If you never climb a hill, you will never know it is different from a plain.
Consider the following to help you answer this question for yourself......
PETER'S LAWS
• When in doubt: THINK!
1. Traditional classes typically teach to the large middle, leaving some students behind and high achievers either frustrated or bored. Most students will learn, but not all. Once the majority have it, the class moves on. Students left behind won’t have the prior knowledge that is so important to acquire new understandings. Students outside the middle become disengaged and perform below their potential.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
[Albert Einstein]
2. Traditional approaches send several bad messages to students.
3. In Differentiated Mastery Learning, low-aptitude students are not left behind and higher- aptitude students are not held back. All students, not just the majority, will learn and understand the content. Differentiated Mastery Learning is a fair approach where each student receives whatever support they need to achieve the same standard.
4. Differentiated Mastery involves actual learning versus mere grade earning.
5. There are more interactions with individual kids at the personal and academic level.
6. Mastery class students significantly outperform those from traditional classes when tested for retention and understanding, with an increasingly greater gap after a course is ended.
7. Differentiated Mastery learning complements standards-based learning as it holds students to a performance standard instead of simply exposing them to required content.
8. Students feel respected in the classroom, which leads to higher motivation, a better work ethic, and greater appreciation for the material they are learning. The emphasis is on student understanding, not teacher control.
Just 'cause you're following a well-marked trail don't mean that whoever made it knew where they were goin'.
