How can history teachers structure learning pathways through historical content in ways that engage and challenge all pupils, that enable them to work at an appropriate pace and that also encourage pupils to self-assess and monitor their own progress? Stainer reports and reflects on classroom experiments in "Mastery Learning" that aimed to achieve these outcomes and argues for the value of this approach, despite the demands that it can make on classroom time, and for the importance of embedding it in coherent historical enquiries. (Contains 6 figures.)