Staff CPD: Stretch and Challenge

Our 1st session of the year, and we looked at how various ingredients go into creating the growth mindsets and stretch and challenge for all our lessons.

Our role is essential, not surprisingly, and it is the right combination of the circles below that gets the challenge right.

There be challenge – right bang in the middle!

 

How we communicate is so important, as this will contribute to the establishment of the right ethos and mindset – growth as opposed to fixed.

We start with resilience, and the old straw-through-potato trick. Spit, grit and a whole lot of duct tape was used by some, with varying success, and it was agreed by all that if we are to drive stretch and challenge, a resilient attitude amongst all learners was vital.

This connects with our growth mindset – do we practise and preach this as well? Jodie was a true believer on this…

The areas that we considered really crucial to improving the learning ethos stemmed from  a few key concepts:

“Challenge in education is the provision of difficult work that causes students to think deeply and engage in healthy struggle. If we get this right, all else will follow.”

• It is not just about the ‘most able’.
• It is high expectations for all.
• It is good for students to struggle just outside of their comfort zone – that is when they are likely to learn most.

 

The next step in the jigsaw was looking at the pedagogy behind Establishing the right ethos: As a group we looked at The Learning Zone Model (Senninger, 2000)

Comfort Zone	Struggle Zone	Panic Zone
Low challenge Low stress Limited thinking Limited learning	High challenge Low stress Thinking required Effective learning	Very high challenge High stress Cognitive overload Limited learning

Together we watched this amazing discussion about the difference between a Fixed and Growth mindset. It is important that we, as teacher’s reflect the same positive ethos in our classroom and model high expectations and trust. This video created lots of exciting discussion around our pupils at Westfield and how we can diminish fixed mindsets amongst the most challenging pupils. We very much look forward to putting our ideas into practice.

The next stepping stone on our whole staff CPD session was to get the staff talking about what they key ingredients are; to establish this growth mindset ethos in their lessons. So , of course, we played a game of Pictionary. Special thanks go out to our amazing Art teachers Sam and Leah, who designed our wonderful playing cards.

After a long and healthy discussion and a lot of different diamond nines, we were able to identify the key ingredients necessary in enabling stretch and challenge. It created several debates- but that is good- because every single element is vital:

1. Working with your LSA
2. Contact with parents
3. Listening
4. Promoting resilience
5. Clarity of the learning direction
6. Having strong subject knowledge
7. Using your class context sheets as a daily guide to planning
8. Having high expectations of all students
9. Having good relationships
10. Creating a safe and inspiring learning environment
11. Being a strong presence in the classroom, and running the show.

Knowing the students, knowing the subject, knowing what they find difficult

If high expectations are in place, with the bar set high, we can differentiate downwards with the most suitable strategy to hoist each individual child up.

After a fantastic and engaged session, we left our teachers with a few tasks for the upcoming week:

1.Context sheets- know the students you are teaching

2.Read your SEN Booklets

3.Raise the bar for the learning direction of the lesson

4.Stretch their capabilities- put them in the learning zone-not the comfort zone.

5.Settle for nothing but their best-inspire & support them in their learning, every lesson.