Guided mastery, as described by Albert Bandura (1993), is a process in which students are guided through graduated steps in order to achieve mastery.  Mastery of the threshold concepts described in the design can be reached through this process.  The key to facilitating a guided mastery approach is providing a space for students in which they can safely fail, and recover from that failure, within the same zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978).  This is important in building self-efficacy and motivation within students.  By having the design, and the epistemic games, developed in such a way that each step allows for failure and recovery in a safe environment, students can navigate through the tasks, building on each success and learning from each failure.  By guiding students through these tasks, they are learning the skills they need to develop mastery of the threshold concepts being taught.

 

Self-efficacy, motivation, and resiliency are key components of the guided mastery concept.  Bandura (2012) lists three factors which contribute to people’s belief in their self-efficacy: mastery experiences, social modeling, and social persuasion.  When looked at through a guided mastery lens, we take mastery experiences to center on the design of the of tasks to be mastered, social modeling to center on the collaborative experiences that the design offers in allowing students to build knowledge, and social persuasion to center on the formative assessment that is provided by both the teacher and the peers.  

 

Another important aspect of guided mastery is that it works to prepare students for the natural environment.  It is not enough to learn how to write a paragraph within the guided learning tasks, rather, the design is not successful unless students are able to transfer that knowledge outside of the guided environment and into everyday life.  Bandura (2009) states that “potential is not fully realized if training programs do not provide sufficient practice to achieve proficiency in the modeled skills or if they lack an adequate transfer program that provides success with the new skills in the natural environment” (p. 189).  Under Bandura’s (2012) guided mastery frame, people develop resilience in managing motivation, set progressively higher goals, improve the quality of their decision making, become increasingly satisfied with their performances, and achieve higher organizational productivity (p. 19).  Our plan aims to implement the guided mastery approach in such a way that students learn the identified threshold concepts in a step by step process that will lead to transformative learning.