Sharing the Addiction

I was looking up bits and pieces in relation to my previous Clinton Golding post and found this downloadable powerpoint about the findings and recommendations of John Hattie. One of his major points is about providing challenge for students. You can get a PDF copy of his powerpoint by clicking here. In this presentation, he has rubrics for teachers to assess themselves such as the one for challenge that you can see in the screenshot to the side.

I also found an interesting article written along the same lines about challenge in the teaching of maths.

James Nottingham who Marne refers to also focuses on challenge with his ‘pit thinking’. I have used this ‘pit’ idea with my children when I was teaching year 3/4. Basically, you help children to see that when mastering a challenging task, they will feel as they are descending into a ‘pit of uncertainty’ where it may feel as if they will never get it. However, if they persevere, they will begin to climb out of the pit and see the light at the end of the tunnel. The kids in my class would start to say things like ‘I’m in the pit at the moment’ and I think it helped them knowing that this was a normal pattern of emotions when in a learning situation. You can download some of Jame’s powerpoints from this address (though they wouldn’t open on my Mac – the error message said it may need to be opened in a Windows version and resaved so that the Mac could access it).

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