MASTERY LEARNING IS OUTCOME BASED

Mastery Learning is a key to Family Positive Living

Education is not about a teacher talking and students sitting listening all the time. It is not about students struggling to complete difficult exercises. It is about success in completion.

Students need to recall and consolidate success by completing more exercises in weeks or months to come. They can complete new exercises or revise old exercises.

This means that the teacher has to prepare extended sequences of problem exercises, arranged in simple to complex order. Better still in simple to simple to simple to slightly complex to more complex to complex order.

Success in one problem nomatter how small provides the clue to success in the next problem. If students find difficulty in one problem, the fault lies with the program. There has been too great a quantum jump from the previous problem exercise.

The teacher has either to remove the exercise or replace with 3 smaller exercises. If students succeed now, the sequence starts to run like a well tuned engine.

Sadly, many teachers in Australia, New Guinea and everywhere else are quite incompetent in Mastery Learning design. They are interested in theory. They can not conceptualize large bodies of knowledge and identify the skills involved.

There are teachers in Papua New Guinea who are the Nazis of the teaching profession. They would oppose Mastery Learning as they believe that learning has to be made difficult to sort out the stronger students from the weaker students.

They believe that they explain once only. If the students do not understand, it was because they were not listening. They can fail. Such teachers do not understand that Education is a right of all students not just the clever ones.

Incompetent teachers can not visualize sequences of skills nor practical scenarios nor arrange these in order. It is a special skill to prepare Mastery Learning sequences. No wonder Outcome Based Education and Mastery Learning have failed over the world.

I promoted Mastery Learning as a teacher. My sequences of exercises were like well tuned engines as the sequences were rearranged or modified. This learning was not just for the brilliant students.

They would complete the work quickly and require more. Exercises were for mastery by average students who completed the work and gained courage in learning. To hell with Nazi teachers.

I taught Tok Pisin at the RAAF School of Languages 1978-1992. That gave ample time to perfect Mastery Learning language exercises. Each exercise grew out of the pattern in the previous exercise.

I go.
I go to town.
I go into the house.
I go up the mountain.
He goes.
He goes as far as Lae.
He walks.
He walks with me.
They walk.
They walk on and on.
Who walks?
Who walks to town?
Who walks up the mountain?
Who walks as far as Lae?
Who walks with my child?
I will go.
I will go with him.
Will you come?
Will you come with the woman?
Will you come with her?

and so on for 1200 sentences completed over 4 weeks.

If you check the exercises on this blog, you will find that all are an extended series of exercises based on Mastery Learning. In PNG high schools, I gave students 300 exercises in Sweet English over 12 months.

FAMILY POSITIVE LIVING - AIDS HOLISTICS: WRITE SWEET ENGLISH

29 Jun 2011 ... WRITE SWEET ENGLISH ..... and stop the baby talk. In Papua

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The first program in Mastery Learning was designed for the PNGDF in 1978. It was a program in solving problems that might face young PNGDF officers in the work situation.

Faulty accounting for stores increases theft by soldiers. Faulty identification of a visitor may bring a trouble maker into the camp. Faulty checking of soldiers will allow some to be absent without leave ....and so on.

There was an extended sequence of 126 problems that gave officer cadets the opportunity to master a series of decision making skills in checking, double-checking, fault finding, drawing conclusions and planning.

Mastery Learning is important in training foreign students for whom English is a second language. Focus has to be on the practice not the theory.

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