Day 27: Mastery

Our learning journey now takes us into the execution phase where the emphasis is on mastery, applying skills to higher level concepts, new contexts, and producing new and original works. In this lesson, you will learn what mastery is, what a master looks like and is capable, and how to master anything.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific References

Summary

What is Mastery?

Our learning journey now takes us into the execution phase where the emphasis is on mastery, applying skills to higher level concepts, new contexts, and producing new and original works.

• In the classical Trivium, this was known as rhetoric, which provides how knowledge and understanding of a subject are applied.

Mastering a skill or knowledge concept means fully understanding that knowledge or skill before moving on to the next concept.

• Mastery learning was first proposed in 1968 by Benjamin Bloom.
• In one study [1], he compared students in a conventional classroom to a mastery learning classroom.
• He found that the average student in a mastery learning classroom was above 84% of students in the conventional classroom.
• Even more significant, students with one-to-one tutoring with mastery learning, we're above 98% of students in the conventional class.

In mastery learning, different students can spend as long as they need to master each topic.

• This means that every student of the class gets up to a high standard in every topic. No one is left behind regardless of the speed at which they master each.
• There's a shift of responsibilities so that the student's failure is more due to the instruction and not necessarily a lack of ability on their part.
• In a mastery learning environment, the challenge becomes providing enough time and employing instructional strategies so all students can achieve the same level of mastery.

During mastery learning, we are moving up Bloom's hierarchy of learning known as Bloom's Taxonomy [2] to reach mastery.

• At the base of this hierarchy is the ability to recall something from memory at a basic level.
• At the utmost level is the ability to create. It's one thing to understand the thinking of another and criticize or evaluate them. It's an entirely different thing to create your own original thoughts.

What does Mastery Look Like?

Recall that in learning we are trying to move the knowledge we acquire in our short memory and store it to our long term memory:

• Short-term memory (Working Memory): Where three to four groups of information are consciously attended to and only retained for about half a minute at most.
• Long-term memory: Contains everything that we've learned up to this point in our lives, all the facts, words, concepts, images, procedures, ect.

We then created mental links, or associated concepts, and spent time practicing recall or skill procedures in order to really solidify what we had learned into memory.

This is where all that hard work pays off because we have created sufficient cues for remembering knowledge and can easily access it when we need to apply it.

Specifically we have converted declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge:

• Declarative knowledge: Building knowledge in facts, concepts, words, or images which require intently focusing while studying.
• Procedural knowledge: Building skills that have procedures or sets of steps that you're going to do over and over again in order make the procedure automatic.

The process of becoming an expert of a domain, or a master, requires converting a lot of declarative knowledge into automatic, unconscious procedural knowledge.

• You're gaining the ability to use intuition and to think fast.

The true master is not only able to apply their knowledge in the context in which they learned it, but can apply it in entirely novel situations which is known as transfer.

How to Master Anything

Our basic learning process is:

1. Engage in active and focused learning session: focused intently on your learning material & using active learning techniques and practices to engage with that material.
2. Alternate from the focused mode to the diffuse mode: take some time away from the learning material and resting before returning to work with it.
3. Engage in practice: use active learning techniques to strengthen neural connections of previously learned material, moving it from short-term memory to long-term memory.
4. Create Associations: Practice the foundational material first and start building associations with new material as continue learning, creating a larger neural network in your brain.
5. Master and apply the skill: continue practicing the skill until you are able to retrieve information easily and apply the skill to solving problems and reaching goals in real life.

The techniques in the rest of the execute section will help to accelerate what you've learned, transforming declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge.

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Activity

Practice active recall by recalling the key concepts from this lesson on mastery.

The reason we're practicing active recall again as because it's the most foundational technique and can be used at anytime. So we really want to master this one.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.