Sustaining Pace and Challenge - Part 1

This blog is Part 1 of 4.

You can access the other parts here:

In Part 1, I’ll focus on differentiation. In Part 2, how to use questioning to stretch and challenge all learners. In Part 3, Bloom’s Taxonomy. And, in Part 4, I’ll share five simple strategies for sustaining pace.

Simplifying Differentiation

There is a lot of confusion over what differentiation is.

The term has become unnecessarily vague.

Put simply, differentiation means all the things the teacher does to help learners make progress, regardless of their starting points.

It is synonymous with personalisation.

This is because to personalise a lesson means to help different learners access the learning and achieve well. This is the same as securing progress across the board.

In recent years, the term ‘adaptive teaching’ has been used in place of differentiation.

For me, and how I have always viewed differentiation, the change is surface level.

True differentiation has always involved the teacher adapting their teaching (and their planning).

This is evident in the definition I have given above.

By differentiating effectively, you can sustain pace and challenge.

This is because you will be doing things that help all learners to access the learning and find the level of challenge that is right for them.

Five Categories of Differentiation

A useful way to think about differentiation is to use the Five Categories of Differentiation model I developed some years ago.

The five categories are:

Questioning
Activities
Words and writing
Things the teacher can do or use
Things learners can do or use (also called self-scaffolding)

Thinking in this way gives purchase.

The concept is no longer large and unwieldy.

Instead, it becomes specific and tied to practical realities.

If you are ever uncertain whether you are differentiating sufficiently, ask yourself whether every learner in the class can access the learning, experience challenge, and make progress.

If the answer is ‘no’, return to the five categories.

Identify one thing you could do straight away to help improve matters.

When you have done this, return to the categories again and see if there is something else you could do.

Working in this way helps you to plan and teach lessons that are highly personalised.

That take account of the different needs of your learners.

A few examples then, to contextualise the categories.

Questioning is self-explanatory.

Every time we ask a question, whether to a learner, a pair or a group, we are in a position to differentiate.

This is because we can tailor our questions to the learners in front of us.

So, for example, we might ask a learner who appears to be struggling a series of questions that help them to think about how the lesson content connects to what they already know.

Or we might simply ask them what is wrong and what help they would like.

Activities is another straightforward category.

It encompasses all the activities you plan.

Differentiated activities allow learners to engage with the content at their own level.

This could be through the provision of choices or options, sub-tasks, extension tasks, group work or the use of discussion to underpin written answers (the former being an easier means through which to articulate, edit and refine thinking than the latter).

Words and writing covers all literacy matters.

That is, speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Tools to support less-able learners include sentence starters, writing frames, exemplar paragraphs and images that supplement written or verbal definitions.

In each case, we are scaffolding words and writing, making it easier for the learner to access the learning.

More-able learners can be challenged to write or read more complex pieces of work, to speak and listen in accordance with certain criteria, or to take on different perspectives when engaging in any of these activities.

Things the teacher can do or use covers modelling, scaffolding, talking, circulating, intervening, explaining and so forth.

You will also note that questioning could fit in here.

This demonstrates the fact that, while the categories are a useful tool through which to think, they are not mutually exclusive.

Talking to learners is always a good way to differentiate.

If you talk to most of your class during a lesson, you give yourself repeated opportunities to assess where learners are at and to tailor the learning in response, mediating it for them.

Finally, we have things learners can do or use.

Or self-scaffolding.

This includes the obvious, like dictionaries and thesauruses, as well as the less obvious like scrap paper (to store information and thus free up space in working memory), mnemonic devices, working with peers, exemplar work and asking questions.

In all these cases, the aim is either to give learners a tool that extends their capacity to think and act, or to present a method that allows them to further their knowledge and understanding.

Returning to these categories when planning and teaching ensures you are always doing things that help all learners access the learning.

This means your teaching will continually include a high level of differentiation.

Next, we’ll look at some specific things you can do to challenge the thinking of different groups of learners. These strategies will stretch learners’ thinking at the same time as they maintain the pace of your lessons.

Challenging Less-Able Learners

Characteristically, less-able learners find it harder to deal with abstract ideas compared to concrete ones.

This does not mean they cannot access abstract thought, just that to do so is often, at first, a challenge.

As such, a good way to challenge less-able learners is to ask questions or set tasks that straddle the concrete and the abstract.

For example, in a geography lesson we might give these learners a list of push and pull factors connected to migration, with each one being explained by an imaginary figure.

(I.e. Reza decided to move to Europe because he thought he could get a better education there).

We could then ask learners to sort these into the two groups of push and pull before ranking the items in each group from most to least influential.

Finally, we could challenge learners to write a short, evaluative summary explaining whether they believe migration tends to be a result of push factors, pull factors or a combination.

This example demonstrates how a carefully planned activity can move from the concrete (individuals giving reasons for their migration) to the abstract (deciding whether, in general, push or pull factors are more significant).

Not only does such an approach challenge less-able learners, but it does so in a progressive way, increasing the chance they will be able to successfully meet that challenge.

This method can be applied across the board and with different age groups.

Simply bear in mind the gradual movement from concrete thought to abstract thought when planning an activity, and recognise the internal scaffolding this creates.

Challenging Middle Ability Learners

Middle ability learners are often overlooked.

This means their thinking isn’t challenged and that, for them, the lesson lacks pace.

This usually happens because teachers spend time attending to the less-able and more-able learners, hoping the main body of the lesson will be sufficient to push those in the middle.

But this can only be the case if we think in advance about how this plays out in practice.

Fortunately, there are two simple techniques you can use to ensure middle ability learners are always challenged in your lessons.

The first is to make it clear that any work you set for more-able learners is presented as being a challenge for all learners.

This means encouraging your more-able learners to engage with such work but also making it clear that middle ability learners can tackle it as well.

In part, this is about communicating, and then regularly reinforcing, high expectations.

For example, you might reveal a pair of extension questions specifically designed to challenge your more-able learners, who you suspect will almost certainly get onto them.

As the lesson progresses, you would also direct your middle ability learners to these questions, indicating that they have an opportunity to really push themselves once they have finished the main body of work.

The second is to introduce added levels of complexity to activities mid-way through.

For example, imagine we have a PE class who are practising long and short passing in football.

We might spend our time working with the less-able learners while the middle ability and more-able hone their skills.

About halfway through the activity, we introduce a set of caveats, for example:

You must change feet every time you make a pass
You must alternate between ground passes and passes through the air
You must use the outside of your foot to make your pass

We then ask learners to decide which caveat to work on applying, or which two they will take on.

This neatly covers middle ability and more-able learners, challenging both.

The former can select one of the caveats and practice this until it is perfected, while the latter can choose two of the caveats and attempt to master both at the same time.

Again, you can adapt these methods to fit with whatever subject and whichever age-group you are teaching.

Challenging More-Able Learners

When it comes to challenging more-able learners, it is vital that we don’t fall into the trap of simply giving them more of the same to do.

This doesn’t challenge them, is boring, and often acts as a demotivator.

If they have completed a task or mastered a skill, asking them to do more of the same will neither push them nor stretch them.

This means progress will not be maximised.

So, we need to plan to make greater demands of our more-able learners.

A simple technique, that supports all learners who are involved, is peer teaching.

If a more-able learner completes the work you have set, invite them to teach one or more of their peers.

The process of teaching sees the learner in question having to go back over their learning, analyse it, and then synthesise it so they can present it in a way that aids the understanding of whomever they are teaching.

Two points to note before we look at another technique.

It is best to provide some guidance, so learners do not feel you are simply lumbering them with an unwanted task.

First, specify who you want the learner in question to support.

This could be an individual, a group, or a set of learners all struggling with the same issue.

Second, give clear instructions as to what the teaching should entail.

For example:

‘Can you help Johnny to develop his answers. He’s struggling to think of more than one reason. Talk him through the different reasons and give him examples of why they are appropriate.’

Here, the challenge is specific and personalised.

This leads to better outcomes and is more motivating.

The only other point to consider here is that you should avoid overusing this strategy.

If you do fall into this trap, your more-able learners will likely start seeing it as a chore and lose interest.

A second useful technique involves asking learners to construct or predict possible questions that could be used to test someone’s learning.

To do this, learners must think about what they’ve learned, and how this could be synthesised into one or more questions.

However, the challenge increases because learners must also take account of whether their questions will elicit the information required to accurately assess whether learning has taken place.

Which is challenging.

As with the previous two sections, both techniques can be adapted for use across the board.

In Part 3, we’ll look at Bloom’s Taxonomy.

This is wonderful tool for sustaining pace and challenge.

I also have a complete knowledge base devoted to it, if you want to explore it in greater depth.