LESSONS LEARNED ON CHALLENGING ALL STUDENTS

Challenge is a concept that has different meanings to different people, not least in an educational setting.  As Deputy Headteacher, I lead on the provision for more able students. Historically, I have tended to narrow my focus to the top 3% of the school cohort. I would analyse data to produce the annual ‘gifted and talented’ register and deliver staff training with a focus on challenging the more able.

I teach geography to mixed ability GCSE groups. This presents a differentiation headache! Teach to the top and you risk losing your lower ability students or simplify and fail your more able students. Finding a middle ground is no easy task and possibly one that risks failing all.

I have piloted lots of different strategies with my classes. Like many experienced teachers, I have become jaded by teaching fads and jargon. During my NQT days, Bloom’s Taxonomy was the bible of planning tools. I applied the terminology religiously to compose success criteria using an all, most, some approach. My lessons became very formulaic and predictable. I found myself repeating the same command words – describe / identify (all), explain (most) and prioritise / evaluate (some).

This approach was flawed in several ways:

1) The less motivated students were quite content in just completing the ‘all’ tasks. In trying to support the very weakest of students, I was also putting them at a disadvantage when it came to exam questions that did require them to explain etc.

2) I was structuring lessons in a way that meant students had to work through all activities in order to reach the more challenging tasks. Whilst I had thought carefully about differentiation, students rarely got onto the tasks that required them to really think hard and to apply their knowledge.

3) I had trained students into thinking that to access the higher grades, you had to include an element of evaluation. When faced with an exam question asking them to simply explain, they would include an evaluation in the hope it would get them more marks.

On the odd occasion that I dig out an old lesson resource, I can’t help but cringe a little. Worst still, I presented the merits of such approaches to my colleagues and to national audiences at various teaching conferences.  

So what changed for me?  

It took a lesson observation several years back for me to rethink my approach to teaching. Whilst students were complimentary of me as a teacher, some of the higher ability students hesitated when asked if they felt challenged. They could appreciate that I had built challenge into each activity but were frustrated at having to listen to my explanations. Quite simply, they just wanted to get on with it!

I won’t lie, I was a little bit on the defensive when being given feedback as I knew I had built in opportunities for independent learning in previous lessons. As we all know, lesson observations are only a snapshot and not a reflection of every lesson that we teach. However, it did make me reflect on my assumptions as a teacher and prompted me to conduct some student voice with the more able students in my GCSE geography group. Whilst I wholeheartedly recommend this as a process, it comes with a bit of a health warning. You can’t be too precious as they certainly don’t hold back! The very brightest students have high expectations of their teachers and can be a very hard audience to please. They know what works for them and if a teacher fails to deliver, their frustrations will quickly turn into resentment. On the other hand, it gave me an opportunity to explain the thought process behind my teaching. For instance, I could have given them A Level reading material to offer further challenge.  However, I knew that they would then struggle to condense all of the information into an exam answer and risked going off the point.

Off the back of my own student voice, I decided to ask the top 3% of students in Year 11 what their challenge wish list would be to teachers. Here’s what they said:

• In lessons, it’s hard to see how certain topics can actually apply to your life so maybe if they gave you information on what it could actually be to do with, that might help
• Having tasks to do after the challenge so once you’ve completed it, you’re not sitting around for ages
• Having more structured revision activities, rather than just go and revise
• Application questions with problem solving
• Having the opportunity to do hard work from the start of the lesson and not just having to do it at the end of the lesson after all of the easy stuff
• Being able to start work straight away without having to listen to the teacher for too long
• In mixed ability classes, I think they should focus more on hard work if you’re going for the higher grade boundaries
• Have a wider variety of homework so that there’s homework for everyone of different abilities
• Being able to start work straight away without having to listen to the teacher for too long
• Spending less time copying out work and doing more tasks about what you’ve actually learnt
• More exam questions and model answers

This brings me back to the notion that challenge has different meanings for different people and what works for some, won’t work for others. Their feedback made me consider where I was going wrong and the importance of communicating with students and other colleagues. I have recently had the privilege of team teaching an A Level class with a fellow colleague. This has been a valuable professional development opportunity as I am able to observe how he challenges our brightest students. I have also come to realise that I rely too heavily on my preferred learning style when planning lessons.

Perhaps the most important lesson I have learnt is that we must challenge all students and not simply the brightest. Every child is able to demonstrate higher order thinking, they just might need a helping hand in doing so. Ask any young person to evaluate mobile phones on the market and I am quite sure that even the lowest ability student would be able to present the various pros and cons.

Delivering the new GCSE geography curriculum has made me rethink my approach to teaching, not least because there is no longer a higher and foundation tier. This has forced me to consider how students can access the paper. Again, I come back to feedback I was given during a lesson observation. This time, I was asked if I thought the work was pitched too high for a student targeted a grade 2. This was on the grounds of the academic language that I was using with the class. Whilst I fully appreciate where the observer was coming from, I also know that by avoiding using the language in the specification, my lower ability students will simply skip questions in the exam. Take for example the following question:

The vocabularly gap has never been so significant. A failure to understand what the terms processes, formation and landforms mean could result in zero marks for what is essentially quite a straightforward task – explain how waterfalls are created. For that reason, I have gone back to basics with my teaching with a less is more approach. The challenge comes through the understanding and application of academic language rather than an overload of content. I have moved away from providing more able students with lots of extra reading and placed more emphasis on how they can apply their knowledge in a condensed format. It is easy for a more able student to write a three paged answer demonstrating everything they know. Instead, the challenge lies in writing a precise answer that covers everything in the question. It is something that I struggle with myself when writing model answers for my students.

I have also moved away from signposting tasks according to their level of challenge. Instead I share a list of activities that I expect all students to complete. I provide ‘helping hand’ sheets for students needing extra support in the form of scaffolding templates and writing frames.   I expect every student to challenge themselves and hold no prisoners when it comes to my expectations. I refuse to mark substandard work. That is not to say I expect every student to produce a grade 9 piece of work. Instead, I talk to students about individual expectations. I am trying to build their resilience and confidence so that they want to challenge themselves. I am firm believer in the power of praise and try to acknowledge the efforts of all students, not simply those that achieve the highest marks. 

On the occasions that I want to signpost challenge, I refer to it as a ‘further challenge’ task or as a ‘take it further’ task. This supports the view that all of the work offers a degree of challenge and not simply extension tasks.

Despite a pleasing set of GCSE results, I won’t claim that I have differentiation or challenge ‘nailed on’. However, I am a lot more reflective as a teacher and quite happy to advocate that old school teaching has its merits. Gone are the days that I spend hours producing creative resources to ‘edutain’ my classes. When I think back to my school days, I was quite happy being given a textbook and doing comprehension activities or being given a tricky exam question to have a go at.

As a more able student myself, I had a pretty good deal at my school. That said, I do feel that there was a lack of advice and support when it came to university courses and careers. Neither of my parents had been to university so it wasn’t a path that they expected my sister or I to go down. My sister was encouraged to apply to university by her art teacher during a parents’ evening appointment. Until this point, it wasn’t something she had considered and it came as quite a shock to my parents. Visiting her made me want to experience university for myself. Had I not experienced this, I may never had thought to aspire to it myself. On the day of my A  Level results, a teacher asked why I had not applied to Oxbridge. The answer was simple – no one had suggested it to me. For that reason, I firmly believe that as many students as possible should have the opportunity to visit a university or college and not just the more able. In addition to an annual visit to Oxford University, we offer students a range of opportunities to visit further education establishments or invite speakers into school. Our aim as a school is to adopt a challenge for all approach that will raise the aspirations of all of our students.