Strategy One: Scaffolding and Modelling Success

If learners feel they can’t access the work, or if they feel that success is beyond their grasp, then they are likely to experience disengagement.

They will look at what they are being asked to do and, whether this perception is right or wrong, assume there is an unbridgeable gap between where they are and where you want them to be.

From here, they will start to think that status cannot be achieved in the classroom through working hard (because why bother if success is out of reach?) and may feel alienated as a result.

Scaffolding is the first technique on which we can call to neutralise this problem.

This sees us doing things that take learners a little way towards completing the task, before leaving them to do the rest of the work themselves.

It involves us helping learners to bridge the gap so they perceive learning as accessible and therefore engage with it as we hoped they would.

Scaffolding is anything you do that makes a task that little bit easier for learners to access.

This might involve simplifying the task or increasing the level of learner skill (for example, by providing a cheat sheet).

Examples include:

• Providing frames or models learners can apply. For example, writing frames, listening frames and sentence starters.
• Giving learners part of the answer, explaining this, and then encouraging them to work out the rest of the answer themselves.
• Asking questions that help learners articulate and refine their ideas. This process develops understanding and gives learners access to the learning by helping them to think about it in a way they may not have realised was relevant.
• Providing learners with a tool they can use to do more than they can do on their own. For example, a maths teacher might give their learners manipulatives to use, or a number chart.
• Using exemplar work or a worked example as a model that learners can copy, imitate or use as a starting point.

This final idea relates to the wider notion of modelling what success looks like.

Here, we are concerned with showing learners what it means to be successful in a task.

This can include the provision of exemplar work and annotated examples.

It can also involve:

• Visually demonstrating how to complete a task
• Verbally demonstrating how to answer effectively
• Verbally demonstrating how to think effectively
• Showing learners examples of how to meet each of the success criteria you set for a particular task
• Asking a learner to show their peer how they have gone about engaging with a task or trying to meet the success criteria

In each case, the aim is to give learners access to success; to help them understand what they need to do to engage with the learning and achieve their aims.

This is distinct from doing the work for the learner or giving them the answer.

The goal is to help the learner understand what success entails and to understand how they can be successful themselves.

This is what the model provides.

All of which is motivational, supporting positive behaviour management.

Strategy Two: Challenging All Learners

Lessons that offer no sense of challenge are unstimulating.

This is because they ask learners to simply repeat what they can already do, or to operate at a level that is well within their scope of action.

As such, the sense of progression and development is missing.

We lose the benefits that stem from novelty, risk and wrestling with something we can’t yet do. The implication is that we have low expectations and don’t trust learners to push themselves.

Unchallenging lessons do not communicate high expectations.

The flipside of this is that if we set out to challenge our learners in every lesson we teach, then we are looking to engage them from start to finish.

This approach also communicates high expectations.

It tells learners that we think they can take on, embrace, and succeed with challenges.

Here are three simple techniques, all fundamental to effective teaching, you can use to embed high challenge in your lessons and, by extension, differentiate in a way that promotes engagement and positive behaviour:

• Seek to elicit information about where learners are at with their learning. Do this by assessing learning within the lesson. Listen to learners, observe them, read their work, ask them questions, and use whole-class feedback techniques to elicit information about what they know. Use this information as a basis from which to challenge learners. Knowing where they are at means knowing what will challenge them and what will simply be repetition.
• During activities, circulate through the room and pose questions that are tailored to individual learners. These questions should be challenging, pushing learners to think carefully about the topic. By tailoring your questions, you can ensure they meet the needs of different learners. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a useful framework for this. Another option is to see questions as being on a continuum that runs from concrete to abstract. The more able a learner is, the more abstract the questions you pose to challenge them.
• Plan extension tasks and questions for every activity in your lessons. This ensures more-able learners remain engaged while other members of the class are working on completing the main activity. Many teachers overlook this strategy, almost as if it is too obvious or simple. Yet it works. It doesn’t add much to workload. And it sends a clear message to learners that there is always an additional level of challenge that they can aim for.

You know these techniques. They are all simple, familiar and easy to implement.

Yet do you do them?

They are easy to forget. They are easy to do for a time and then stop. And they are easy to use now and then, in a piecemeal way.

But if you want to use differentiation as a cornerstone of your positive behaviour management, doing these three techniques in every lesson you teach is essential.

• If you consistently elicit information and use this to tailor the level of challenge in your lessons, good things will follow.
• If you consistently use tailored questioning to provide varied levels of challenge for different learners, good things will follow.
• And if you consistently provide higher-order, challenging extension tasks on all your slides, good things will follow.

There’s nothing newfangled or extraordinary about these techniques.

But they work.

They make behaviour management far easier.

And they engage learners in a way that is meaningful and enjoyable. For them and for you.