I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ratowick. I'm Becky Hiread. And this is Al Pelletz, a podcast featuring tips for Ad teachers.
We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Welcome back to Al Pelletz where our miniseries is digging into the science of teaching and learning. Today, we're diving into principle five of how learning works which focuses on the journey toward mastery. Brian's still working on it.
See if we can get in there today. I'm still working on building mastery. Wow, shots fired early in the podcast. I love it.
My son comes with my rescue. I love it. I comes here rescue. We're all still in fact building that is one of the things we'll we'll see as we work through.
Mastery is not really something we just get to arrive at, which I think is going to be a fun piece of the conversation today. Because that really gives us the room to think about what does it really mean for a student to master a topic. If it's not where we just arrive, what does that look like at our different great levels and in our classrooms? Because it's not just about getting the right answer.
It's about developing the ability to fluently and flexibly. We'll talk about those. Apply knowledge and skills to new situations. And so we'll explore the path to mastery, which is paved with deliberate practice and targeted feedback.
So let's explore how we can guide our students from novice understanding to expert performance. And I think probably first we need to spend a little bit of time thinking about what is mastery. So you're going to answer that for us, Becky. No, one of you is going to answer it because you read the chapter, right?
Of course. Of course. Of course you did. How could we do a podcast without reading the chapter?
Brian did it on work. I did my notes. I have notes. So I think just to kick things off and I do hope that those that are listening and as we have this conversation, you see some threads through not only this, but previous seasons.
And it goes back to that conversation that we've had around novice to expert and that whole continuum. And and we jumped around at the beginning about needing help to continue to work towards an expertise and one of the fundamental things that we have to realize that we're not going to be an expert in everything. And so our students are going to come with an interest in an expertise in all of those areas and some of our even best students are going to excel in some classes. And they might struggle and and we have to deal with that emotional pieces.
If they are much closer to being a novice than an expert, however, we want to define the term expert as we go through that. And so they're all going to be at that level of mastery in different different stages. And so unpacking that definition of mastery, we throw that term around a lot in education and it means different things to different people. So I think it is good to talk a little bit about what we mean and kind of the principles and elements behind that term mastery.
I think one of the things you think about the carpenter, you know, we've had folks here and I know how to make sure that's cut a board, hammer board, put those things together. Get the board stretcher. Get the board stretcher out. Throw back your previous podcast.
But you know, I sit here and I look at some things that we've had a carpenter come and built from scratch here. And what he was able to do is bring all those skills that he had together to make them form a larger piece that was more than just some of the parts. And you know, it's mastery is not knowing a lot of stuff in isolation. I think it's that ability to be able to, I forgot the word transfer that knowledge into another setting into another context, to be able to apply that to a larger type of piece and be able to synthesize that information from a variety of places to solve something.
And I can do what I can do. I can have boards and do basic woodworking. I can't build and do what the master carpenter is that it's both the knowing and knowing how in a lot of respects and that looks different to whether we're talking about something like woodworking and mechanics versus a veterinarian or a vet tech or a vet assistant. And so knowing what those things are, they can are important and it's one thing to know it.
It's another thing to be able to do it and do it well. And you know, I love your carpentry example to Brian because I can do a lot of rough in work, but you certainly wouldn't want me to do any kind of finish type work. You wouldn't be happy at all. And so just knowing what those skillsets are is important piece.
And I think we could probably spend a lot of time thinking about where mastery and expertise fit together and where they're a little bit different. But I think just for those who've been kind of listening through the series and saying, well, we've already talked about expertise in a couple of different places. I think the things we're really keen on when it comes to mastery, we're thinking about skill acquisition, practice integration and application of learning. And as we think about those, that goes back to something we kind of said in the intro with being fluent and flexible kind of Brian's point, can I take all those things together?
Can I use them in the right situations? Can I apply what I know about those things to different situations that have varying degrees of similarity? And I think this really kind of is the, when we're talking about mastery, it kind of flips the challenge of expertise because it's this balance of knowing too much and not knowing enough. Yeah, I think that's a great thing for.
I mean, we talk about that a lot, especially in our professions, you know, I've always joked that I've been educated beyond any usefulness to society. I think we got to worry about it. Are you able to just know things and know things or can you actually put things into practice and integrate them? And I love, and maybe I should do this term a summer before, but until this chapter, this idea of fluency, I hadn't really used that terminology before that really got me thinking about what does that mean?
What does it look like? How do we kind of be able to eyeball that and then put it into practice? And as we talk about mastery, you know, and whether the extent to what it looks similar or different than expertise, but, you know, with mastery, we're starting to deal and think around complex problems and complex tasks. And so thinking about how do we impact that earlier in stages for students to make it a little bit more manageable components.
And so they know how to put all of those pieces together as they kind of grow and develop their own mastery. This idea that, again, going back to my Harvard example, this MasterCard for me to build through these things here at my house, he didn't learn that on day one. And he didn't start off by learning that thing. It was a series of steps that he gained skills over time.
It was very methodical. It was a pace. It took some time. There was some stuff forward and stuff back to be able to gain these skills and know how to then integrate them and simplify them was taking time.
I think that's, to me, the words for both the teachers in a both ways, one, to remember that with your students, but also to remember that with yourself. It's a slow progression that we're going to end up into making. What you think about building fluency, like, you take that flu, even that word fluency and apply it in other areas and reading crashing through right now, which is a story about somebody who who gained their sight and the number of things that as he came to sight, he said, why don't sighted people ever talk about this? Why?
Why isn't this a thing? Why isn't this a thing? What? Like, and he said this a couple of times in the chapter of this is, why did you tell me that?
Well, depending on my level of expertise, it may not have occurred to me that that is the thing that you didn't know about or didn't see or we're aware of in this. I think this fluency gives some really kind of cool metaphors to the things that are so often implicit in the rules of our disciplines and the things that we're trying to learn that just as as an expert, you kind of say, yeah, this is how it works. But for a seventh grader saying, I have no background with this. This is all brand new language to me.
How do I make sense of any of this to kind of go back and think about what are those things that as somebody knew I would have to say, why did you tell me that? Well, I think that really leads to this idea about the need for continuing to plan. Because your point there, as I go through what if in the area that I feel like I may have a son of that mastery, if I'm trying to tell somebody about that, I skip all those steps and don't even think about some of those basic concepts. But when I sit down, do we think I planned this conversation or plan this lesson?
I'm like, oh, wait a minute. I need to tell them how I got to here. And that helps you fill them with gaps so that you can help bring people along with you. I think the book is the example of a chef telling somebody to saute or chop a certain way or do these certain things that if you don't have any experience in a kitchen, you say you don't even know what tools to use to to carry out the instructions, let alone execute in a way.
That aligns with a gourmet restaurant. And so it gives it really, I think, puts some weight on that expertise, even if you don't feel like an expert to your students who are, it really is why we need to plan. The knowing it is why we need why we need to plan for it. We can't stop planning just because we feel like we mastered our content.
Yeah, and I think I think along those same lines as teachers, we need to think about how we can help students recognize when and where to apply those skills and that knowledge. And so often, you know, we make sure that they know it. We make sure that we've covered that material. But how do we apply it?
How do we fit it together? And if we're talking about mastery, it's more than just knowing that information, like we've said before, so helping them learn how to apply it and utilize it in the right context. So I think that goes to what you're talking a little bit about the chefing example to Becky. I think it really just emphasizes how much our selection of learning tasks matters.
It's not we're not just trying to keep students busy. We really need to think about about. We really need to think about. We need to articulate everything that the learner needs to do to make sure that they actually have the knowledge required to do whatever that learning task is.
It's a lot of building and back and forth. And I think we often conceptualize planning is like, okay, here's what I've got. 50 minutes, here's what I'm going to do for my 50 minutes. And it can be kind of really linear process.
And we forget that, hey, wait a second, there are a lot of what ifs here. We are working with people. Well, I think we have in our context, what we teach really provide a lot of opportunities that we need to take advantage of this, things like, you know, plant growing plants in the greenhouse or in a garden or, you know, mechanic example, I think about, you know, a lot of programs, a little trailers or something as a welding project. But it's the idea that we have to bring all those skills together to get that part of it.
It's not just they have to know the basics of welding and measuring and angle and all that sort of thing. But then it's like, okay, this is actually going to make this actually happen something in real life to bring it all together. Yeah. You may be saying the same thing that comes to mind, Brian, and I'm just thinking about it a little bit different way.
But as we think about all those various contexts, quite often we don't go full force and all the way with our students and we stop a step too soon. And so thinking about, you know, helping students, or we can help promote the transfer of learning. And so, you know, if we're building trailers, if we're doing other things or if we're working in the greenhouse, what's that mean? And how does those skills get transferred to other situations, other careers, other opportunities?
And thinking about the transferability of that is an important part that I think with the bell rings and we forget about it or we think about how we're going to test knowledge, maybe on an exam, but we don't go that next stop about step into transferring that to careers and other opportunities or maybe the next course or any of those kind of things. But in the example, we talk a lot about, you know, in like an animal class, you'll learn, you know, the breeds of cattle or you'll learn all of the parts of the animals, what else, but we never take it next step. Like, why do those breeds exist? What do those characters?
Why do we even have those? How does it bring those together? We don't talk about, okay, I can label all the parts of the cell, but we don't understand how cellular respiration all the time into digestion and nutrition and all those sort of pieces. So really, we're not just preparing people to be on Jeopardy.
We're preparing them how to bring these information into solving real problems. You're talking to an audience who might not even know what Jeopardy is anymore. Very true. But I think there's even thinking about that trailer example, and thinking about how important that sequence and timing, like how often do we get in our own way in our planning where we have planned to get to a certain point, we set like we do all the things right we assess we plan we're on the right track.
And we stop because we just kind of short ourselves in the assessment category or we had something out of sequence. And so if we had something out of sequence, our students were trying to apply something or it didn't make sense and we're trying to make sense of our misplanning when we hadn't put things in the right order. So that all of a sudden something became really, really demanding. And the this idea, I think, in the chapter of kind of the balance between cognitive load and demanding this there's making sure that we have things in the right order so that when we get to something, we can kind of like to price trailer example if we've sequenced it well, we can build a trailer without necessarily learning anything new, which is a little bit crazy.
As you think about, you know, as you think about some of those bigger summative projects and what their evidence of maybe we're just applying a whole bunch of things that we already know and we're figuring out how to put them together. We wouldn't necessarily say we learned a new welding scale or we learned something new about how to read plans or how things go together. If I've sequenced all those things, I don't know how to build a trailer now. I maybe just, but if I haven't gotten to build a trailer, all of those will just be random skills that I know how to do.
I won't know how to build a trailer. I won't be able to meet that demand. Well, on the flip side of that so many times you talk to folks like, we'll keep on with this trailer example. I was going to have my students run a trailer, but they didn't know how to do this or measure angle.
I'm like, well, does he ever teach him? Well, I talked about what that's again, again, there's no ownership on the students side too. But I think sometimes we understand that the gaps that we have left for those so much of projects. So we bring things together are so important.
Brian's point made me think about how teaching is really a design profession. We got to spend a lot of time kind of designing and sequencing content, our delivery and engagement of students in a variety of activities that help build that knowledge base and that skill set so that they can do those bigger projects and work towards the appropriate level of mastery for whatever age group and whatever that content is in the courses that they're teaching. And I think even in that there, I have heard colleagues say, well, teaching doesn't have to be such a design profession with the abundance of resources available and the opportunity like we have sequenced curriculum available why how where's the where's the work there and I think I hope for folks who are using it pre packaged curriculum and some of those really well designed curriculum things that you can use thinking about where those opportunities then to think about Where my students really fit into that. You know, the designers of curriculum don't know your students and so taking Taking a case curriculum and really doing the work to say how where will my students meet some of these things.
How will how will they get fluent in these areas that takes a person. That's not something curriculum can necessarily just do for us. Well, I think to hopefully if you're going to use that curriculum use the advantage of that. But also start thinking like why did the curriculum designer put these things in the sequence.
So the two understand that ahead of time. So you're you're knowing where the large project is. So it's not just And I don't think any of those designers are saying just wrote following that the instructions if you're trying to why things are put together the way they are. I think there's also great opportunities to think about those pieces.
Anything about your own transfer using That transfer is an automatic and I think again going back to the trailer example just because I can do all these skills or just because it's been told to me once how to do this thing Doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to associate that skill in a dissimilar learning context and recognizing that we're talking about this fluency and flexibility. This flexibility piece is really that can I use it in different situations. Can I use what I learned here. If I know how to measure an angle for a trailer.
Can I also do it for a bookshelf. Can I do it in these other applications and does that same concept still hold up and I think when we think about that there are some really Really big implications for Agad and CTE more broadly when we're constantly talking about these transferable skills. It's something we kind of hang our hat on as a TTE educators. And so there is a lot of opportunity for us to say Are we really doing are we really doing that transfer work and bringing those skills together and then taking them beyond the application we have time for in class.
I think again, we're running this trailer example for all it's worth here. I think it's important for us to remember that in that example, the trailer is not just a product. The trailer is also a teaching tool and like I said, you may have learned all these skills somewhere else. But what the trailer does, it provides that transfer is the how to put those into place to move on to it so that they learn how to transfer and put those together so that they want to build something on.
They've seen how to bring these together. I'm thinking about student teaching. This is why we have this is why we have people who students teaching. We learn all these skills and knowledge in college and our classes and our pre service program or classes.
Now you get to go to work into a school system through a student teaching internship. See how you put all these things together because it doesn't all just fit literally to work with those students. So I think that's a good example. So that brings us to some kind of key strategies.
How do I take these big ideas, fluency, flexibility, transfer, demanding, as cognitive like we talked about a lot of things in case anyone was kind of like, oh my goodness, that's a lot of terms. We're still talking about mastery. So when it comes to those strategies for mastery, I think one of the things we kind of hit around but haven't really explicitly said yet this episode as a strategy is the opportunity to really reinforce component skills and we've talked about, I said it once or I told them once I don't even know how to measure this angle. In a high school CTE class likely isn't the first time they've had to measure an angle or define an angle.
So also thinking about who else outside my discipline is requiring these components skills. How do we build on each other, even if we're not locked step in our sequence to know where can I, where can I help students access that information. How do I help them be flexible with the content they've learned in other classes to then bring it into what we're doing in ag class. I think those are that that's a great strategy and something to think about a couple others that come to mind for me.
And these are pretty basic. The first one is being intentional and breaking things into steps for for students and help them kind of build into bigger projects that would be steps that could be scaffolding. And then also thinking about opportunities for case studies, the students develop a lot of different skill sets and in knowledge bases, given them cases and situations where they have to apply and utilize that in real world context and in situations or examples of where businesses and companies or farms have found themselves in situations before and how they could use that knowledge to help solve those problems. I think those are all opportunities too as we think about, I think we sometimes think about facilitating transfers, something separate from everything else we're doing.
But if we're thinking about those things like just talked about, we're also thinking about just where we practicing and how we practicing and where do those things really come together and how do we make that really, how do we highlight that first? How do we make that really obvious that that's that that's what's happening in that practice to actually make sure that transfer happens. Yes, that's so important. I guess it's that idea of intentionality is where we're thinking about teaching this practice and also understand that that's what's going to be and what's going to be and what practice comes from failure and that's a learning tool as well and to be and to use that not to avoid it and not to disregard it, but to use that.
And I think that ties us all together and recognizing that mastery isn't a destination. It's this continuous process of refining and applying and failing and trying again and moving forward in different contexts. So by designing learning opportunities that really include that deliberate practice, providing feedback that we're going to talk about actually next episode, we can really help our students build that durable and flexible understanding of our content. So as you plan your next lesson, think about whether or not you're giving students a chance to truly apply, like truly apply what they've learned.
And as we'll talk about next episode, are we giving them the feedback to improve? So thanks for joining us. As we said, our next episode, we'll really be getting into practice and feedback. And we can't wait to see you back on Alpelitz Tips for Ag Teachers podcast.