further consideration is that some students need immediate feedback if they have short-term working memories. Differentiation to challenge all students Differentiation has long been a contentious topic. Only several years ago, the words all, most and some were part of the lesson plan format for a formal observation in some schools. This tended to result in different tasks being set according to ability or ‘learning style’. Until recently, teachers have used gold, silver and bronze as a way to differentiate. I used to do this until I noticed that many students wanted to ‘go for gold’ but didn’t have the scaffolding to get there because I’d planned – mistakenly - that if they couldn’t do the gold task they should be doing the silver or bronze one. Researchers currently seem to be in agreement that all students need common high challenge learning objectives achieved by “different degrees of guided practice, responsive questioning and feedback tailored to push students forward from where they are. “ (Sherrington 2019). Similar ideas are presented in the 2016 WordPress blog: All Hail Adaptation Rather than Differentiation by Chris Parsons. Like Farnborough and Sherrington, he considers the key to providing challenging lessons for all students is planning: “the most fruitful form of strategic adaptation facilitates tactical adaptation as and when it becomes necessary.” Usually when teachers talk about high expectations, we mean expectations of the students. My introduction states that all students should have the same challenging learning objective and that teachers should provide appropriate scaffolding to achieve it – not only in one lesson, but also over time. That is why teachers also have high expectations of themselves. References Bennewmark.wordpress.com 2017. Making Challenge Meaningful Doug Lemov 2015 Teach like a Champion L E Farnborough 2017 Classteaching.Wordpress.com 2017. Classroom-culture-high-expectations-andchallenge. https://www.pedagoo.org/the- thinking- classroom - don’t -Call -it -Challenge Tom Sherrington 2019 Rescuing Differentiation from the Checklist of Bad Practice. Chris Parsons 2016 All Hail Adaptation rather than Differentiation. Wordpress. Stepping Back a Little (apt for Lockdown) Bradley Busch The Guardian Education: What research tells us. Nov 2017 Andy Tharby 2017 Making every English Lesson Count
David Sanchez-Brown - How do we nurture a resilient, hardworking attitude to sixth form study? For many of us, the anticipation of sixth form results day can be a rollercoaster of emotions and sleepless nights. Witnessing and sharing the joy experienced by students as they gain qualifications which open doors to their future prosperity is an amazing privilege. When analysing the results in 25
