Transforming Failure into Success

Every now and then I perform a Google news search for "mastery learning" to see what pops up. A few days ago, a story from a newspaper in northern Kentucky caught my eye. In Public demands answers from RCS board at the Ledger Independent, the author describes a county school board meeting. At one point, the county staff member in charge of assessment proposed using mastery learning, but parents in attendance weren't especially receptive.

In other business, the board attempted to listen as Garrick Ratliff tried to explain how a Mastery Learning Policy for RCS could benefit every student and leave none without instructional attention.

The program was used at Eminence Independent School when it was in a similar financial and educational crisis, with extremely positive results at preparing students for college, or careers, he said.

Commentary from audience members interrupted his presentation, including negative comments from a parent who claimed it never helped her child, in a trial class, and another parent who challenged Ratliff on the value of the program.

Another parent suggested poorly performing students should be allowed to fail, as a learning tool, a contradiction to the MSP plan to encourage every student to achieve passing grades, while challenging students who are learning faster to be more proficient in advanced learning activities. [emphasis added]

Eminence Independent School District's high school recently established a program called Framework of Innovation for Reinventing Education (FIRE). The "foundation" of the program is mastery learning, and each week students take core classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and participate in remediation/enrichment activities on Tuesday and Thursday. For more information, see the description in Eminence on "FIRE" after changes at the Kentucky Teacher.

The FIRE program sounds promising, but I have not read any details about its implementation. Also, achievement data for the 2012-2013 school year is not yet available at the Kentucky School Report Card site. So I will ignore the first two negative comments from parents and focus on the third comment about failure as a "learning tool." (This topic relates to my July 7 post.)

As John Dewey explains in Democracy and Education, all experiences are "educative," technically. They result in learning. But not all experiences are constructive, too. They don't necessarily increase the likelihood of future learning and growth.

If failure, like any experience, is always educative, under what conditions is it constructive, too? Based on my studies, I'd like to propose two conditions:

1. Students must receive good feedback and opportunities to improve. Good feedback tells students what they did right, what they did wrong, and how they can improve. 
2. Students must perceive failure as a temporary condition resulting from misunderstanding and/or lack of effort.

Traditional teaching fails on both counts. Traditional teachers may provide good feedback, but what good is that feedback if students don't receive opportunities to make use of it? Students are unlikely to invest time and effort to remediate themselves if their grades are already set in stone. Worst of all, traditional teaching often causes students to perceive failure as a permanent condition resulting from their inability. After repeated failure, many students begin to think, "I'm going to fail, so why even bother to try?" This mindset is called learned helplessness.

Mastery learning is designed to ensure that failure is constructive, not destructive. Mastery teachers provide opportunities for students to improve. Through the process of remediation, mastery students learn something in addition to the explicit learning objectives of the lesson. They also learn how to transform failure into success. With the assistance of the teacher and their classmates, students examine, understand, and correct their mistakes. Slowly but surely, they become self-regulated learners.

What is the main message about failure that teachers should be trying to send? Failure has consequences, or failure can be transformed into success. I think the answer — and the superior teaching method — is obvious.

Mastery Learning in the Press and Elsewhere

I'm a big fan of mastery learning (Bloom's Mastery Learning, in particular), so you'd think that I'd be happy to see it mentioned in the press and elsewhere. But I have mixed feelings. When people write about mastery learning, it increases public awareness about the practice. Raising awareness is a good thing, provided that the information is accurate and the overall representation is fair.

At the Coursera blog, there is an article titled 5 Tips: Learn more effectively in class with Mastery Learning. In the case of this article, the above criteria are met, more or less, and the author is presenting mastery learning in a positive light. But I do have a nit to pick.

In my opinion, the author's description of mastery learning is too narrow. She says, "In mastery learning classrooms, students must fully understand (demonstrate mastery of) the material before moving on to the next topic." Is this statement accurate? It depends on the mastery learning model. It is true for Keller's Personalized System of Instruction, but false for Bloom's Mastery Learning. And the only researcher mentioned in the article is Benjamin Bloom.

So if the Coursera article is pretty good, why post to nitpick? Think of this post as a prelude to the bad articles that I will be bringing to your attention. Most articles contain misinformation, and that's unfortunate, but understandable. (Everyone makes mistakes, me included.) But somewhere, you have to draw a line in the sand.

Making Learning Whole

If you're only going to read one book on education this year, read Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education by David Perkins, professor of education at Harvard. The introduction alone is worth the cost of the book. In just 23 pages, Perkins expertly diagnoses America's education problems and provides a prescription, a coherent set of instructional principles. In the chapters that follow the introduction, Perkins explores the principles in greater depth, with illustrations and evidence.

The Ailments: Elementitis and Aboutitis

Perkins summarizes America's education problems by coining two terms: elementitis and aboutitis.

Elementitis is the tendency to break a whole skill into components taught in isolation. If there were more to the story--if students were required to bring everything together and practice the whole skill in a "real world" context--then this practice wouldn't be a problem. In fact, Richard Mayer has found evidence that pre-training (i.e. teaching the components of a complex process before teaching the process itself) is highly effective. But American students are condemned to perpetually pre-train. They are like athletes who perform drills, but never scrimmage, let alone play in a real game. So it is no surprise that they wonder (often aloud), "What's the point of all this?"

Aboutitis is the tendency to teach about something, but never provide a chance for students to actually do it. The classic example is science instruction. Science is a process of inquiry and experimentation. Science is also the knowledge produced by scientists engaged in this process and ongoing communications with their peers. Unfortunately, in American classrooms, the process that begat the knowledge is neglected. American students study theories and memorize long lists of facts and jargon, but they rarely hypothesize, experiment, and discuss ideas and results. In short, they don't do science.

The Prescription: Seven Principles for Making Learning Whole

Perkins believes (and I happen to agree) that the remedy for these problems is student participation in "junior versions" of authentic human projects. Junior projects provide a simplified, yet realistic context in which students practice whole skills as they pursue meaningful goals. In short, junior projects involve learning by doing. For example, students may learn about nutrition, plant/animal physiology, and agriculture by gardening and preparing a meal--all the while maintaining a journal with their plans, observations, questions, research notes, experiments, etc.

Perkins offers seven instructional principles, and he uses the analogy of sports to increase their memorableness and highlight their connections. Below, I've listed the principles and noted related educational concepts in parentheses.

1. Play the whole game. (Project/problem/case-based learning)
2. Make the game worth playing. (Intrinsic motivation)
3. Work on the hard parts. (Modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and practice)
4. Play out of town. (Situated learning and transfer)
5. Uncover the hidden game. (Hidden curriculum and "soft skills")
6. Learn from the team...and the other teams. (Cooperative learning)
7. Learn the game of learning. (Metacognition and self-regulated learning)

Most teachers are not accustomed to this style of instruction, and Perkins recommends testing the waters by wading into "teaching by wholes" rather than jumping in head first. Teachers should add a few projects to their course rather than completely overhaul it. And teachers should focus on the first few principles rather than attempt to incorporate them all into a project. (The principles are arranged in order of importance.) Once teachers are comfortable with this new style of teaching, they may expand the projects and incorporate additional principles.

Rebutting Criticisms of Mastery Learning

Buffy: Uh-oh, you have "but face."
(Giles looks confused.)
Buffy: You like like you're gonna say "but."
Giles: But...this Initiative, I'm a little concerned.

Like the librarian Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, many people are reluctant to try new approaches to dealing with problems. In spite of its effectiveness and common sense appeal, mastery learning is rarely adopted by teachers, schools, or school systems. Why? Most people either lack information about it or possess misinformation about it. And some people are ideologically opposed to it.

In this post, I'm going to rebut three common claims about mastery learning.

Claim 1: Mastery learning takes too much time.

Mastery learning requires less time than people imagine. Researchers have found that on average mastery students spend just 2-3 minutes more per hour on their work*. How do mastery teachers accomplish this feat? They have two major strategies.

First, mastery teachers "front-load" in-class mastery teaching. At the beginning of the school year, they provide many in-class remediation/enrichment sessions. Then once students get the hang of the process and appreciate its value, these teachers begin to assign some remediation/enrichment for homework.

Second, mastery teachers prioritize some objectives over others. They know that it is better for students to deeply learn several important things than to superficially learn numerous things (that they just forget because they merely memorized the information). In fact, the most important multimedia learning principle that you will not find on my site is the coherency principle, which states that teachers should present essential information in an organized way and exclude non-essential information. In short, it says, "Oftentimes less is more."

*Kulik, C.C., Kulik, J.A., & Bangert-Drowns, R.L. (1990). Effectiveness of mastery learning programs: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 60(2), 265-299.

Claim 2: Mastery learning slights high-achieving students.

Mastery models explicitly target BOTH low-achieving students and high-achieving students. With Learning for Mastery, high-achieving students complete enrichment projects. And with the Personalized System of Instruction, high-achieving students work at their own pace.

In contrast, traditional models do NOT target high-achieving students. They offer uniform instruction. So what's really going on here? Many people who make this claim are not proponents of traditional models per se. They are proponents of tracking, and they recognize that the effectiveness of mastery learning undermines the case for the controversial, but widespread practice.

Tracking involves segregating students based on achievement. Proponents of tracking believe that 1) achievement is mainly a function of ability and 2) ability is more or less fixed. Mastery learning defies these beliefs by reducing variation in achievement with a fairly small investment of time and effort on the parts of teachers and students. Moreover, the size and make-up of the remediation group vary from unit to unit, so it is neither fair nor accurate to permanently assign "low-achiever" status to certain students. These facts, among others, make tracking difficult to justify. Mastery learning is a viable, preferable alternative.

To be clear, I am not saying that students should be required to take the same courses from kindergarten through high school. Students, especially older ones, should be able to pursue their interests, which inevitably differ. But "different paths" should not be a euphemism for higher/lower paths.

Claim 3: Mastery learning doesn't prepare students for the "real world."

Every time I read a news story about mastery learning, I browse the comments section. Invariably, commenters assert, "In the real world, you don't get second chances."

Wrong. People DO get second chances. If a plumber fails to fix a leak, he returns to the house to seal the deal. If a doctor incorrectly diagnoses a patient's illness and prescribes an unsuccessful treatment, she performs additional tests and prescribes a new treatment. And so on.

Even if it were true that adults don't get second chances in the workplace, would that be a compelling reason to prohibit children from being able to redo/revise assignments in school? No! Schools should endeavor to provide an environment in which students can experiment, take risks, and occasionally fail. Failure leads to success when students are afforded the opportunity to analyze, reflect, and improve.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

John Dewey, Experience and Education

Welcome to the RealEducationReform.com blog!

I recently re-launched Real Education Reform as a jQuery Mobile site. It should now work well on mobile devices such as smart phones.

I'm re-publishing my original blog Welcome message. In the future, I am going to try to post at least once per week.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.

John Dewey, The School and Society

Welcome to the RealRealEducationReform.com blog!

This blog will differ from the RealEducationReform.com Web site, which focuses on research on curriculum and instruction. Here, I plan to post about books, news, research, policy, and anything else relating to education reform.

You wouldn't know it from listening to the news, but today the average American student performs better than ever before on standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Yet large disparities in achievement exist. Generally speaking, students from high-income families perform well, and students from low-income families perform poorly. Over time, the so-called "achievement gap" has fluctuated, but the gap itself persists.

What are the causes of this gap? And what should we do to close the gap (i.e. increase the achievement of low-income students)? People's diagnoses and prescriptions differ. Oftentimes, one's personal philosophies and worldview influence the way one approaches the problem. The result is an ongoing battle over education reform.

On the bright side, nearly everyone agrees on one thing. Education reform is needed. As I've written on the RealEducationReform.com Web site, "Public education is a vital institution in the United States, and it must be improved in order to promote, protect, and ensure the well-being of individual citizens and the society as a whole."

John Dewey's words, written more than a century ago, represent many things. A goal. A challenge. A moral imperative. A warning.

Isn't it about time for meaningful change? Isn't it about time for effective action?