00:
And that's what your book is about, correct? How to actually do this with the staff that we have in a typical school setting, right?
[19:27] SPEAKER_01:
Exactly. And Bloom talked about with the mastery learning, We don't, even in master learning studies, get effect size close to two. I mean, that's even, you know, people have criticized my good friend John Hattie for this, you know, because some of the effect size, when he talks about things like, you know, collective efficacy and that's talking about effect size a bit greater than one from a group-based classroom setting, we never, never get that. And Matthew Kraft has actually criticized John for that because John hasn't been really careful in selecting good studies to come up with these effect sizes. But Bloom, when he talked about mastery learning, he said that mastery learning under ideal conditions can yield an effect size close to one. You know, even general studies have found that it gives effect size like 0.8, 0.87, so even close as one.
[20:15]
But two is possible. But to get to two requires that individual tutoring. And so his idea with the two sigma problem was, if we can get halfway there with mastery learning, how can we get the other half? And so we talked about parent support and engaging kids in instruction in better ways, highly thoughtfully developed curriculum and instructional materials to go along with it. And so just these were ways we could add in to mastery learning to make it even better still.
[20:42] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, so that importance of curriculum, of formative assessment, of working with the class in person, certainly, I don't want to take the spotlight away from that. I did want to ask, though, about some of the technology side, because certainly some of the early attempts at individualized instruction, as you mentioned, used computers. Today, we hear about schools using apps quite a bit, whether it's IXL or other platforms that give students explanations of how to solve a certain type of math problem, give them practice problems, give them additional practice if they need it. We are seeing quite a bit of adoption and I would guess quite a bit of success with using technology in that way. But I feel like there are still some concerns about the kind of dystopian nature of, you know, plugging every kid into a computer with some headphones and it's not really a class anymore at a certain point.
[21:39]
And like you said, in the cartoon that you have framed in your office that I, you know, I can fall behind at my own pace is the reality, perhaps for some students. So talk to us about like what's good, what's bad about that, that kind of individual students on individual devices versus a teacher teaching a class of students learning together.
[21:58] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think that the software development that's available in education is truly remarkable. And I think that there are sort of organizations that have really capitalized on that. The Khan Academy would probably be the best example where they have gone out of their way to prepare lessons that are engaging and even entertaining. in some way and provide these approaches in different ways. And even when Bloom was talking about this as these ideas were first being developed in the early 70s, the idea was stressed that it's never going to replace a classroom teacher. You know, Keller sort of had the idea that technology get to the point where teachers would basically just serve as monitors in a classroom.
[22:39]
They would be there to answer questions that maybe were a little bit confusing in the virtual presentation of the ideas. where Bloom said, no, the teachers are still going to be in charge of directing high quality initial instruction. But as an alternative to that, why not turn to what the technology can do? Why not start, even in my classes at the university, when I would give students options for correctives, I always used, I would give them, you know, website addresses that they could turn to for different presentations on the same concepts. And so it's the idea that It often is a different way of presenting the ideas. It uses different examples.
[23:18]
It engages students in different ways than the initial instruction was able to. And so in that way, it can be a very powerful corrective or instructional alternative. Even there are options available when it can serve as a form of the initial instruction. In the Mastery Learning, Implementing Mastery Learning book, I talk about one of the ways in which mastery learning is being implemented is through sort of that flipped classroom approach. where basically the kids would watch a presentation, then come in, the teacher would go over the presentation, answer kids' questions, address issues, not just be there to monitor, but to be there to facilitate and coordinate that and lead discussions about the ideas of students working collaboratively. And then after a series of those, provide the formative assessment to see if it's really coming together.
[24:03] SPEAKER_00:
It's interesting to think of the unintentional experiment that we had during the pandemic when remote learning was really the only option for a period of time. Thankfully, we had much of the software in place already. Students were used to using apps. In many cases, teachers were used to assigning things through these apps. But we certainly realized what we were missing by not being there in person and not having either that initial instruction in person or even if it's a flipped lesson and the initial content is taught through a video or a technology platform, that in-person relationship matters so much. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the information that teachers get from from formative assessment that, you know, you can call what an app has stored in it formative assessment.
[24:53]
What is happening in a teacher's head that we need to be aware of and that we need to value? Because certainly if I assign an app for my students to practice on, I don't really know what they're getting and what they're not. I don't have any insight into that as a teacher. So talk to us about the value of formative assessment for the teacher's decision-making and for their knowledge of students more broadly.
[25:16] SPEAKER_01:
And I had some personal experience with this too, when we hit that pandemic and we went to, you know, even at the university level, a virtual format for it. I was asked to teach a course using a, not only a virtual format, but to do it, you know, asynchronously. So that I basically had to record all my class presentations for it. And students could get on at any time. They could listen to the presentation and they could, you know, ask questions. I went through an entire semester in a graduate class with 24 graduate students, never having an individual conversation with one.
[25:50]
I found it dreadful. I found it. And again, I think I suffered terribly with it. I think my students suffered more because every teacher will tell you, and you know this too, that you get a sense when you're teaching about how things are coming, how things are coming across and what's going well and what's not. When students are scratching their heads or shaking their heads or that, you get a sense of that. When they're just listening to your presentation at some remote location, you don't get that sort of feedback.
[26:16]
And Bloom was very clear when he first even talked about these ideas, distinguishing between what he called formative assessment and what he called checking for understanding. And a lot of people in more modern writing have sort of lumped those together. But Bloom's idea was that as you're teaching, you're always getting feedback from your students. And you're doing this purposefully. You're asking questions, you're asking for hands up, hands down, turn and talk, you know, those kind of things that go on. But he differentiated that from the formative assessment process, which he considered to be a much more sort of formal device.
[26:48]
That teachers should constantly be gathering information from the students as they're going along. But then there are sort of natural breaks in instructional sequence. Textbooks would be structured in this way so that they would have chapters or units, you know, that they would work on. And as I said, when Bloom first described this, he felt that it was about a week maybe at the elementary level, up to maybe two weeks at the secondary level. Even at the college university level, I don't like to go much beyond two weeks, where you just want to stop and check to see if everybody's with you. And so that's when you would have this more formalized formative assessment.
[27:21]
But Bloom also stressed that a formative assessment doesn't always have to be a paper-pencil instrument. You know, it could be a composition. It could be a skill demonstration. It's any device at all by which a teacher gains evidence of learning in the students. And at that point, that's when you have this sort of assessment that has one cutoff, what's mastery and what's not. Now, Bloom recognized that no matter what he labeled mastery to be, and this is a constant question that comes up, what does it mean to really master a skill?
[27:50]
That no matter what he suggested, people are going to argue with him about it. But he was very, very clever and very, very bright. And so all he did was he turned it around and went back to teachers and he said, do you give grades? Teachers said, well, of course we give grades. He said, okay, are the grades really based on student learning? I mean, don't tell me you give like A's to the top 20%.
[28:10]
Are they really based on what the kids have learned? And he said, yes, they're based on what they've learned. Bloom said, great. Tell me what you took for an A. I don't have to tell you what math is. You have already defined it.
[28:21]
Our job is to get everybody up to that level. And so that's what Bloom said. On these formative assessments, there's only one cutoff. That's the mastery level. And it can be the A level or whatever you set that to be. And for those students that didn't reach it, then we go back, we provide the corrective activities to get them up to the level.
[28:37]
But he also recognized, and this is another mistake made in so many individualized programs, some kids, the initial instruction is going to be very appropriate for them. They will have learned well and demonstrate mastery. There's no reason for them to go through this corrective process But we also don't want them sitting around biding their time where everybody else catches up. For those students, we have to provide an exciting, challenging learning opportunity to give them a chance to extend their learning. And Bloom said that these should be related to the subject area, but they need not be tied to the content of that unit. He said it was far too restrictive, but this should be the opportunity where students have choice to really go into some subject in greater length, explore some topic that they find particularly interesting, And it should be exciting.
[29:21]
It should be challenging, but it should be something that's actually rewarding for students. They really want to get into that group. That enrichment can't be seen as just more harder problems. It has to be something that the kids really want to do. And that would serve as then a major incentive for them to do on the first assessment because then they get to take part in enrichment.
[29:39] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. Absolutely. And we should mention, you have quite a few books and articles on reporting and on grading and on how we think about how to count different assessments in grades and report cards. Is that right?
[29:52] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And this work began actually a long time ago because it was tied to the mastery of learning in some ways, but really came forward in 2016, the American Educational Research Association was celebrating its 100th year anniversary. And as a part of that celebration, they put a call out to the field to researchers and scholars to ask them if they would take on the challenge of trying to summarize the research in these different areas of education. So together with my friend Susan Brookhart, we put together an amazing team of people to really look at all of the research studies we could find on the topic of grading that had been conducted over the last 100 years. We're able to pull those sort of together in a book we called What We Know About Grading. I would say probably the most impressive thing we learned in summarizing that body of research is to discover how much we know, how long we've known it, and how little has found its way into practice today.
[30:50]
We were just convinced there's just another area in education where the gap between our knowledge base and our practice is greater than in the area of grading. And we, in our country, are even more handicapped than this because we are more bound by traditions in terms of grading practices than almost any other developed country in the world. We do things the way we do because we've always done it that way, not because we've always thought about it. And the problem we face is that today we're using computerized grading programs. And computerized grading programs are not based on our knowledge of what works well. They're based on what has always been done.
[31:29]
They try to replicate the practices that schools are already using and try to make them a bit more efficient for teachers to implement. So we're just, they're replicating these practices that we know haven't worked for a long time. We've just translated now to do it in a technologically feasible way that makes it a little bit easier for teachers to implement inappropriate practices.
[31:51] SPEAKER_00:
I wonder if I could ask, I know we're not going exactly through the book and certainly hope people will do that themselves to get a systematic treatment. But I wanted to ask about the idea of some things that are known to work. extremely well being somewhat distasteful. And a recent example would be explicit phonics instruction. I mean, there's an extent to which educators find, you know, the drill and kill of explicit phonics instruction to just be distasteful and came up with lots of alternatives to it while ignoring the fact that explicit phonics instruction is incredibly important for many students. What are you seeing in terms of pushback on some of the tenets of mastery learning that maybe people feel is just icky or distasteful in some way, but really, really is good for students?
[32:43] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think that's such an excellent point, Justin. We've always gone through this idea in education that we're looking for best practices. And I wrote a piece a couple of years ago as a blog for Education Week, suggesting we give up the search for best practices. because there's really no such thing. We find that context really makes a difference. And we've got so much evidence of this.
[33:06]
When we started looking at programs that were based on this idea of teacher competencies and the things that teachers could do, and could we identify the things that lead to successful instruction for all students? We looked at it in terms of these value-added models for accountability, teachers who were getting remarkable results in terms of the increase in student scores over the course of a year. But what we found is if You took teachers who were getting excellent results working in an inner-city school with major populations of children of color and minority students, and yet they were getting great results in that environment. And took those teachers out of that environment and put them in a rural community and rural mountains of some state and had them do the same thing, they failed miserably.
[33:58]
But if you took those teachers who did a great job of helping those kids in those rural communities and looked at what they did and put them in inner city environment doing the same thing, they failed miserably too. But the sad part was that it broke down this notion of one set working for everybody. But what the positive aspect was, it said, regardless of the context, there are people who have found ways to be really successful there. And so it seems that we need to get away from this notion that one track works for everybody but that people have found ways to be successful within that context. The same with the reading wars. I mean, you're working with a group of kids, and they're reading orally, and a kid comes to a word that doesn't understand.
[34:39]
For some kids, for the teacher to say, sound it out, makes great sense, and it really, really works well. For other kids to say, read on and tell me what you think the word might be, makes good sense too. The problem is that a teacher can't use the same thing for every kid every time. that it makes a difference for the individual, makes a difference in the context, makes a difference what culture they're coming from. You know, we learned this lesson when Jaime Escalante did so well with having these kids in East Los Angeles learn calculus, but then tried to implement the same things in a school district outside of Sacramento, it fell apart. The same strategies.
[35:18]
But we know that really good teachers have a keen sense of that. And they find ways to work well in that context with those students understanding their background and what they bring to the learning experience. So we know that students learn in different ways. We also need to learn that kids learn things in different order. This is what has hampered our efforts to use the technology because it typically organizes instruction in a single sequence for all learners. And we now understand that kids learn things in different ways, but they also learn things in different order.
[35:50]
Some kids need mastery-based skills before they can apply those skills in problem-solving situations. For other kids, the basic skills don't make sense until they become engaged in problem-solving activities where they have to use those basic skills. And so teachers have to have this flexibility, agility, some are calling it, in terms of applying this in classrooms because you have those differences among the learners that are there. So I think that our challenge as teacher educators is to provide teachers with this sort of broad array of techniques and strategies they can use Even with regard to reading instruction. And so, yeah, phonics doesn't work for everybody, but it does work really well for some kids. And whole language doesn't work for everybody, but it does work well for some others.
[36:35]
And teachers have to know both. And so that they can provide that difference in strategy and approach to make sure that you custom tailor it to the needs and learning orientations of particular students that you have.
[36:47] SPEAKER_00:
And I'll again refer people to your book, Implementing Mastery Learning, for a lot of the details. But just by way of a final question, I wanted to ask your thoughts on training teachers and on teacher education and helping people not only learn the fundamentals of the research in our field, but figure out how to put them into practice. I see a shallowness of some of our attempts to imitate teachers. You know, as you said, if you take something that's working well in one setting and just transport it to a different setting, often it doesn't work well. And I feel that in many cases we see rather shallow attempts to copy because, you know, if it worked there, hopefully we can implement that with fidelity here is the way we think about it. Do you see that perhaps lack of application resulting in the failures of those attempts to copy?
[37:43]
Help me think about that and what that means for teacher training and teacher education.
[37:49] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. Again, that's such an excellent point and something with which we're struggling in all universities and colleges to prepare teachers for that. We're at a position today in education whereby when new teachers are hired, they typically are assigned the most challenging classes in the entire school. Because once teachers get experience in their school, the first thing they do is take on easier to teach classes. And so the kids that are most challenging are assigned to teachers with the least experience. And that means we need to really do a great job as we prepare teachers to go into that kind of environment, to understand what it's like, and really take advantage of what they can do to have students in that environment work well.
[38:28]
I've written a lot about giving teachers opportunities to be in those environments and seeing the importance of success. We find that regardless of the kinds of backgrounds or experiences kids bring to school, the most powerful motivational advice we have is success. You have to have kids be successful in learning things you set out to teach. And you've got to get it early. You have to find ways to achieve that success early, usually in the first two weeks of school. Because kids come back to school and a lot of their attitudes and perceptions are up in the air.
[38:57]
And they have this idea that maybe this year will be different from all the other years in the past. And they go through that first unit until the first assessment occurs. The first assessment is graded. Grades put a kid in categories. Getting out of the categories is real tough. And so if a kid gets a C in the first math quiz and says, well, it looks like there's going to be a C this year in math.
[39:17]
But if they get an A in the first one, on something challenging, they say, whoa, maybe I can get an A in math this year. And to be able to see themselves as a success, You know, it's not that we don't teach kids to develop a sense of efficacy and self-regulation by changing their attitude about it. You know, you don't try to convince a kid that they can be a successful learner. You show them they can succeed in learning, and then they'll believe that they can. And so our challenge is to help teachers develop that sense where they can give kids the experience of success early on, regardless of what they bring, and then be able to use that to carry forward the work that they're doing.
[39:55] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is Implementing Mastery Learning, now in its third edition. Dr. Tom Guske, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. Thank you, Justin.
[40:04] Announcer:
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