Mastering Mediocrity

That Question. It is the question that students ask a jazillion different ways.

How many pages does this paper have to be?

When is this going to be due, and do I have to hand it in during class, or can I have till the end of the day?

That's a lot of mastery.

Tomorrow's test-- how many questions can we miss and still pass?

How many sources do I have to cite?

How much is this homework going to be worth? Enough to hurt my grade?

How many examples do I have to include?

Do I have to show my work?

All of these questions (and the rest of the jazillion) are really just ways to ask one simple question:

What's the absolute least I can get away with doing for this assignment?

Students ask about the absolute least all the time. This does not make them lazy or terrible human beings. They're trying to manage their time and effort, often in a class that they're required to take and don't care much about (which, again, does not make them awful human beings-- all adults have the widely recognized right not to care about some things).

It's not really a good look on anybody. As I used to explain to my students when I was calling them out on this, "If you're new romantic partner asks 'What's absolute least amount of time I have to spend with you to keep this going," you will not be thinking to yourself "This one's a keeper." And you don't want to ask your employer, "What's the absolute least amount of work I have to do to keep this job."

Of course, there will always be students who shoot for amazing all the time, who always go above and beyond any requirement you give them. But for many, the moment you hand them a specific minimum is the moment they start thinking in terms of how little they need to do and not how much they could do.

For that reason, teachers often learn to be purposefully vague in the classroom. My answer to That Question was never terribly specific. Unlike some teachers of (bad) writing, I never gave a required paper length and never, ever told them that a paragraph must include X number of sentences. "Long enough to do a good job of making your point" was about the best they could get from me, or maybe, "Impress me. Amaze me." When you're proofreading your own work, there's a big difference between asking "Did I include the bare minimum?" and "Is this amazing?" Every English teacher has read at least one potentially good essay that basically stopped in the middle because the student believed she had written enough to satisfy the bare minimum requirements.

This has always been the problem with Learning for Mastery, an old ed concept enjoying a current comeback via Personalized [sic] Learning and Competency Based Education.

It makes a certain amount of sense-- you teach students an area of skill or knowledge, and once they can prove they've mastered it, you move on. But there are problems.

Mastery Learning asks us to create a performance task that will demonstrate mastery. That's our first problem, because if we define "mastery" too rigorously, may students will have great difficulty meeting the standard. Define "mastery" at a lower, more accessible level, and higher functioning students will become bored. If we're teaching basketball skills, does mastery look like LeBron James, or "student can dribble length of court without falling down." And there's a whole other problem with reducing complex constellations of skills to a list of performance tasks. Exactly how do we define mastery of, say, essay writing? But the list problem is one we'll save for another day.

Because another big problem is that in defining mastery, we are giving students an answer to That Question. And while we may see all of this as a culminating performance task that shows mastery of particular skills, what the student sees is an assignment or test and an answer to That Question. They will know exactly what they have to do to be marked as masters, and many will not do an iota more. This is double true in mastery systems where the assignment-- I'm sorry, the mastery performance task-- is just pass-fail and the students are grade-oriented. Why be amazing if you just get the same passing grade as a bare minimum project.

Mastery Learning makes it more difficult to push a student to work at the top of their game. Instead of a system in which teachers can use their full bag of tricks to raise or lower the bar for individual students, they're stuck with a system where the bar is welded in place, probably somewhere around the mediocre middle.

There are ways to make a mastery system better, starting by jettisoning the word "mastery" which suggests, incorrectly, that such a system will demand excellence of every student in all subjects, which is as realistic as No Child Left Behind's requirement for 100% above average test scores by 2014. Though I'm no fan of CBE, "competence" is a better term. Nobody takes a drivers test to show that they are master's of driving; the state just wants to know if you meet the basic competence level. To further tweak the competence system, we could institute an assessment system that showed just how competent the individual student was, and to get past the checklist flaw, we could give a wide variety of performance tasks that overlapped in the competencies that they assessed, with the ultimate effect that we get a more holistic look while assessing each competency multiple times instead of just once. Periodically we could combine all the competence level marks from each performance task into a combined competency ranking, and we could issue a report, maybe on something simple like a card, every so often, listing the precise gradations of that student's competencies and the grades on that report card would indicate whether the student is competent to proceed to the next level of.... oh. Never mind.

Mastery [sic] Learning is innately prone to promote mediocrity. Both in how it reduces complex learning to a list of simplified performance tasks, and also in how it answers That Question. What's the absolute least you can get away with doing in a class? Mastery [sic] Learning systems will always tell you, and that's not a good thing.