Developing a Mastery Orientation

Barriers to a pupil’s progress arise from a complex interplay of factors, including: attitudes, values, experiences and practices existing at the individual’s social, biological, developmental and educational level. 

Schools can change this. Schools help when pupils ‘have supportive teachers whose morale is high and are provided with creative extracurricular activities’.¹ In practice this means teachers are available for support and teaching, are willing to see the learner’s perspective on work problems, are willing to support the learner’s competencies and will challenge the learner to be active and responsible in choosing, planning, executing and evaluating the activity and its outcomes.

Scaffolding is a fundamental pedagogy for supporting the child or young person. In order to achieve the intended outcome of the activity, scaffolding helps children and young people to build on their previous knowledge and learn new information (based on the Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD).

For those at risk of underachievement, a lot of work in the classroom revolves around building-confidence, resilience and self-esteem. Hart and Green show the link between self-esteem and achievement but remind us that young peoples’ positive self-image and esteem can be challenged and may require ‘maintenance’ or support: ‘anyone may be exposed to adversity at any point in their lives and may not cope with it successfully’.²

To address this, educators need to think about how they develop mastery-oriented pupils, who tend to: not see themselves as failing, engage in self-motivating strategies, engage in self-instruction or self-monitoring, remain confident that they will succeed, have an attitude that they can learn from their failures and do not see failure as a criticism of themselves as people.³ The characteristics of mastery-oriented pupils are illustrated below:

Educators would undoubtedly agree that this is the type of learner they would like to develop in their classroom. In practice this means: 

• creating a positive learning environment
• developing good pedagogical practice
• working collaboratively

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