Send work back if you aren’t satisfied. Insisting on excellence and being prepared to ask students to improve their work sends a powerful message about building strong work habits. Improving or redoing work should be seen as a necessary part of learning, not a sign of failure. Look for excellence in every task by pushing students towards greater precision, detail, sophistication and depth in their work. Begin with high standards outlined in criteria for top levels and use these to guide students from an early age. Avoid low-value activities and presenting work that does not demonstrate real mastery of the subject.

1. Send work back if you aren’t satisfied Make a point of challenging all students, including high attainers, by being hard to satisfy when it comes to the quality of their work. Insisting on excellence, and being prepared to ask students to im- prove work when you feel they can do better, sends a powerful message and helps build strong work habits. Build a growth mindset by being clear that improving or re-doing work is not a sign of fail- ure or a personal criticism, but a necessary part of learning.
Cherwell
Learning
5 ways to find CHALLENGE in lessons
Challenge in every task - Whatever task you ask them to do —no matter how minor— think about what would represent genuine excellence in student work, and bring attention to this through explanation and light-touch modelling of quality. Look for excellence in EVERY task - even a simple spider-diagram has the potential for excellence if we show students how to include in- creasing precision, detail and sophistication, whilst a poster could contain contain challenge if students are pushed towards depth and making links.
Begin with the End in Mind - Look at the A* criteria for GCSE or A Level in your subject. Pick out the key words and concepts there—commonly ‘sophistication, precision, flair, detail, wide range, coherent, original, attention to detail etc’ - and use these to bring attention to quality responses when teaching all groups from year 7 upwards.
TO BE AWARE OF AND AVOID... - Low-value starters or fillers—’just-a-quick...’ activities which can suck time out of the lesson and remove challenge
- ‘bunching’ challenge in activities towards the end of the lesson. If it takes 40 mins to reach the challenging part, it’s not a challenging lesson
- Being distracted by presentation / form of work—it’s great if students present work with care, but this may not mean that the quality of the knowledge or explana- tion is any better—save most praise for excellence from within the subject criteria for success
- Fixed-Mindset praise for high attainers—avoid telling students that they are talented or clever—instead, focus on praising effort, attitude and process.
BULLETIN—July 2013
Push students on excellence in Literacy
- In lessons which are based around ’learn some knowledge and apply it’, it can be difficult to add challenge by simply adding more and more knowledge. An alternative to adding breadth of knowledge is to bring more attention to quality in the ’apply’ stage—push the students to pro- vide excellent explanations, descriptions, analyses etc which show in- creasingly precise use of language, application of key terms, use of con- nectives etc. Light touch modelling and attention to features of excel- lence will be needed—literacy mats can be a great help here.
1
2
3
4
5
A recent outstanding lesson...
1. A film clip was shown and students were asked to com- ment—’how is this clip made to seen realistic?’
2. Some direct instruction from the teacher explained the approach to realistic film-making they needed to learn
3. Students watched the same clip several times, with the same focus, and were pushed to focus on ‘attention to detail’ in their notes / discussion—challenge and pro- gress was striking here
4. Teacher modelled the process of creating part of a storyboard, showing the students the difference be- tween adequate and excellent work, focusing again on ‘increasing attention to detail’
5. Students worked for 25 minutes on creating their own full storyboard—teacher circulated and challenged stu- dents to add increasing detail and depth—‘Can you go further with this? How?’. Students responded to the challenge and worked hard.
6. Lesson concluded with paired self/peer assessment and target setting
7. This feedback was then acted on for homework / in the following lesson