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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Packed with practical teaching strategies, Making Every Lesson Count bridges the gapbetween research findings and classroompractice. Shaun Allison and Andy Tharbyexamine the evidence behind what makesgreat teaching and explore how toimplement this in the classroom to makea difference to learning. They distilteaching and learning down into six coreprinciples challenge, explanation,modelling, practice, feedback andquestioning and show how these caninspire an ethos of excellence andgrowth, not only in individual classroomsbut across a whole school too. Combining robust evidence from a range of fields with the practical wisdom of experienced, effective classroom teachers, the book is a complete toolkit of strategies that teachers can use every lesson to make that lesson count. There are no gimmicky ideas here just high impact, focused teaching that results in great learning, every lesson, every day. To demonstrate how attainable this is, the book contains a number of case studies from a number of professionals who are successfully embedding a culture of excellence and growth in their schools. Making Every Lesson Count offers an evidence-informed alternative to restrictive Ofsted-driven definitions of great teaching, empowering teachers to deliver great lessons and celebrate high-quality practice. Suitable for all teachers including trainee teachers, NQTs, and experienced teachers who want quick and easy ways to enhance their practice and make every lesson count. Educational Book Award winner 2016 Judges' comments: A highly practical and interesting resource with loads of information and uses to support and inspire teachers of all levels of experience. An essential staffroom book.
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Makingevery lesson count
Six principles to support great teaching and learning
Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby
Foreword by Doug Lemov
A few years ago I spent a day touring schools in a major American school district. The district in question was committed to providing better training for its teachers. The organization that helped them design a summer training program to make sure newly qualified teachers were successful when they entered the classroom was using one of my books. The long tunnel of winter was turning to spring and things were going well. They invited me down to visit and see the results, and on the day in question we went from classroom to classroom to watch the new teachers at work.
Everything I’d read prior to my visit indicated that great things were afoot. The data on the new teachers indicated that they were proving more successful than almost any class of new teachers in the past – internal assessment data showed higher than expected student achievement levels; observations by school leaders were positive; the drop-out rate among the teachers low. This was all great news – the first years of teaching, in an urban school district in the US, can be brutal for new teachers. So brutal that The New Teacher Project, a highly respected organization here, found that about half of them quit in the first three years. But by every measure the district had, these teachers were surviving and thriving at higher rates than normal. The new teachers weren’t perfect but they were on their way.
What I saw in classrooms that day unexpectedly eroded my optimism. It was plain to see that the teachers had developed a set of skills and that those skills were helpful to them in setting the conditions for learning. Students were engaged and ready to learn. There they were sitting brightly at their desks with their eyes up and alert and their minds ready. They wanted to learn; they appeared to like and trust their teachers. They were waiting, those students, for something great to happen. And that was the problem.
The lessons those bright-eyed, would-be scholars participated in often lacked the fundamental elements of what a great lesson should look like. There was a general dearth of challenge and rigor. There wasn’t much independent practice. The goal seemed to be to keep students from getting turned off school by keeping them from struggling too much, so, for example, the texts they read were too easy. They read them; they were praised for reading them. But the intrinsic rewards that come from reading something rich and challenging were not bestowed upon those children. The end product did not push their minds. Other times they would do a handful of math problems say, but not fifteen of them of increasing challenge and complexity. And they rarely executed with autonomy. In the I/We/You model they did a lot of “I” (the teacher modeling) and “We” (guided practice) but not much “You” (independent practice).
It may have been better than what usually happened in a first year classroom, but it wasn’t good enough. And often it wasn’t the things the teachers hadn’t thought of that betrayed their lessons but rather the things they were trying to achieve. They’d been trained and socialized (previous to attending the summer institute) to know not to give students text that was “too rigorous.” They knew they should not give poor kids who might be behind in reading hard things to read. It’s not that what they chose to read had not been given much thought but that it had that was so damning.
And the fact that their skills in some aspects of teaching had changed the culture among the children just made the need for rigor and challenge all the more urgent. The kids had done their part. They had bought in to the promise of “something more” but the something more wasn’t “more” enough. To not deliver the kind of lessons that set their minds alight was to not deliver on a promise.
Let’s be honest here. Skills matter. A lot. To walk into those classrooms with Dostoyevsky tucked under your arm but no idea how to engage all kids, ask questions or establish orderliness is to guarantee another, perhaps quicker and occasionally spectacular, form of failure. But mastery of skills without a clear vision of “what for” also isn’t enough.
I holed up in my hotel room that night and into the wee hours hammered out a note to my colleagues with thoughts on how to develop a tool to help their trainees hold a vision of what excellent and rigorous lessons looked like, as a constant lodestone and guide, even while they were learning the fundamentals that would allow them to execute on that vision fully somewhere down the road. I suggested something called a “rigor checklist” – basically a list of gut check things teachers should be seeing and doing if they were on the right track in terms of lesson design. It included things like reading challenging text and doing lots of independent writing in complete sentences followed by revision. If none of the things on the list were happening regularly, it meant there was probably a rigor problem. Skills must be developed but without perspective and the right compass heading they don’t work that well.
If only Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby had written their outstanding Making Every Lesson Count then it might have-meant a less fraught and sleepless night for me and more importantly better teaching for children in that city. Certainly their document envisioning what a well-designed lesson should encompass is better than what I put together in my “checklist.” Their book is not only immensely useful but a great read – clear and thoughtful; direct and lively; written – you will be reminded on almost every page – not by people who sit in some theoretical aerie high above the fray but by front line educators who live and breathe the fundamentals of schooling every day in real schools with the full panoply of challenges that implies.
Yes, I still believe teaching is a craft and that teachers succeed by refining their technique over and over, to better execute the moments of their day, throughout their working lives. Allison and Tharby do too I suspect. But what they provide in this book is a vision: what does the end product look like? What is it we’re shooting for and why? What’s most important? How do we avoid the burden of bad ideas in teaching? In particular their vision focuses on the centrality of challenge and the necessity of practice, the very two elements most likely to be missing from well-meaning lessons that just aren’t rigorous enough. The very two things teachers were not providing to their eager students on that fateful day.
And of course while the visit to the schools I describe here reminds me how helpful it can be to early stage teachers, this book will be immensely useful to all teachers at all stages in their development. It’s full of grounded and real world insight. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
Doug Lemov, managing director, Uncommon Schools, author of Teach Like a Champion 2.0, Practice Perfect and Reading Reconsidered
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to the fantastic teachers and students, past and present, whose work at Durrington High School continues to inspire and challenge us every single day. Without you to learn from, this book would simply not have been possible – so thank you. The recent rise of online teacher networks – through Twitter and blogging – has led us to engage with countless educators from across the globe, working in a wide range of contexts. You have broadened our horizons beyond all measure. Once again, our heartfelt thanks – we truly are standing on the shoulders of giants.
Shaun would like to say a special ‘thank you’ to the Senior Leadership Team at Durrington for your brilliant humour, support and unswerving commitment to excellence. You are an inspiration to me and I am lucky to work alongside you and learn from you. Above all though, I would like to thank my beautiful wife Lianne and my four gorgeous children, May, Finn, Eve and Jude. You are my world and I love you all very much.
Andy would like to pay special tribute to the English team at Durrington. Your good humour, decency and desire to do the best for our students have made for ten wonderful years. Mostly, though, I would like to thank Donna and George. Donna for your love, patience and for putting up with my infuriating absentmindedness during the writing of this book. And George for your indefatigable cheerfulness – you make me happy every day.
Contents
Introduction
One Easter, Shaun and his wife, Lianne, were clearing out their loft when they happened upon Lianne’s dog-eared school books hidden away in a dark corner. They were from her fourth year (Year 10) chemistry lessons when she was taught by Mr Clarke, a teacher she remembers vividly to this day. They started to flick through. Her books were full of detailed, well-presented notes. Even thirty years later, Mr Clarke’s teaching approach shone brightly from those dusty pages.
Chemistry was hugely challenging in Mr Clarke’s lessons. In Year 2, Lianne was learning about valency; in Year 4, empirical formulae. As one of his students, it was your duty to raise your standards to meet his demands – he would never come down to meet you. Woe betide anybody whose efforts did not make the grade; Mr Clarke might publish your name on his infamous ‘dirty dozen list’! You were always expected to respond to Mr Clarke’s marking. He would write ‘corrections’ and you would be expected to repeat your incorrect answers until they were right. Mr Clarke did not worry about whether the work was intrinsically interesting. He cared that you learnt what you needed to know. Every student in Lianne’s chemistry class achieved an O level grade C or above. And it was a mixed-ability group too.
Did Mr Clarke’s lessons engage and motivate his students? You bet they did. He regularly won the school’s ‘teacher of the year’ award and is still a local hero in Porthcawl, South Wales despite having retired some years ago. Lianne is now a successful science teacher.
As a profession we have become confused. After many years of educational research, nobody can put a definitive finger on what successful classroom practice really looks like. Yet teachers across centuries and millennia seemed to have managed perfectly well. Mr Clarke certainly did. Of course, successful teaching is more than a case of simply mimicking those we admire. We have to find something that works for us individually – in our classrooms, in our schools. Might it be, however, that in recent years the profession has so overcomplicated definitions of ‘good practice’ that it has blinded itself from some simple truths?
Ofsted, who in the past have favoured and prescribed a preferred style of teaching, last year stepped back from grading individual lessons – instead letting schools define how successful teaching should look for themselves. In classrooms up and down Britain, teachers now have more freedom than they have had for a decade to develop and hone strategies that suit their preferred teaching style and the needs of their students. This is a welcome but daunting change. It also poses a question. If we are to make every lesson count, what simple and manageable actions have the greatest impact on learning?
We should categorically state from the outset that we do not believe in silver bullets. This book does not pretend to gift you with solid answers to every dilemma you will face. Instead, we offer a coherent ethos and six evidence-informed pedagogical principles that cut to the core of successful teaching: challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback and questioning. We hope that the ideas we share will be useful to new and experienced teachers alike, as you look to further your understanding of how a rich climate for learning can be forged from the small details of practice.
Two values provide the bedrock for everything that follows in this book: excellence and growth. After reading Massachusetts middle-school teacher Ron Berger’s wonderful book, An Ethic of Excellence,1 we realised that in our headlong pursuit of fashionable pedagogical ideas – such as pace, rapid progress and independent learning – we had long neglected an eternal truth. That it is our fundamental responsibility to give children the chance to be excellent. Berger writes about how he immerses students in high standard exemplar work and models, allows them to redraft their work multiple times and builds up a culture of collegiate pride. The result is a culture of craftsmanship. All children, Berger argues, are apprentice craftsmen. They should be encouraged to hone and refine their work with pride and diligence until it reaches excellence.
But excellence is hard to come by. To achieve it, a child must work hard and be prepared to face the setbacks they will inevitably meet on the journey. This is where Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck’s ideas about mindset take centre stage. Dweck has found that human beings fall roughly into one of two broad categories: those who adopt a fixed mindset and those who adopt a growth mindset. Those who think in a fixed way believe that their ability is innate and cannot be changed: I was born clever – or stupid – and that way I will remain. Those alive to the possibility of growth, however, will attribute success or failure not to an unchangeable lack of ability, but to whether they have worked hard or not. Put simply, if a child flunks an exam there are two possible attributions they might make: place the blame on their natural ability and see no need to increase their effort next time around, or seek to learn from their mistakes with the aim to do better next time.
Of course, it is the growth mindset that we must seek to encourage. Teachers and children need to realise, in Dweck’s words, that ‘working harder makes you smarter’ and that it is old-fashioned effort that unlocks improvement, not a gift granted at birth. Dweck’s research demonstrates that through the language we use with young people, adults can have a huge influence on the mindset a child adopts. How we frame success and failure, and the way we promote ‘struggle’ as a positive state, are hugely important. Viewed from another angle, Dweck’s findings point at another principle behind this book: exemplary teachers are not born great, they become great.
Underpinning this book, then, are the notions gleaned from Dweck and Berger that expert teachers must be uncompromising in their quest to foster pride and hard work. Nevertheless, excellence and growth are soulless, vacuous aims without good teaching to bolster them. It means very little to ask a child to adopt this philosophy if we have not furnished them with the tools that make it possible. Indeed, Muijs and Reynolds conclude that research tends to show that ‘the effect of achievement on self-concept is stronger than the effect of self-concept on achievement’.2 In other words, teach students well and they will achieve; and if they achieve, they will begin to see themselves as successful learners. A school ethos of excellence and growth, then, can only truly be created through great teaching that leads to genuine learning.
An extensive report from the Sutton Trust entitled What Makes Great Teaching? argues that research evidence proves that many popular teaching practices are ineffective in improving student attainment.3 The authors name the following strategies as being myths that have little impact on learning: lavishing low achieving students with praise; encouraging students to discover ideas for themselves; grouping by ability; rereading as a revision tool; attempting to improve motivation before teaching content; teaching to ‘learning style’; and the idea that active learning helps you remember.
However, the two factors linked with the strongest student outcomes are:
♦ Content knowledge. Teachers with strong knowledge and understanding of their subject make a greater impact on students’ learning. It is also important for teachers to understand how students think about content and be able to identify common misconceptions on a topic.
♦ Quality of instruction. This includes effective questioning and the use of assessment by teachers. Specific practices, like reviewing previous learning, providing model responses for students, giving adequate time for practice to embed skills securely and progressively introducing new learning (scaffolding) are also found to improve attainment.
It would be a mistake to adopt the broad brushstrokes of such findings crudely or uncritically. Our joint experiences have demonstrated again and again that schools should never underestimate the practical wisdom of the classroom teacher. Careful day-to-day decision-making, informed by years of thinking and practice, is vital. Situational factors have a huge influence too. Great teaching is not a single entity; it varies enormously from school to school, from subject to subject and from classroom to classroom. What makes you an exemplary practitioner in your environment might not make us exemplary teachers in ours – and vice versa. Needless to say, it would also be a grave mistake to dismiss the findings highlighted in the Sutton Trust report, and so the ideas shared in this book do lean on this and other sources of evidence, such as cognitive psychology.
It follows, then, that this book will combine three aspects when coming to a definition of effective teaching: what the research evidence suggests; what we have learnt from inspirational teaching colleagues at our school and in the burgeoning online education community; and, most of all, what we continue to learn from our day-to-day experiences as classroom teachers.
We have targeted six interrelated pedagogical principles. Inspired by the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin, ours is a ‘tight but loose’ approach. We have highlighted a few essentials to great teaching but leave you free to implement them and connect them as you see fit.
The principles work as follows:
The first principle, challenge, is the driving force of teaching. Only by giving our students work that makes them struggle, and having the highest possible expectations of them, will we be able to move them beyond what they know and can do now. This will be the focus of Chapter 1.
Challenge informs teacher explanation, which is the skill of conveying new concepts and ideas. The trick is to make abstract, complex ideas clear and concrete in students’ minds. It is deceptively hard to do well, and so we delve into the art and science of teacher talk in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 3 we move on to modelling. This involves ‘walking’ students through problems and procedures so that we can demonstrate the procedures and thought processes they will soon apply themselves. It also involves the use of exemplar work.
Without practice student learning will be patchy and insecure. They need to do it, and they need to do it many times as they move towards independence. In Chapter 4, we take heed of the findings from cognitive science research. It goes without saying that practice is the fulcrum around which the other five strategies turn. This is because it develops something that is fundamental to learning – memory.
Students need to know where they are going and how they are going to get there. Without feedback, our fifth principle and the subject of Chapter 5, practice becomes little more than ‘task completion’. We give students feedback to guide them on the right path, and we receive feedback from students to modify our future practice. And so the cycle continues …
Chapter 6 leads us to our last principle – questioning. Like explanation, questioning is a skilful art. It has a range of purposes: it allows us to keep students on track by testing for misconceptions and it promotes deeper thought about subject content.
Finally, in Chapter 7, we consider how school leaders can put structures and systems in place that will allow a climate of excellence and growth to take root and flourish. We include a number of case studies, including from some of the most influential school leaders in the UK.
Through the application of these six principles, the ultimate goal is to lead students towards independence. The idea of ‘independent learning’ is often misunderstood. Independence is a desirable outcome of teaching, not a teaching strategy in its own right. Our job is to teach children, rather than to cross our fingers in the hope they will learn on their own. Classroom management and relationships are of great importance too, yet they are not the subject of this book. Without a strong classroom climate in place, it is unlikely that the above principles will have much effect. Even so, research shows that sometimes, even if a child is working hard and engaged, new learning might not be taking place.4
So, how do these six principles relate to one another? Well, to be clear, this is not a neat cycle to be adhered to in every lesson. Learning is highly complex. It ebbs and flows through lessons, across schemes of work and over years. In fact, the hackneyed ‘three-part’ lesson of starter, main and plenary is hopelessly simplistic. Some learning cycles are simple, quick and over in minutes. Others are much longer loops covering two, three or more lessons. Others still are choppy and messy, returning back to teacher explanation and modelling repeatedly as students struggle to refine new knowledge and skill through lots of practice and focused feedback. Some sequences will prove so simple and quick that all six principles will be unnecessary. Others will require them all.
To explain to a child how to spell ‘accommodation’ might take a matter of minutes – ‘Two cots need two mattresses in any accommodation!’ – plus a bit of practice using the word in context. To teach the same child how to write a speech, however, will require a more comprehensive sequence. You will set the level of challenge high by introducing students to seminal historical speeches – those by Elizabeth I, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, perhaps. These will act as exemplars to inspire their own writing, but you will also need to model explicitly some key aspects of speech-writing with the class: an arresting opening, a well-evidenced argument, a powerful ending. Students will need to practise these discrete features and receive feedback on their performance before they embark on writing a full speech of their own. Perhaps they will redraft as a result of your feedback. Through each stage of the unit of work, you will have questioned them to find out what they understand and to provoke deeper thinking.
The majority of this book is dedicated to sharing the planning, delivery and assessment strategies that bring each of the six principles to life. For instance, there are ten strategies to accompany Chapter 4 on practice, including The Power of Three on the importance of repetition, Fold It In on building regular practice of important concepts into long-term planning, and Pair Their Writing, a strategy that involves students verbally supporting one another during writing practice. Each chapter begins with two typical classroom scenarios. These are fictional but rooted in problems we and many other teachers encounter on a daily basis.
Our hope is that you will pick and choose from the strategies as you see fit. While one teacher might use all the strategies with great success, the next might have little success with any of them. What matters most is how and why they are implemented. They will need to be adapted and refined to suit the content you are teaching and the children you are teaching it to.
We propose that all planning should start with the question: what is the subject content I aim to teach to the students in front of me? It is at this point that the principles and their supporting strategies come into play. We suggest that you adopt the individual strategies as rough ideas to adjust, modify and combine to suit your subject and teaching style. Aim to capture their essence, their spirit, rather than to apply them as hard-and-fast rules. Ours is not a regimented, thought-free approach to teaching.
A persuasive line of argument suggests that generic teaching strategies, such as those we share in this book, are a distraction; that pedagogy is more effective when it is subject specific. In general we agree: delivery of subject content must be the primary concern. However, there are some fundamentals to teaching and learning that we should all be made aware of. This is why each chapter starts with a description of the principle and why it works, and then moves on to practical strategies. Once you understand the essential concept you can decide which strategies can be usefully adapted for your subject.
We hope you will enjoy our book and be as inspired in the reading of it as we have been by the teaching that has inspired it. Most of all, we hope that you will relish building and maintaining a culture of growth and excellence with your students. Teachers like Mr Clarke are certainly not relics from a bygone era.
The six principles
1 Ron Berger, An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).
2 Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds, Effective Teaching: Evidence and Practice, 3rd edn (London: Sage, 2011), p. 188.
3 Robert Coe, Cesare Aloisi, Steve Higgins and Lee Elliot Major, What Makes Great Teaching? Review of the Underpinning Research (London: Sutton Trust, 2014). Available at: http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/What-makes-great-teaching-FINAL-4.11.14.pdf.
4 Graham Nuthall, The Hidden Lives of Learners (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2007), p. 24.
Chapter 1
Challenge
Evie
Evie arrives at secondary school with the label ‘less able’. She has fallen behind during her primary years in the basics – reading, writing and arithmetic. She is a hard-working, conscientious child from an underprivileged background. She receives little support from home. On arrival at secondary school, Evie takes a number of baseline tests and before long finds herself in the bottom set for many subjects. In unstreamed subjects, teachers differentiate by giving her easier work to complete than her peers. Teachers rarely expect more than this from Evie – after all, somebody has to be the weakest in the group. It is no wonder then that Evie herself has little expectation that she can become an academic achiever. After five years of secondary school, Evie enters the real world. She has failed her GCSEs.
Emma, the English NQT
During her first year as an English teacher, Emma decides to take a risk and teach a poem she has always loved to her Year 9 group, Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. It is a sullenThursdayafternoon in late November and the lesson is nothing short of a disaster. The classroom is awash with cries of ‘I don’t get it’, ‘Why do we have to do poetry?’ and ‘Mr Brown’s class next door are watching a video today.’ At last the bell rings for the end of the day, and Emma vows never again to attempt Browning with her Year 9 groups. She will look for an easier alternative next year.
Challenge – What It Is And Why It Matters
Put simply, challenge in education is the provision of difficult work that causes students to think deeply and engage in healthy struggle. It is unfortunate that all too often challenge is presented in the context of ‘challenging the most able’. Evie’s story is an extreme logical extension of this phenomenon. Teachers were only ever expected to support her, never challenge her. Sadly, these low expectations, consciously and subconsciously, were transferred to Evie herself, whose schooling became defined by a lack of self-belief. Fascinating, if controversial, research from Rosenthal and Jacobson in the 1960s, into what they dubbed ‘the Pygmalion effect’, suggests that our expectations of students can have a profound effect not only on how we interact with them but also on the student’s future achievement.1 They found – and it makes for uncomfortable reading – that teachers in their study would interact differently with those students of whom they had higher expectations. They would be ‘warmer’ towards these children, teach them more material, give them more time to respond to questions and provide them with more positive praise.
It is bizarre, morally questionable even, that we have come to believe that only those we describe as the ‘most able’ need or deserve to be challenged. Some overarching principles are needed to help us to use challenge in the classroom:
♦ It is not just about the ‘most able’.
♦ We should have high expectations of all students, all the time.
♦ It is good for students to struggle just outside of their comfort zone, as that is when they are likely to learn most.
The first and last points relate to Carol Dweck’s work on mindsets. Those students who adopt a growth mindset are more likely to understand that hard work, effort and learning from failure are vital to their future success. Providing them with challenging work is easy for the teacher; they are likely to embrace it. They will enjoy the struggle and see this as integral to their learning. It is the underachieving, fixed mindset students that cause us most difficulty. To them, effort feels fruitless and seems to compound their negative self-perception. Because they want to be seen as bright at all costs, they do not want to be considered as struggling. The temptation, as a teacher, is to give these students ‘easy work’ for a quiet life. Because the work leads to no real effort or deep thinking, it is very unlikely that they are learning. However, it keeps them satisfied because by completing the work they will not have to lose face through public failure.
Instead, we need to move these students from a fixed to a growth mindset, and the only way to do this is to give them more challenging work and to support them by helping them to believe that they can do it. We want to shift them to a position where, through hard work, resilience and determination, they will eventually embrace the struggle.
Have you ever been told, following a lesson observation, that your lesson was ‘badly pitched’ because students were struggling? This is an odd statement because, within reason, struggle supports learning. A careful balance needs to be struck – as in the figure below. While we want to move students out of their comfort zone into the struggle zone, we also need to ensure that we do not push them too far so that they end up in the panic zone. Hattie and Yates have summarised research showing that useful learning will not occur when there is too much new material for our working memory – the part of the mind responsible for holding and processing information – to cope with.2 The skill of the effective teacher, therefore, is to push students just far enough so that they are in a productive struggle, but not so far that they drown in a sea of panic.
The second scenario at the beginning of this chapter featured Emma, the NQT English teacher, grappling to teach a difficult poem to an uncooperative class. The students were possibly experiencing cognitive overload or perhaps feigning laziness. The solution here is to reconsider how to teach the poem, rather than to scrap it from the curriculum forever. If ample time is given to teaching the poem step by step, then teaching ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ to the full ability range is eminently possible. The take-away here is that challenge must start at home – with us, the teachers.
So where does this leave differentiation, which is conventionally thought of as the teacher providing students of different abilities with work to match their ‘ability profile’? The figure below demonstrates our solution to the problem of ensuring that needs are met, yet keeping the challenge high.
This model suggests that we should set the bar of expectation high for all students, irrespective of their starting points. Our job, then, is to respond to and support students during lessons, and over weeks, months and years, so that they all strive to reach, or in some cases surpass, this common goal. In doing so, differentiation will lie in the skilfulness of our response to the anticipated and unanticipated difficulties that our students will encounter along the way. This can only work effectively if we understand the individual students we are teaching, we have a deep knowledge of subject content and we know which parts of our subject students tend to find difficult.
For example, imagine your students are writing an essay on Shylock from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. They are five minutes into the task when …
♦ Callum puts his hand up and asks how to spell ‘traumatised’, as he often does with new vocabulary. You tap the dictionary on his desk and smile, but repeat the word for the whole class to reinforce your expectation that students employ challenging vocabulary.
♦ Grace’s hand shoots up. You smile and motion it down. She smiles wryly back, sensing that, once again, you are encouraging her to be more resilient.
♦ ‘Less able’ Katy has not written a thing. You verbalise the first half of a sentence and she finishes it. Then she writes it down and off she goes.
♦ You and your teaching assistant circulate for a couple of minutes armed with highlighter pens. You randomly zoom in on students who are likely to have misspelled words and either highlight them or put a dot in the margin for the student to work out where the mistake is.
♦ On your rounds, you have noticed the clunky overuse of ‘this’ at the start of sentences. You stop the class and explain how they can use ‘which’ clauses (relative clauses) to combine sentences into fluent complex sentences.
♦ You come to Matt, incredibly able but prone to prolixity. He must cut out ten unnecessary words before continuing.
♦ Graham has written a page and a half of scrawled nonsense and is swinging back in his chair. You hand him a piece of paper and tell him to redraft the first paragraph, this time using the paragraph structure you have given him. You sense potential defiance and remind him that it is breaktime after the lesson.
In this scenario, all the students are given the same task, yet your response to individuals is different. These responses are decided not according to preconceived assumptions of need, but to genuine needs as they arise. High expectations are in place because you set the bar high to start with. You then differentiate downwards as you experiment with the most suitable strategy to hoist each individual child up. This is a highly subtle skill that takes many years to learn. You will never master it fully – no two children are quite the same!
We believe that much that is promoted as good differentiation practice is both unmanageable and counterproductive: it is not humanly possible to personalise planning for each and every child, nor, as often suggested, is it possible to create three levels of worksheet for every lesson.
The following strategies provide you with some simple, transferable ideas to help you challenge your students – and yourself.
1. Make Them Single and Challenging
How can I prepare lessons that challenge every student?
In recent years, there has been a trend to use all, most and some learning objectives at the start of lessons to cater for differing student entry points. Take this example from a biology lesson on photosynthesis:
All students will describe the factors required for photosynthesis.
Most students will be able to write a word equation for photosynthesis.
Some students will be able to write a balanced formula equation for photosynthesis.
What message does this give to students? As long as I can reach the first objective, I have done enough? Why risk failure and humiliation in front of my peers by attempting the other ones and getting them wrong? Through this method we may well be perpetuating low expectations.
A single, challenging learning objective is a far more aspirational:
Describe and explain the process and chemical nature of photosynthesis.
As a result, our expectations remain high for all, whatever their starting point. The role of the teacher, then, is to support all to reach, or even go beyond, this point. Naturally, not all will always get there, so our next job will be to work out an alternative approach for these students. Consider the fact that many of the students we categorise as ‘low ability’, like Evie, may never have been required to meet a challenging learning objective over many years of schooling. Is it any wonder that these children typically make very little progress?
2. Scale Up
How do I gauge whether lesson content is challenging or not?
A rule of thumb is to take into account the expected knowledge, concepts and skills in your subject and teach your classes just beyond that point. So at Key Stage 3, for example, dip into GCSE level; at GCSE, dip into A level; at A level, dip into undergraduate work. In doing so, the most challenging concepts that the assessment criteria require them to know will not be the most challenging topics they will have been exposed to. In fact, we have found that students find it very motivating to be told that they are studying something intrinsically difficult.
One of the most robust findings in experimental psychology is that of the anchor effect. Our perceptions, whether we consciously realise it or not, are unduly influenced by the first piece of information we receive on a topic – the anchor, if you like.3 Imagine you are bartering for a porcelain jug at your local car-boot fair. When you hear from the seller that the price is £100, all negotiations are adjusted up and down from that figure – £55 suddenly sounds like a bargain, even if the jug is actually worth mere pennies.
This works as a useful metaphor for how we should plan for challenge in our classrooms. By exposing students to content at a level usually considered above (or beyond) national expectations, we anchor in challenge. Success is measured by adjusting up and down from here. This also works for the start of lessons. As soon as the students cross the threshold, they should be challenged to think about the topic at hand. For example: What does this picture tell you about …? Write down five things you know about …
If the anchor is set too low so that the content of lessons is less stretching, then, needless to say, overall success will be adjusted up or down from this inferior position. Therefore, if we are to genuinely challenge our students, we must take on the guise of the unscrupulous car-boot seller. Set our original price high and we are more likely to achieve better results than if we set it low. So, for example, introduce GCSE English literature students to the basics of feminist and Marxist critical theory, or in science, when teaching enzyme action and denaturation, explain the intermolecular forces that hold the active site in shape and how this changes as a result of increased temperature.
