ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a background as to why mastery is being promoted in England, reviews mastery initiatives and discusses the different meanings of mastery. It introduces some ideas from Shanghai and Singapore that are sometimes described as teaching for mastery and looks at examples of how mastery is enacted in practice in mathematics lessons in English classrooms, using short examples from teachers who are adopting mastery approaches. Mastery learning was originally developed to apply to all curriculum subjects. In Shanghai, lessons are shorter – typically 35 minutes in primary schools, with most practice work being done as daily homework. Mathematics is taught using whole-class interactive teaching, with lots of questioning, and mini-plenaries. In Singapore mathematics, a key pictorial representation is the bar model. The bar model can be used to represent a wide variety of mathematical problems: addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, and fraction and proportional reasoning problems.
