After my Skiing holiday over the Christmas break, I have been pondering mastery (and also Learning Styles – but that may be another blog – just don’t tell @tombennett71 !)

Mastery techniques were first introduced and proposed by Bloom (1968), an American Educational Psychologist (who is also well known for his taxonomy) which focus on a learning model where students achieve a set learning objective or goal before they are taught the next skill.

The suggestion is that a teacher would set a threshold around the level of achievement which is usually measured by a test, with an eighty percent or above pass rate. If a student does not achieve this expected level, then they go back to revise and revisit the skills to tackle the test again and achieve the threshold before they can move to the next step.

This is a technique favoured by the French Ski School…