How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn?

Tackling the third question...

In Attention, Meaning & Mastery I argued that all teachers need to ask and answer four questions every lesson:

1. How do all know all students are paying attention?

2. How do I know all students have made sense of what has been taught?

3. How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn?

4. How can I do all this in a way which is inclusive and results in all students experiencing success?

This post explores the third question: how can we know - during the lesson - that students are getting better at the things we want them to be skilled at?

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We talk a lot about mastery. We also endlessly discuss skills. The proponents of teaching skills and those who advocate mastery instruction can seem to come from very different camps but, I wonder perhaps if - at least to some extent - they’re talking past each other?

Mastery learning, at its heart, is a beguilingly simple idea: students should only move on to new content once they have mastered the current content. It’s not enough to merely teach content; the aim is to ensure students have learned it—deeply, securely, and in a way that will withstand the inevitable erosion of time and forgetting.

But here’s the rub. Mastery learning presupposes that all students can achieve mastery given sufficient time and the right conditions. This is both its greatest strength and its Achilles heel. After all, in the real world of finite lesson time and thirty students with thirty different needs, how on earth do we create the time and space for every student to master everything they need to be successful?

Some areas of the curriculum are harder to master than others. Some students will take longer. Some might not get there at all, at least not in the timeframe we’d like. Does that mean we abandon those who don’t get there in time? In the real word, maybe the best we can hope for is the knowledge that learning will also be partial, provisional, and subject to forgetting.

Learning vs performance

And this is the complicating factor: learning is invisible. We know it happens. We know students improve and make progress but this happens unevenly, over time and in their heads. My preferred definition of learning is that it is the retention and transfer of knowledge. Retention concerns the durability of what we know. In order for us to be content that learning has occurred we know it needs to last, at least more than a few hours or days. Transfer is about flexibility” can we apply what we’ve learned in new contexts? In order to test if either of these conditions have been met we need to wait and we need to text in new contexts. Learning is not a product of here and now, it is revealed elsewhere and later.

That said, we live in the present. All we get to see is performance: what students can do here and now and from that makes inferences about learning: what we think they will be able to do elsewhere and later. This being the case, we need to accept two things:

1. What we see in lessons are proxies for learning, not the thing itself, and

2. Some performances provide more reliable evidence of learning than others.

Teaching for mastery is to accept that performance at the point of instruction provides the weakest evidence of learning and that if we want to get to something more durable and flexible we will need to try to see into the future. To that end, it’s not enough for students to do something once. Mastery is demonstrated through consistency, quality, and independence. Below are some of the practical techniques that, used properly, will give us a better sense of whether all children are consolidating the skills they need to master.

Ask questions that require extended responses in specified formats

If students can only give one-word answers, you’ve no idea what they really understand. Extended responses force them to think, organise, and express ideas with clarity. This isn’t just about seeing who can write lots—it’s about who can sustain an argument, who can link ideas, and who can apply knowledge flexibly. Obviously, these kinds of questions need to be planned in advance and students need ample preparation to be able to tackle them successfully.

Ask students to improve answers on their MWBs using new vocabulary and academic language rehearsed during the lesson

It’s not essential to use MWBs here but I tend to find their use allows to student to experiment without fear of making mistakes and to easily reshape and improve their initial response. It’s important to explicitly teach vocabulary items students should include and to demonstrate how to use this vocabulary flexibly. For instance, I regularly see students using the word patriarchy inappropriately:

Often, the version of word students learn is the often version they are then able to us. At the very least it behoves us to teach them how to transform nouns into adjectives and back. Although academic writing tends to be full of nominalisations, knowing that one can create noun phrases such as ‘patriarchal society’ is important in helping students develop a more sophisticated response.

Similarly, the ways in which academic writing is constructed tends to be very different to the syntax of spoken language. Typically, I will give students very specific formats in which to answer such as to begin their answer with a subordinating conjunction such as ‘although’. Not only does this provides much needed practice in using academic constructions, it allows students to think carefully about how to shape the content knowledge they have learned.

Needless to say, I will be circulating during this process, prompting students to correct errors and improve expression.

Ask students to reframe their own, and others’ ideas using academic language

The cognitive control required to rephrase ideas using academic language is what distinguishes successful from less successful responses. After I asked students to have a go at answering an extended question using specific vocabulary item and syntactic constructions I will call on students - usually as a result of what I’ve noticed whilst circulating - to share their response.

Often, I will select one student’s response to write out verbatim on the board or display under a visualiser. I’ll then ask students to identify any instances of redundancy and to see if they can reshape the answer to make it more concise.

These concepts of redundancy and concision are not ones most students are familiar with so will require some explicit teaching. But once they’ve understood the concepts, they need practice at analysing their answers to see where they are baggy and imprecise. I will often get students to have brief paired discussions to see if they can spot areas of answers to improve and then, after they have had an opportunity to reshape their initial responses I will get them to transfer their answer from MWB to exercise book.

Give students multiple opportunities to practise using new vocabulary and expressing ideas in academic language

You cannot master what you barely use. Repetition is the engine of fluency. Think of it like weightlifting: it’s the reps that build strength, not the flashy one-off lift. There’s a compelling body of evidence supporting the concept of ‘over learning’ but the most persuasive reason to do this is the logical observation that we shouldn’t ask students to practice until they can do a thing but to continue practising until the idea of not being able to do it becomes inconceivable.

Multiple practice opportunities signal to us—and them—what’s secure and what’s shaky. It’s important to be able to work out whether students who are still fumbling after multiple attempts need further input or further opportunities to refine and embed. Probably the most useful rule of thumb is to consider how close answers are to meeting your expectations: the further away they are, the more likely students will be to need reteaching.

Ask students to work with greater independence

The ultimate test is whether students can perform without scaffolds, without you hovering, without prompts. Of course, we should always keep in mind that independence is the end of instruction rather than a means. Few students are going to succeed by being left to sink or swim. But, if success is dependent on our scaffolding will be guilty of propping up current performance at the cost of future learning.

This requires us to work towards creating classroom spaces where we leave students to struggle for increasing durations. If students struggle too much they are likely to learn that they’re just no good at his aspect of the curriculum. That is in no one’s interest. We need to tell students that they can have the support they need to be successful for as long as they need it but that true success is being able to achieve independently. Imagine this as a very clumsy relay race with the baton being fumbled back and forth between you and your students until they are ready to run.

Use a visualiser to share students’ extended responses (you do)

Your visualiser is a spotlight. By showcasing work, we not only model expectations but create a culture of public accountability. When students know their work might be shared, they think harder, write better, and take more care. Of course, we should always do this respectfully and sensitively but we do need to do it. Students can learn so much from interrogating the work of their peers and by being able to see more clearly how they can get from here to there.

Each of these techniques can help us answer that critical question: Are they mastering what I need them to master? but only if we’re paying close attention. Evidence doesn’t gather itself—we have to elicit it, scrutinise it, and act on it. Mastery, unlike learning, can be made visible, but only if we know where and how to look.