We Can Do Better: Embracing the Mastery Game in Education

“Ugh, I hate science class. It’s so boring! The teacher just rambles on about sciency stuff all day,” – student. We live in an interesting time in education. In the United States, we are privileged enough to have an established, solid, public school system. All minors must attend school until a certain age because each citizen with basic academic knowledge benefits society. Yet when something is mandatory, human nature stops seeing it as a blessing. It is a blessing to require all children to attend school and achieve a basic level of academic knowledge. This is an amazing part of the United States. Yet with this obligation to attend school, students often see school as a chore instead of the amazing opportunity it is to make their lives successful. This is one reason that traditional teaching strategies aren’t working anymore. What if, instead of droning on and on like a really boring book you just can’t get into, teachers ran education as a mastery game?

Traditional Methods

In both the distant and recent past, many people viewed education as a privilege. It was not available to everyone and certainly not required. Historically, education has been the domain of the wealthy and idle. If you and your family had to work the fields for 16 hours/day just to make ends meet, there was certainly no time or money for education. Therefore, the students and their families saw education as a privilege. It was a competitive edge that would help students escape working 16 hours/day in the fields or factories. The opportunity for education was the promise of a better life.

When education was viewed as a highly privileged opportunity, teachers were highly revered and could simply talk in front of groups of students. In that system, students were motivated to absorb every word that was divinely blessed as it escaped from the sacred lips of the teacher. The only real skill required of the teacher was to be knowledgeable about the subject matter. This system became the foundation of our modern educational system.

Modern Education

Eventually, something wonderful happened. As a culture (in the US), we began to value every individual no matter their economic status. We discovered how an educated population can improve our overall culture. We made education available to everyone. Then we even went a step further than that. In order to make education equitable, we required public schools to provide an education to every student in their district. We made it mandatory for students to attend school. Wonderful things have happened because of this mindset change and our culture is better for it.

Yet with this mindset change of education as an individual right and requiring students to attend school, the mindset of our students changed. Instead of seeing school as a privilege, many see it as an unpleasant chore and see it as too much work.

Adolescents tend to live in the moment and, without the daily reminders of how bad life can be without an education, many students lose track of the benefits of a diploma. The logic of “I have to work hard today to have a good life in 10 years” is lost on many students. This means that students no longer hang on every word that a teacher speaks.

In addition, sales, entertainment, and visuals became more available than ever. Marketers must sell and they are competing for the students’ attention all the time. In this highly competitive world for student attention, the traditional teacher that lectures in the traditional way will have a very hard time capturing student attention.

It is a wonderful thing to make education available and required of every student. Yet it is important to acknowledge that a different student mindset requires a different teacher mindset.

Results of this Mindset Shift

If the student mindset towards education is so different, why are so many teachers still teaching the old system? This mindset shift is not a bad thing, it is a result of progress and teacher must progress along with it.

Due to this student mindset shift and lack of forward-thinking, many students simply go to school because “they have to.” Students who attend school only because they “have to” don’t do their best. They are only motivated to do the minimum required to avoid punishment. Students who are simply trying to “get by” are not learning critical thinking skills, they are not problem-solving, and they are not learning life skills to make themselves successful in the workplace one day. These students feel like they are not in charge of their education so they learn very little. My previous blog post went into more detail on the student in the spectator or victim mindset. Needless to say, this is not a scenario for optimal learning.

In addition to this lack of skill learning, classroom consequences are different. In the past, being sent out of class for causing a disruption was cause for alarm. This meant that the student would be missing out on the privilege of vital information. Yet now that students feel like they “have to” be in class, sending students out of the classroom is often a reward.

Despite the fact that students are less motivated to learn, teachers are still pressured to make sure that a majority of their students pass the class. If most students pass the class, it means that the teacher has done his/her job and instilled the correct information in student brains. Because of this, teachers lower their standards for “passing.” The less motivation students use, the lower the standards get in order to maintain the grading bell curve.

We Can Do Better

As teachers, we have to acknowledge that students have a different mindset toward education than they had in the past. This means that teachers also need a different mindset. We can’t use a teaching system that worked so many years ago. We have to do what works now.

What if we could use a teaching strategy that motivated students to engage in learning, inspired students to take responsibility for their own education, and raised the learning standards in the classroom? Sign me up!

The answer is this. Teachers, let’s not run our classrooms like lecture halls. Let’s run our classroom like a mastery game. Games are fun, engaging, and give responsibility to the student. A well-run mastery game will also increase the passing standards for every student. Bringing together several research-based strategies into one strategy provides significantly increased benefits to students.

So the question is, who’s ready to make the change?

If you are in education and want to join a community of educators who want to empower their teaching with modern teaching strategies, join our Facebook community. Let’s support each other on this journey and reinvent education as a mastery game.