Mastery and Music

We wouldn’t ask a piano student to attempt an advanced concerto before they had Mary Had a Little Lamb down pat.

So why do we do the equivalent in schools?

In this video I use a comparison to music instruction to illustrate why tying school curriculum to students’ ages rather than their skill level doesn’t work for anyone.

(music playing)

Oh, hey there. I was just brushing up on a piece that I have not played in a long while. It's Schubert's Fourth Impromptu, and it's a piece that I'd actually mastered a long time ago on the piano.

But now I'm trying to get it up to speed on a keyboard—and it's a very different experience. But you can imagine that if I was just starting piano—I'd never played before or maybe just a couple lessons and my piano teacher said—well, Michael, you're 44 years old and it's August. So that means our lesson plan says it's time for you to be learning Schubert's Fourth Impromptu. So let's get started.

That would be insane. Why?

Because I wouldn't have mastered any of the foundational building blocks to be able to play such a piece. More appropriate for me would be trying to learn something like this. Right?

So it would be literally crazy for someone to say, sorry, it's time to skip on to what the pacing guide or the lesson plan says you should be doing based on your age.

Now, to be fair, that maybe wouldn't be a classical piece of music.

Maybe they've taken some of my level into account.

But still, maybe it'd be something like this. (music playing)

Or maybe even this. (music playing)

But the point is that it's pretty obvious that I should be moving on to something more advanced only once I've really shown that I've actually mastered or at least become proficient in the current piece and the set of skills that I'm working on.

No piano teacher worth their salt would do otherwise.

Yet here's the rub.

Our traditional schools, they do this all the time and every single day. And we—the public, parents, even educators—most of us don't even bat an eye. We accept that that's just how school works.

Even though we know that's not how learning works.

Even though, of course a kid who has not mastered double-digit addition is going to struggle if they move on to double-digit multiplication before they're ready. It's crazy.

And it's time that we had people—students, kids, all of us—learning at the right level for them, just above where they've achieved mastery, so they aren't bored and there's some struggle and effort required to really engage them, but also so that they aren't discouraged, as there's too much struggle and too much effort required.

So let's wake up and move to mastery based learning and embed success for each and every child—not what we currently have, which is failure for most.