Redefining More Able Education

How can teachers expect students to take an increasing responsibility for their own learning when they are often given so few opportunities to do so? What, in the end, makes a meaningful difference to a child’s chances to achieve the ‘glittering prizes’ of education and career? What drives exceptional teaching and learning? And what can address these issues?

These are some of the questions that the Redefining More Able Education series explores. This series is about how to establish an ambitious school climate through high challenge teaching and learning.

With advice specific to different subject areas, the series offers practical ways to shape a whole school culture, such as how and why teachers need to focus on longer term narrative arcs, model academic language, teach to the top and go ‘off piste’, normalise extended responses and deliberately set up　productive failure.

It investigates a number of concepts that are highly significant to more able education, including more traditional ideas such as character development, collaborative learning, extension, feedback, growth mindset, meta cognitive strategies, pace and questioning. It also engages with concepts from other fields in education that might prove to be very useful, such as cognitive bandwidth, cultural capital, desirable difficulties, grit, higher level thinking, the jaggedness principle, motivation, productive frustration, reciprocal learning, the tension to learn and threshold concepts.

Examining the history of educational policy in relation to more able education as well as the history and validity of IQ tests, this series establishes a set of underlying principles which teachers can hold on to. It puts forward an approach to learning that is holistic as well as dynamic, addressing the need for an urgent and immediate response to the education of the more able.