NACE – Boost more-able learners with cognitive challenge
Building cognitive challenge into your curriculum and pedagogy will help your most able pupils to flourish, says Dr Ann McCarthy…
When you’re planning a lesson, are your first thoughts about content, resources and activities, or do you begin by thinking about learning and cognitive challenge?
How often do you consider lessons from the viewpoint of your more-able pupils?
Highly able pupils often seek out challenging cognitive work and can become disengaged if they are set tasks which are constantly too easy.
Actively promoting ‘cognitive challenge’ in a way that is distinctive, embedded and consistent, across both your classroom and your school as a whole, can provide greater long-term learning gains.
Pupils will develop skills more rapidly and learn more effectively. On the other hand, focusing on methods such as ‘must, should, could’ or commercially promoted activities can mean you miss opportunities for cognitively challenging learning.
More-able learners
So, what exactly is ‘cognitive challenge’?
It can be summarised as an approach to curriculum and pedagogy which focuses on optimising the engagement, learning and achievement of highly able children.
The term is used by the National Association for Able Children in Education (NACE) to describe how learners become able to understand and form complex and abstract ideas and solve problems.
Cognitive challenge prompts and stimulates extended and strategic thinking, as well as analytical and evaluative processes.
For example, you might set pupils a problem without a question and encourage them to investigate, ask their own questions and create new problems.
To provide highly able pupils with the degree of challenge that will allow them to flourish, we need to build our planning and practice on a solid foundation.
This involves understanding both the nature of our pupils as learners and the learning opportunities we’re providing.
Using ‘challenge’ as a routine extends learning at specific times on specific topics. This has useful but limited benefits.
However, by strategically building cognitive challenge into your teaching, pupils’ learning expertise, their appetite for learning and their wellbeing will all improve.
What does this look like in the classroom, you may be wondering.
In a recent NACE research project, schools accredited with the NACE Challenge Award examined the impact of cognitive challenge in their practice against a backdrop of relevant research.
They focused on the following three areas, designed to provide cognitive challenge and impact on the present and future cognitive growth of learners:
- Design and management of cognitively challenging learning opportunities
- Rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse to support cognitive challenge
- Curriculum organisation and design
Let’s delve into each area a little more closely.
Design and management of learning
In the most successful ‘cognitive challenge’ schools, leaders have a clear vision which explicitly reflects an understanding of teaching more-able pupils in different contexts and the benefits this has for all pupils.
This vision is implemented consistently across the school.
All teachers engage with the culture and promote it in their own classrooms, involving pupils in their own learning.
Pupils are able to take control of their learning and become more self-regulatory in their behaviours and increasingly autonomous in their learning.
Through intentional and well-planned management of teaching and learning, children move from being a recipient in the learning environment to an effective learner who can call on the resources and challenges presented.
They understand more about their own learning and develop their curiosity and creativity by extending and deepening their understanding and knowledge.
Talk and cognitive discourse
Cognitive discourse involves both teachers and pupils routinely using ‘big questions’.
With practice, this gives children the ability to challenge received understanding, reframe problems or look at ideas from a variety of perspectives.
The importance of questions and questioning in effective learning is well understood, but the importance of depth and complexity of questioning is perhaps less known about.
When you plan purposeful, stimulating and probing questions, it gives your pupils the freedom to develop their thought processes and challenge, engage and deepen their understanding.
Initially you, the teacher, may ask questions, but when you model high-order questioning techniques to pupils they, in turn, can ask questions which expose new ways of thinking.
This so-called ‘dialogic teaching’ frames teaching and learning within the perspective of pupils and enhances learning by encouraging children to develop their thinking and use their understanding to support their learning.
By using an enquiry-orientated approach, you can more actively engage children in the production of meaning and acquisition of new knowledge and your classroom will become a more interactive and language-rich learning domain where children can increase their fluency, retrieval and application of knowledge.
Curriculum organisation and design
How can you ensure your curriculum is organised to allow cognitive challenge for more-able pupils? Here’s three things to think about:
- What is planned for the students?
- What is delivered to the students?
- What do the students experience?
Schools with a high-quality cognitive challenge curriculum use agreed teaching approaches and a whole-school model for teaching and learning.
Teachers expertly and consistently utilise key features relating to learning preferences, knowledge acquisition and memory.
When planning a curriculum for more-able pupils it’s necessary to think beyond individual subjects, assessment systems, pedagogy and extracurricular opportunities, and to look more deeply at the ways in which these link together for the benefit of your pupils.
If teachers can understand and deliver this curriculum using their subject knowledge and pedagogical skills, and if your school can successfully make learning visible to pupils, you’ll be able to move from well-practised routines which are designed and controlled by the teacher to highly successful and challenging learning experiences.
Recasting the role
If we’re going to move beyond the traditional monologic and didactic models of teaching, we need to recast the role of teacher as a facilitator of learning within a supportive environment.
For more-able pupils this can be taken a step further.
If you can build cognitive challenge into your curriculum and the way you manage learning, and support this with a language-rich classroom, the entire nature of teaching and learning can change.
Your highly able pupils will become increasingly autonomous and more self-reliant.
They’ll become masters of their learning as they gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter.
You can then extend your role even further, from learning facilitator to learner activator.
How to use talk effectively in your classroom
Plan for talk and decide when it will be led by you, when pupils will lead the teaching, and how pupils will engage with each other.
Prepare opportunities for classroom dialogue which are most beneficial to the learning context.
Structure discourse to develop cognitive learning, rather than talk being a disparate part of the lesson.
Model high-quality language and effective discourse practices, teach the pupils how to use these practices and then pass the learning to them.
Make use of questions which open learning and cognitive thinking, rather than limiting pupils to those which have expected responses.
Dr Ann McCarthy is a NACE associate and co-author of the NACE research publication Making Space for Able Learners: Cognitive Challenge. It is available via the NACE website. Follow NACE on Twitter at @naceuk.
