Mastery learning creates opportunity to address the learning needs of children in a holistic manner that focuses on foundational skills, social-emotional learning, digital literacy, and other life skills at the same time.
The approach blends the best of technology, teacher, and tabletop (family engagement) to create a supportive ecosystem designed to help children master what they learn.
Technology
Rapid technology acceleration during the fourth industrial revolution has gifted us with powerful adaptive mastery learning solutions. Innovations that finally allow us to have Vygotsky’s cake and eat Bloom’s challenge too.
We can now introduce these solutions into conventional classrooms as highly impactful “teacher helpers” to unlock a first mastery learning opportunity.
Adaptive mastery learning solutions can create Vygotsky’s optimized learning conditions in digital space. When children play in a gamified environment online, they encounter more knowledgeable others, skillful tutors, and scaffolding that ushers them into learning flow.
They can therefore work on skills just beyond their ability to master, engaging in deep practice and productive struggle to grasp knowledge and command skills in their own time and at their own pace.
Teacher
Adaptive mastery learning solutions are like a Trojan horse.
When they are brought into a classroom, they have a positively disruptive effect. They fundamentally transform the learning environment. Suddenly, children are productively engaged in their zone sixty minutes per week.
That is sixty minutes per week of space, time, and opportunity that a classroom teacher can have back. Sixty minutes during which that teacher can transform themselves from knowledge broker to skillful tutor.
The teacher, as skillful tutor, can strategically pull learners aside, one at a time, to help them find their Zone of Proximal Development. The teacher can cultivate the expertise to combine real-time data and recommended activities from the mastery solution with formative data from their own engagement with each child to increase the personalization of offline learning within the classroom.
This one-to-one teacher-led tutoring experience can thus unlock a second mastery learning opportunity for each child as they continue to master what they need to learn, in their own time and at their own pace.
Tabletop (family)
Over time, teachers will grow in their confidence as one-on-one tutors. They will develop deeper knowledge of their students and greater insight into how to help each child succeed. This can improve teacher family engagement and create opportunity to unlock a third mastery learning opportunity.
Adaptive mastery learning solutions can be used by children both at school and at home. When used at home, opportunity is created for family members to become more proactively involved in their children’s education. In addition to online learning activities, these solutions can provide recommended activities for family time that align with what are learning in school.
Households can therefore begin to transform routine family tabletop experiences into rich learning activities that help reinforce each child’s progress as they strive to master what they learn.
Personalized Mastery Learning Ecosystem™ (PMLE™).
By unlocking these three mastery learning opportunities (technology, teacher, and tabletop) the Age of Learning Foundation’s approach to mastery learning can help improve learning for children in conventional classrooms,like Vygotsky and Bloom may have envisaged.
The combined effect of these three opportunities creates Personalized Mastery Learning Ecosystem™ (PMLE™) around each child. It is a conceptual framework that captures the opportunity that teachers have to put children at the center of supportive learning environments as they strive to achieve mastery, through the blending of applied learning science, with adaptive, personalized technology.
To learn more about the PMLE™, please visit the Age of Learning Inc. website, the creators of the mastery learning solutions that the Age of Learning Foundation makes available in partner countries.
This is the exciting work of the Age of Learning Foundation as we partner with education systems in low- and lower-middle-income countries across the world.
We serve as an R&D partner so that education ministries can:
- experiment with new learning technologies in classrooms;
- build expertise and systems for mastery learning at scale; and
- establish effective policy, funding, and delivery strategies that will end learning poverty.
Learn about our Mastery Learning Program objectives
