Busy work or intellectual challenge in classrooms

Working in a school that is very actively differentiating learning experiences to accommodate a wide range of abilities, a Year 1 teacher, Tessa, complained that she was drowning in preparation. She went on to talk about her capable students and how quickly they whipped through everything she prepared, often in a matter of minutes.

The central structure in the classroom is a ‘Learning List’, a list of learning tasks that all students are to go on with, in various curriculum areas and based on their learning needs. Meanwhile the teacher delivers tailored instruction and just in time assistance for individuals and groups of students.

Tessa diligently prepares literacy, numeracy and other learning area tasks for students with different abilities, every day. She works incredibly hard and it is not surprising that watching hours of preparation create piles of marking is demoralising.

Who is working the hardest?

This is a question teachers should return to regularly.

Tess and I went on to talk about how she could set the children up to work harder and think more deeply than they currently are. We know that if students are not deeply engaged in learning, they are unlikely to recall it or be able to apply it. Surface level completion of tasks just makes the teacher work hard, and means that students learn very little.

I suggested that Tessa introduce a new ‘Stretcher’, a process that enables the teacher to extend the learning, to her class each week. Over time there would be a bank of them that she could direct students to choose from each time they undertook a Learning List task.

An important part of building student engagement is practical ways to support learners to go deeper. Choose a couple of these and give it a go.

Possible ‘Stretchers’:

• Teach someone else how to do it.
• Create and wear an ?Expert? badge labeled with this new skill and offer help to 2 other students. Blog about what really helped them learn.
• Make practice examples for other students. Test them out. Did they work? Record the learning.
• Record 3 key things that you, or someone else, needs to know in order to do this.
• Create a step by step guide to explain how to make this work.
• Take photos of each step on your iPad and create an e-Book ?How To?.
• Use Screencastify to explain your thinking process as you do this.
• Find a different way to do this.
• Create evidence that you know how to do this.
• Write 4 questions that you think someone new to this might have.
• Create a timeline or set of steps to do this, cut it up and have someone else reassemble it.
• Write a Blog post about your learning.

Once students have been introduced to a few, you can allow them to choose the one that suits their learning task. This too is intellectual work that the student can do, instead of you!