Sustaining Pace and Challenge - Part 4

This blog is Part 4 of 4.

You can access the other parts here:

Five Simple Ways to Sustain Pace

As promised in Part 3, here we have five techniques you can apply in almost any lesson to help sustain a good level of pace.

Strategy 1: Time Limits and Countdowns

Setting time limits creates a sense of urgency.

Depending on the age of your learners, you may need to give them continued guidance on how long is left.

Do be careful to ensure your time limits are realistic.

If they are too short the sense of pace will be lost.

The time will be up, and learners will not be close to finishing the work you set them.

Countdowns differ slightly in that the time limit is only introduced towards the end of the activity.

For example, we might tell learners they have two minutes left and then display a timer on the board that counts down the remaining seconds.

Strategy 2: Circulating

During activities, circulate through the room and, as part of your efforts, remind learners how much time there is available, push them to work quicker, and make interventions that either speed up their work or create a greater sense of dynamism.

Depending on your learners, this might involve targeting the whole class, or specific individuals/groups.

Strategy 3: Introducing New Elements

Having set learners off on an activity, introduce new elements which they must complete as well.

This creates a sense of pace as you are altering the demands under which learners are working.

For example, you might set learners off on a paired discussion task and then, halfway through the activity, introduce a subsidiary task requiring each pair to create a six-sentence summary of their discussion.

In this example, the pace of work immediately jumps as learners must readjust to complete the new task in the remaining time.

Strategy 4: Mid-Lesson Reviews

This involves taking a break during the lesson to review the learning up to that point.

It is also known as a mini-plenary.

The review should last a couple of minutes and be led by the teacher.

You can guide learners in reviewing the aim of the lesson and the learning that has taken place so far.

Then ask them to predict what they think will happen next in the lesson and why.

All of this helps to re-energise the class, who return to their work with a renewed sense of purpose.

Strategy 5: Big Question Track-Back

If you framed your lesson with a big question, you can continually track-back to this during the session.

This sees you asking learners to what extent they can answer the question as well as whether their answers (or understanding of the question) have altered, based on the learning they have done.

As with mid-lesson reviews, the technique is a good way to renew the sense of purpose underpinning the learning.

And with that, we draw our exploration of how to sustain pace and challenge to a close.

It goes without saying that, to excel as a trainee teacher, you should aim to maintain a good level of pace and a high degree of challenge in every lesson you teach.

Applying, practicing and modifying the ideas we’ve looked at will help you to do just that.

We conclude with some questions and activities designed to help you reflect on the topic and to further challenge(!) your thinking.

Questions

Is having your thinking challenged always a comfortable experience? What might be the implications of this for teaching and learning?
How could you train learners to respond positively to challenges? Can you train learners to embrace them? How?
Is it possible to judge the pace of a lesson from your lesson plan, or is pace something you can only assess ‘in the moment’?
What characterises a lesson with good pace? How does it differ from a lesson in which the pace is too slow or too quick?
During your time in education, when was your thinking challenged the most? What caused this, how did it feel, and how did you develop as a result?

Activities

Take two or three of your most recent lesson plans and two differently coloured highlighter pens. First, go through each plan and use one pen to highlight the points at which you think the lesson offers a sufficient level of challenge for all learners. Then, take the second pen and highlight the points at which you think you could have included more challenge. Finally, reflect on what you will take from this and how you can apply it to the next lesson you plan.
Challenge yourself to learn something new. It could be connected to your training or something else entirely. As you go through the challenge, pay attention to what the experience is like – both cognitively and emotionally (for example, do you get frustrated?). At the end of the process, consider what insights this has provided about how your learners might view the challenges you set them.