Teaching to the Top: The Route to Mastery

Last Saturday, I was privileged to be part of a Media teach-meet where ideas and teaching strategies were shared amongst the community. Like many, I was inspired by all speakers at the event, and took lots away to think about and try applying to my own teaching. One of these was Jake Barber, an experienced and highly regarded Media Teacher, who shared a plethora of amazing resources and ideas. One of these was the use of 'mastery' resources.

The word 'mastery' has to be used carefully in a classroom in my opinion, because the idea of mastering a subject implies you have nothing more to gain from learning. However, the way this was used was part of a much bigger ethos of growth and development that really resonated with me, and was something that I wanted to build on and replicate in my classroom. Yes, mastery means to have comprehensive knowledge and skill, but by using it in the context of a journey and route to mastery, we can encourage the idea that anyone can become a master with enough practice, determination and effort. And that is a good ethos to foster in a classroom.

This also resonated with me because I have been reading Megan Mansworth's 'Teach to the Top', a book that explores various strategies around the principle of teaching at an aspirational level to the most able, and scaffolding where needed for lower attainers, rather than the more outdated concepts of three way differentiation or 'All, Most, Some' learning objectives. It's a concise and very useful read that pinpoints areas where teachers can impact students through aspirational teaching and modelling, and tied in very well with Jake's ideas. Based on both of these, I was inspired to create my own version of Jake's 'Mastery Packs'.

The idea is to take an assessment, consolidation point or question, and create a resource that allows scaffolding to be provided at the level all students want without compromising challenge for any student. I furst read about this idea in codexterous' blog (https://codexterous.home.blog/2021/03/31/differentiation-done-the-super-mario-way/) which refers to scaffolding as power ups. I loved this idea, and not just because I love Super Mario, but because it illustrated scaffolding in a really straightforward but enlightening way. It was one of those moments where you go 'oh of course!' and secretly kick yourself for not thinking of it sooner as it seems so obvious. Combining this with the principle of modelling in Teach to the Top (aspirational modelling: don't compromise on quality or 'dumb down' modelled examples), I started to put together a pack for my Y9s in preparation for their first consolidation task in Media Studies. 

N.B. These students are the first cohort to experience the new 'foundation year' we have in place to embed key concepts, practical experience and ideas before tacking the GCSE. As such, we have spent very little time discussing exam skills, timings and question types, and much more time honing analysis and gaining knowledge and understanding of media language. This consolidation task is fairly open and allows them to demonstrate these skills without trying to second guess a precise exam mark scheme (we will leave that for later!) 

I found it really useful to put together, as it made me think about the exact knowledge and skills required to answer it, and how well we had covered those in class. Students receive the pack with their text to analyse and their question. Then, they use as much of it as they want: all can use the front page which picks apart the question, offers top tips and a range of vocabulary banks. Then, the next page offers the mark scheme and key words so they can see what they are expected to achieve in a precise manner. Then, a quick recap of key content that relates to the question, followed by a writing frame and vocab booster, and finally a guided tour of the text and a modelled response. This will also be available to them when they get their feedback, so they can access whatever level of help they want once more and develop their responses through this. I anticipate students to use this fairly heavily right now, as they are at the start of Y9 and their Media mastery journey. However, as they progress, the aim is that they reduce the amount of mastery pack intervention and become more independent. This is relative to ability - some may need a boost right up to the end of Y11, and some will only use the first page from fairly early on.

The resource is linked here. I hope to make more for both GCSE and A Level as we progress through the year. I appreciate any feedback, so if you have anything then please let me know. Thanks for stopping by, and I'll see you in the next one with another great idea stolen from Jake!