As a sector I think there’s a tendency to make things too easy for too many of our pupils in the mistaken belief that they can’t cope with demanding work.
Yet when we talk with pupils and students, we find that there’s a common thread: they enjoy doing difficult work, because they say, it makes them feel clever!
By way of example, in Assessment for Learning without Limits, Alison Peacock and colleagues interviewed pupils as they moved from Year 5 to Year 6. They wanted to find out what they thought about ‘ability’ groups, but the pupils’ responses were about the level of work they were given:
The most poignant and powerful part for me is that the children on the ‘bottom’ table wanted to try harder work, but they knew they would never get the chance. Well, I don’t know what a child is capable of, until they are given difficult demanding work and I support them to get there!
When I was doing some work in a school where I’d been asked to talk to a group of Year 9 students. This group had been identified as high prior attaining, but underachieving and I found a similar response from them. When I asked them if there was any subject where they did not mess around, they told me that they worked hard and enjoyed geography.
When I asked why, they said that their teacher gave them interesting, difficult materials and supported them to understand.
For example, for homework she would often give them articles and extracts from professional geography publications. She would tell them ‘Now you’re not going to understand all this, but that’s alright because at the start of the next lesson, we are going to talk about what you did and didn’t understand.’
These students were thrilled to be offered this work and when I was in their geography lesson later that day, their teacher had the same high expectations for all the students in the mixed attainment class.
She offered this demanding work with the principles of ‘high challenge and low threat’. She signalled that the work was difficult (high challenge) and reassured the class that they would talk about what they found difficult, in order to help them understand (low threat).
When I checked the results for geography, they were the highest by a margin, in a high performing school. This teacher was offering students work ‘above their pay grade’ and it paid off, not just in terms of strong attainment, but in pupils having a deep engagement with the subject.
So, when we’re thinking about providing our pupils and students with more demanding work, one way of doing this is to offer them new content through a high-quality text. For secondary colleagues, there’s a series of conversations with Steve Willshaw talking with subject leaders on Myatt & Co about how they include texts in their key stage 3 programmes of study.
For primary colleagues, The Teachers’ Collection is dedicated to linking texts to the national curriculum programmes of study, more info here.
Until next time
Mary
PS Lekha Sharma and Sam Crome have come together to create Building Teams on the Huh Academy
With Sam from secondary and Lekha working on culture from a primary perspective, they found many similarities: we all enjoy working in settings where the purpose is clear, where we all understand why we are doing the work we do; that the vision is not something aired just at the beginning of a year, but is revisited regularly, and is evident in the way people feel and talk about their work. You can watch my conversation with them here.
Great article. I hold the belief with my students that confidence comes when they see they can do something they previously couldn't. Often, when they start my course they find it hard, but still fun. A few months in, their confidence is up because they can see the difference in their work. They are doing what they previously couldn't do. Now they are challenging themselves to get to that next level, knowing it is only a matter of time and hard work.