Chapter 2

This chapter talked about what exactly mastery is. One of the things that I learned was that not everyone has the same definition of what mastery is which makes it difficult to determine if a student has mastered a subject. One of the things that the author suggested was to talk to the school district and colleagues to see what their idea of mastery is and to come up with a common definition of mastery. The author also suggests looking at the curriculum and the standards to see what exactly mastery should mean to us as teachers and what it should mean in the classroom. One of the big ideas that I got out of this chapter was that it is important for you, your colleagues, and school district to have the same definition or general idea of what mastery means so that you can determine if your students have mastered the material or not. One of the things that the author said was that the curriculum is subject teacher’s interpretation. This will impact the way that I teach the standards and the curriculum because it is nice to know that I have some say in the way that I teach the standards and the material that has to be covered instead of the curriculum saying “say this and then say that”.  In this chapter the book says “to demonstrate sophisticated mastery, we’d like students to make an inference and elaborate on how they arrived at their conclusion in writing, orally, or some other way”. This will impact how I determine mastery in each of my student’s in the classroom.