Understanding Mastery

With help from Adam Gopnik

I picked up a copy of Adam Gopnik’s book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery because I wanted to better understand the concept of mastery, flow, art, and genius. There is much talk of student mastery in public education, that I wanted to learn how real masters become experts in their respective fields. The book jacket explains that Gopnik observed several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dance instructor, and a magician, to share with readers what masters have in common. Maybe I could take their collective wisdom, distilled through Gopnik’s astute, honest prose, and better encourage my students toward a version of themselves that feels successful both in and out of the classroom? I wanted some practical tips on how to design my classroom for mastery in all things, not just core academic subjects.

adamgopnik.com

Gopnik’s memoir/investigative reporting completely surprised me. Not only does he write a “self-help book that won’t help”, he offers no blueprint for me to integrate into my pedagogy. Instead, Gopnik took me on an immersive journey in search of the real work, a term familiar to anyone connected with magicians. The real work refers to “the accumulated craft, savvy and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great.” Both of my sons went through their magician phase, obsessing over card tricks and sleight of hand. We watched hours of the television series Penn & Teller: Fool Us. My sons were awestruck when watching Joshua Jay and mesmerized by Shin Lim. Through Gopnik’s incredible storytelling, I learned about the history of The Turk, the mystery of Erdnase, the creative craft of making bread, and why, depending on who you talk to, David Blaine is either destroying or saving magic.

Even though I didn’t get a recipe for success that I can share with my students or design a learning experience around, I did resonate with three themes that I believe will help me on my continuous quest of humanizing classroom instruction.

Breaking Down and Building Up

According to the masters that Gopnik studied, mastery is the “slow carpentering of fragments into a harmonious whole.” When learning a new skill, such as drawing or close-up misdirection, you must break it down into simple steps. First do this, then do that. Now combine these together. Now add this step. Pretty soon, you are completing dozens of small steps quickly, giving the impression of continuous movement.

In each skill, a rich and flowing activity broken down, yet again, as so often, into component parts, the pattern built back up.

Adam Gopnik

This is exactly how I learned to juggle during my Clown College days. First, I learned with two scarves. Then three scarves. Then one scarf and one ball. Then two balls. The more I practiced, the more I could project a seamless sequence, which Gopnik believes “is not a special feature of the movies; it is a fact of life, the truth of learning.”

As a teacher, I’m in the profession of breaking down complex ideas into simpler ones. I take abstract concepts and illustrate them concretely to my students. One of the hardest parts of being a teacher is not falling prey to the curse of expertise: once you know something, it is difficult to remember how it felt to be ignorant. The longer I teach, the more susceptible I am to forgetting what it is like to not understand finding common denominators or why so many colonists died in early Jamestown. Mastery comes from breaking down skills and rebuilding them into a greater whole. Gopnik writes, “If you surrender to allow the simple pattern to imprint itself on your mind, an inordinate gift will blossom. At least, that is the promise of mastery. Repetition and perseverance are disproportionately rewarded in the real world of real work.”

Learning anything takes time. There are no shortcuts in the classroom. AI tutors claim to make learning easier or more efficient, but students need time to wrestle with complex ideas. Technology may present academic content in a user-friendly way, but in the end, tools do not replace good teachers, time and persistence through repeated failures. In my classroom, I’m intentional about resisting the traditional bell schedule. I provide my students with as much time as I can give them to learn humanely. Gopnik reminds me how important it is for me to take new concepts and not only break them down, but help my students build them back up again.

Some visual thinking plans for the upcoming school year.

I do a lot of drawing as part of whole-class and one-on-one instruction. At the beginning of each school year, I teach my students a visual vocabulary developed by Dan Roam that helps them tap into their own visual minds, allowing them to articulate their thinking. Visual thinking helps students break down complex concepts visually, so that they better understand what they’re learning. It helps me tell better stories, develop new ideas for learning experiences, solve problems in unexpected ways, and share insights with my students. Research shows that making ideas visual helps engage students and clarify concepts. The more visual I make my learning experiences, the more impact it will have on my students’ learning.

Humanity, not Perfection

When studying magicians and artists, one thing that Gopnik noticed is that there is no such thing as perfect. In fact, when a card trick is executed too perfectly the audience is less impressed. Magicians want the audience to question what they saw, not naïvely believe they know the secret. The same is true for music. In This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, Dr. Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas, explain why we like certain music and how we each possess a unique “listener profile” based on our brain’s reaction to seven key dimensions of any record: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre. Authenticity is “the subjective sense that the emotion expressed in a musical performance comes mainly from a cerebral, conceptual place or from a heartfelt, purely emotional impulse.” As listeners, we either prefer music that is above-the-neck, polished technique, or below-the-neck, rougher musical performances. Realistic records feature real instruments played in real time by actual humans. Abstract records feature computer-generated sound-design and digitally corrected performances that don’t resemble natural sound sources. This is why there is so much resistance to AI-generated music on Spotify.

Gopnik says that mastery is more about humanity than perfection.

We never really love an artist's virtuosity, or if we do, it feels empty. We love their vibrato, their way of entangling their learned virtuosity within their unique vulnerability.

I love the phrase unique vulnerability! Each of us comes to new learning experiences with a unique vulnerability. We all have experiences, both positive and negative, that influence how we learn. If a student has had mostly positive learning experiences, they see learning as a net-positive. If students have had previously traumatic experiences, then learning becomes something to be avoided at all costs.

Standardized curricula remove humanity from classrooms. Teachers are forced to read from scripts, follow curriculum maps, and push students through each grade level, even if they have not successfully mastered any content. Often, students are not allowed to participate in certain “fun” activities because they have not “mastered” a particular concept. What I’ve learned from The Real Work is that mastery requires humanity. If I want my students to engage in their own learning toward mastery, I must celebrate the flaws that make them human. Learning is messy. I plan to takes chances in my classroom for my students. I may not get it right every time, but I want to be the one that keeps taking risks, modeling my humanity over perfection.

Mastery is Everywhere

There were so many wonderful, non-academic examples of mastery in The Real Work. I loved his stories of baking bread with his mother and learning to ballroom dance with his daughter. Mastery is ubiquitous. Too often, we fail to see mastery in life’s banality because we falsely attribute mastery to a select percentage of humanity. We look to experts to tell us how to live our lives well. As teachers, we fall into the trap of teaching students that success must look a certain way. We flood with them exemplars and rubrics and demand that they reproduce them for passing grades. We then use these grades to ranks and separate students into inequitable classroom experiences. Over time, students begin to expect that they will never master anything. They will never be a reader or never be good at math. They learn that school sucks.

Early in my career, Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory was in vogue. Gardner explained that everyone has strengths and weaknesses in various intelligences, such as interpersonal, intrapersonal, logical-mathematical, spatial, linguistic, etc. Teachers were expected to differentiate their instruction based on Gardner’s eight intelligences. An unintended consequence I observed was how quickly teachers and students wrote off a particular student’s weaknesses so that they could encourage them in another area. For example, if a student struggled with a math concept, they must not have logical-mathematical intelligence, but have bodily-kinesthetic or visual-spatial intelligence instead. This mindset got conflated with learning styles, despite evidence that different learning styles do not exist.

Gopnik pushes us to see mastery everywhere. My illiterate grandmother couldn’t follow a recipe, but she was a master cook. My dyslexic son struggles to read and study for tests, but has a shrewd wit; reducing us to tears with his sense of humor.

Instead of trying to label each of my students so that I can place them in their learning box, why not look for the mastery in their lives? All students come to school with hours upon hours of practice in something. They could be eloquent debaters or have an incredible ear for tonality. Maybe they have expertise observing human behavior and can navigate social situations easily? Whether or not a teacher recognizes a students’ talent and makes it count for some arbitrary measure, students are always learning, and they have an easier time learning when their classroom is safe, loving, and full of magic. My goal for this upcoming school year is to find multiple opportunities to showcase my students’ mastery in all things.

Gopnik ends The Real Work with these lines,

“There is no magic without a master. But also, no magic without a mark. We love to do things because when we do, we are no longer things. We are selves, and sometimes, souls. With time and luck perhaps to dance, the poet writes, having first had us stumble and then step. But stepping and stumbling are dancing, segments becoming seamless.”

Stumbling and failing are learning. Instead of trying to force learning to happen in my classroom, this year, I plan to practice taking a step back, breathing, and seeing how my students are already becoming masters in their own right.

Have a great week!

—Adrian

Resources

How Adam Gopnik’s new book helped me think about the work of universities.

• If reading another book is not a realistic goal right now, read this Inside Higher Ed Review by Joshua Kim. It is a great summary of Gopnik’s key points.

Design for Belonging by Susie Wise

• I devoured this book in one sitting, and have since reread it multiple times. I use it throughout the year to design moments of belonging for my students: from the time they enter my classroom to the time they leave. My favorite exercises are Listen for It and Picture Grid Conversations.

• Whenever I’m looking for more from a book, I check out author interviews. Last summer, Adam Gopnik spoke at The Aspen Institute. It’s an hour-long discussion, but well worth it!

The Biggest Problem with Mastery-Based Learning and How to Solve It

• I have not read Jonathan Bergmann’s The Mastery Learning Handbook, but this article has some solid strategies for helping students who are behind. Bergmann suggests a competency-based approach to student achievement.

Dan Roam's Napkin Academy

• If you are interested in learning more about visual thinking, check out his Napkin Academy. There are also a ton of YouTube videos that discuss the basics.