Discovery learning is how we learn something new throughout our lives; mastery learning is how we refine our skills and get better, but if we want innovation and creativity in adults we need to foster both sets of learning in our young people. We need to be aware that we don’t know everything and there is not always an answer to be taught by an authority figure. One of our favourite things to do with our children is watch a documentary or read a piece about something completely new to all of us and then ask - I wonder why that happens? We often all come up with different theories and then go and see what the current reasoning is. We remind our kids (age 9 & 12) that when their grandparents were at school, plate tectonics was a weird theory that many people thought was rubbish, DNA had only just been discovered and computers still used paper punch cards; and that when we parents were at school, global warming was a fringe theory that wasn’t given much weight, we still thought lead in petrol was a good idea and we believed everything that was published in a book. The world and our understanding of it changes rapidly and it’s largely because there are people who are still curious and wonder why things happen or why they get a result different from what they expect. Without mastery learning they wouldn’t have the expertise to recognise the difference but without discovery learning they wouldn’t even wonder why. I strongly believe we need both to enable our young people to learn about and understand their world - which will probably look as different to them as adults as today’s world is to us. Unfortunately schools are being forced to focus more and more on mastery as young people get older which leads to them not seeing the point of learning knowledge as it is not meaningful to their questioning minds.
While I tend to agree with you in general that both discovery learning and mastery learning are needed in life, I am somewhat perplexed by the use of the word play by several writers. How do you define "play"?
Discovery learning is how we learn something new throughout our lives; mastery learning is how we refine our skills and get better, but if we want innovation and creativity in adults we need to foster both sets of learning in our young people. We need to be aware that we don’t know everything and there is not always an answer to be taught by an authority figure. One of our favourite things to do with our children is watch a documentary or read a piece about something completely new to all of us and then ask - I wonder why that happens? We often all come up with different theories and then go and see what the current reasoning is. We remind our kids (age 9 & 12) that when their grandparents were at school, plate tectonics was a weird theory that many people thought was rubbish, DNA had only just been discovered and computers still used paper punch cards; and that when we parents were at school, global warming was a fringe theory that wasn’t given much weight, we still thought lead in petrol was a good idea and we believed everything that was published in a book. The world and our understanding of it changes rapidly and it’s largely because there are people who are still curious and wonder why things happen or why they get a result different from what they expect. Without mastery learning they wouldn’t have the expertise to recognise the difference but without discovery learning they wouldn’t even wonder why. I strongly believe we need both to enable our young people to learn about and understand their world - which will probably look as different to them as adults as today’s world is to us. Unfortunately schools are being forced to focus more and more on mastery as young people get older which leads to them not seeing the point of learning knowledge as it is not meaningful to their questioning minds.
While I tend to agree with you in general that both discovery learning and mastery learning are needed in life, I am somewhat perplexed by the use of the word play by several writers. How do you define "play"?