What is Mastery Learning and How Do You Implement It Effectively?

This is #8 in the Top 10 of the First 1,000 — the countdown of the ten most-downloaded episodes in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher. Ranked on total downloads including re-airs, this conversation has been heard 24,210 times.

It originally aired in November 2022 as episode 797.

Mastery learning — also called competency-based learning — gets talked about far more than it gets implemented. Jon Bergmann, one of the pioneers of the flipped classroom and author of The Mastery Learning Handbook, is a working teacher who actually runs it, and he talks about what it takes in a real classroom rather than in a model.box.

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Resources from This Episode

• The Mastery Learning Handbook by Jon Bergmann — the book behind this conversation.
• JonBergmann.com — Jon’s site, and where his flipped and mastery learning resources live.
• Teach Better and the Grid Method for mastery learning — mentioned on the show as a practical structure for running mastery in a single classroom.
• Mastery Transcript Consortium — for schools thinking past the individual classroom to what the transcript itself looks like.

About Jon Bergmann

Jon Bergmann is one of the pioneers of the Flipped Classroom. He has helped schools, universities, organizations, and governments all over the world introduce active and flipped learning into their contexts. He is a frequent keynote speaker who challenges and inspires audiences with stories and real-life examples from his classroom.

He has taught at urban, suburban, rural, and private schools. He spent twenty-four years as a classroom teacher in Colorado before becoming a technology facilitator in the Chicago suburbs. When Flip Your Classroom became an international bestseller, he traveled the world for eight years, helping schools and universities move from passive to active learning. In 2019, he returned to the classroom to further develop Flipped and Mastery Learning. This has amplified Jon’s voice with teachers and professors. They now see him as a fellow teacher working through the complexities and challenges of teaching today because his presentations include struggles and successes as he works every day with students.

Jon believes the two most important things that make good teaching good are active learning and relationships. Too much education is received passively, and Jon knows from both research and experience that students learn best when they are active participants. Students don’t care what you know until they know that you care, and Jon tries every day to connect with his students.

Jon has written and co-authored ten books that have been translated into thirteen languages. In 2002, Jon received the Presidential Award for Excellence for Math and Science Teaching; and in 2010, he was a Semi-Finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year. He serves on the advisory board for TED Education. He teaches full-time science and assists with staff development at Houston Christian High School in Houston, Texas.

Connect with Jon: JonBergmann.com | LinkedIn | YouTube | The Mastery Learning Handbook

Episode Transcript

✅ TRANSCRIPT AVAILABLE — no Auphonic needed. The full transcript was already published on the original post and is saved at 987 Jon Bergmann / 3 Transcripts / e987-from-e797-blog-transcript.md. Paste it into a collapsible details block here, then delete this box.

The Top 10 of the First 1,000

As the 10 Minute Teacher approaches its 1,000th episode, I went back through the download numbers for every show and pulled the ten that teachers listened to most. One airs each weekday through September 18, counting down to number one.

#8 — you are here. Yesterday: #9, 8 Ways to Engage Every Learner. Tomorrow: number seven.

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