STANDARDS IN MASTERY LEARNING

Dear friends in the PNG Department of Education,

Mastery Learning is the ultimate teaching process when it comes to teaching students to master skills. But there must be a constant standard within subjects from elementary school to grade 12.

There must be a progression of skills. A total strategy in Mastery Learning needs to move like a symphony of classical music. In the first movement, the violins come in. In the second movement we introduce the woodwind instruments.

In grade 4,  the study of ecology starts. The study of heat begins in grade 5. All the way through is a focus on simple sentences. Complex sentences begin in grade 6 with a focus on clauses and phrases.

We teach basic story telling from grade 5 and move into essays by grade 7. There has to be an overall plan before we start to design Mastery Learning.

There must be constancy within each subject and across subjects. For that reason, there needs to be a design team with a constant understanding of progression of exercises.

If we do not do this, there will be schools whose teachers have gone right off the tracks in their Mastery Learning.

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TEAM OF MASTERY LEARNING DESIGNERS

We must take care in the advisors we select. There will be no value in employing advisors from Australia with Doctorates of Philosophy, limited knowledge of curriculum and no understanding of the ways in which curriculum needs to be aligned to the PNG culture.

We do not need advisors who are too young to know the basics in literacy. They should not be refugees from classrooms but be experts in the total range of inductive and deductive reasoning skills for the subjects on which they are working.

Mastery exercises should be pitched at the age of students. For village children there should be exploration of science that may be experienced in a rural village.

They may study tectonics, volcanoes, earthquakes, rainfall, global warming, underground water, plants, tropical vegetation, shifting agriculture, uplift, ring of fire, erosion, latasolic soils, mangroves, ecology and much more.

The work should be practical and within the reach of students.

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MASTERY LEARNING IN SCIENCE


MASTERY LEARNING ON BODY HEAT


My grade 6 daughter brought a sequence of 20 exercises in algebra home from school. She was having difficulty. I did not blame her as the sequence was very poorly designed.

The teacher had no progression in difficulty. Mastery of one exercise did not lead to the next exercise. There were exercises out of sequence. Suddenly a completely foreign exercise would be dropped in that bore no relationship to those before and after.

A Mastery Learning sequence in algebra has to follow a strict sequence:

a + a = 2a

a + a + a = 3a

a + a + a + a = 4a

a + b + a + b = 2a + 2b

a + b + c + a + b + c = 2a + 2b + 2c

3a x 4b = 12ab

2a -a = a

2b - b = b

3c - 2c = c

Which is the odd one out?