Parkesburg, WV – August, 1998: In the last hour of the last day of the Langford Conference, David laid out the proposition that traditional testing and grading systems were essentially flawed. He went on to talk about an approach to learning in which all students have the opportunity to work with teammates, to master their work, and to act as colleagues in designing and evaluating study units. At first, I rejected the whole idea, but over the next three or four days I came to see the wisdom behind the concept, and by the time school started two weeks later, I had completely redesigned my approach to teaching and learning.
The paragraph below introduces the document, Teaching For Mastery, that is essentially an overview of this dynamic approach, and is now available on this forum’s site. I created this document years ago in answer to questions from colleagues who were curious as to what I was doing in my classroom. They had heard about Mastery from my ambassadors, my students, and simply wanted to know more.
The Paragraph:
‘Teaching for Mastery in the classroom is a concept based on the business-world work of W. Edward Deming. This concept took shape when junior high school teacher David Langford joined with Deming to develop principles of educational reform that could raise the quality of school and classroom practice to a higher level. What they came up with was a system that adapts quality practices used in the industrial and technological world to the public schools. Their aim was to develop a system in which students could learn to develop quality products in the classroom, in the same sense that businesses create quality products in the competitive free market.’
The entire three-page document will give you a conceptual view of the mastery strategy and will surely generate questions that will take us into the specifics. So, take a look at the document and let’s get started!
