You know the feeling when you return in September, feeling prepared, lessons ready, imagining your groups, beautiful 5 minute lesson plans for the first 12 weeks that took an hour each all ready….smug! Then day 1 you are hit with...right so today we thought we could spend some time planning the first few weeks of term given our new lesson plan and scheme of work structure….Argh!!!! It’s all changed! Into the bin goes your summer work and rapidly you pray to get through at least the first 4 weeks worth of work in a day. No idea what I am on about, then you are very fortunate as this happens to me every year! Thankfully every year’s change or tweak to the lesson plans or schemes of work are positive and eventually I am pleased they have changed but those first few weeks are gruelling!
A few years ago I was introduced to the 'challenge for all'. (Cue images of Tower of Terror ride at Disneyland and the Twilight zone music!) As part of the team responsible for coaching and mentoring staff to meet standards it was quite complex to get across to staff what the 'challenge for all' is. I can take no credit it was all the work of my amazing teaching and learning colleagues but I am more than happy to share it!
To be clear, this is not stretch and challenge in the sense that you plan for the HATs (oldie but a goodie term!) top end of the group some extension activities. There is an element of that but it is actually about challenging all learners no matter where they sit in your group. What often comes up as good ideas for challenging all are, design a tweet, create a mnemonic, promote a discussion with deeper probing questions. Some of these techniques are useful and appropriate to maths lessons but often they are not. Discussions and opinions about who is right and wrong are very limited in their applicability in maths in my opinion.
Imagine we are teaching expanding brackets, something like 2(x+5).
Traditionally to stretch and challenge the high attainers we might ask them to move onto expanding double brackets, for example (x+5) (x+3). This stretches their skills to a new level. However it can be argued that they are actually learning a new skill in moving on to double brackets. In my experience of doing this, more teacher input is required meaning that the learner isn’t being stretched but that the teacher is guiding them to the next activity. Yes you can set them off with scaffolded worksheets to relieve this but I always have Dylan Wiliam ringing in my ears at this point. Wiliam (on the amazing Mr Barton Maths Blog) talks about a hysteria of a few years ago which came from observations where teachers, observers and OFSTED all wanted to see more activities to evidence the learning. Thankfully this is less so now, we recognise it’s not the busyness of the learner it’s the engagement that tells us if learning is taking place. This is why I like the 'challenge for all' element. It’s not about keeping them busy with the next thing, it’s not about more teacher input, it’s about deepening the learners understanding of the topic covered in that lesson.
So let’s return to our expanding brackets of 2(x+5). We could ask learners to create a tweet, a diagram of the stages or a cheat sheet (see next blog). However, if we could apply their knowledge to new concept we could evidence a deeper understanding. Asking them to move onto double brackets wouldn’t necessarily achieve this. We could take expanding brackets to solving a worded problem, an AO3 style question. We could ask the learners how old Millie is if Billie is 5 years older than Ellie and Millie is twice as old as Billie. For the lower attainers we could form the expressions as Billie is (x+5) and Millie then is 2(x+5). For the middle attainers we could give them the problem without the expressions. For the high attainers we could ask them how old Millie is if Billie is 12 and they could solve the expressions. We could ask all of them the age difference between the oldest and youngest and see if they can work this out algebraically rather than by solving. This got me thinking, would this work with any AO3 style question? Could we give a 'challenge for all' opportunity for all just by looking at the AO3 style problems.
I am a big fan of doing something well once and it will save you time in the long run. I created a lucky dip box and cut up AO3 questions and put them in the box. The 'challenge for all' then became about learners applying their knowledge to an AO3 style question. It started off as random and they could pick a number AO3 question out and we had been learning data but it worked as a nice retrieval element as well. Reflecting on this, I created an algebra AO3 lucky dip, a shape AO3, a number one, data and finally the really tricky crossover problems box lucky dip. Depending on the topic would depend on which lucky dip box we used. The beauty of this was high attainers could pull their own AO3 out. Mid and low attainers we could work on as groups and collaboratively solve.
As with anything once it becomes routine it is expected. Learners would race through activities to get to the lucky dip. There was a leader board of who answered which question quickest. We would discuss if one question was harder than the other, and if so why. Given that we think one is harder than the other, should they be worth the same amount of points for the leaderboard. This then got learners thinking about the design on the question. One healthcare student said “the maths isn’t any harder in that one it’s just spotting what it’s asking” I think if we are aiming for learners to deepen their knowledge that quote sums it up beautifully. If learners know why they are doing something and can explain what the aim of the task is they have begun to understand the topic. We will cover understanding another time….
