Practical strategies for ensuring effective provision for the most able students.

1. Practical strategies for ensuring effective provision for the most able students. What strategies do you already use in the classroom?

2. Aims. • To recap best practice in differentiating for the most able students. • To demonstrate practical strategies which can be used to extend the most able students in lessons. • To stimulate your thinking on how best to cater for the most able students in your own subject.

3. Background and key principles. • Gifted students are identified as the top 7% of students in each year group. They are identified based on a range of assessment data, including MidYis testing and examination results. • Talented students show a particular aptitude in one subject area, usually the arts and sport.

4. In an outstanding lesson… All students, including those that are gifted and talented, should be challenged throughout the lesson and activities should include a suitable amount of challenge.

5. Some characteristics of the most able students. • Possess superior powers of reasoning and able to deal effectively with abstractions and generalisations. (Laycock) • Originality and initiative in intellectual and practical work. (Montgomery) • Ability to process information quickly to develop coherent and complex arguments. (NAGC) • Keen powers of observation, allowing them to identify analogies and mismatches. (Montgomery) • Exceptional curiosity and desire to know why things happen. (Wallace) The most able students have a cognitive ability to learn and to think.

7. Model for effective provision at Macmillan Academy

8. Current best practice. • What provision do we already make? How do you challenge a gifted student in a subject where they appear to struggle?

9. Practical strategies. • What if? • How is this like? • Code breaking. • Concept mapping. • Core principles. • Creative writing. • Create _______ to solve a problem. • Construct a different problem/question using the same data/to generate the same answer. • Before, before, after,after. • Dingbats. • Whats the rule. • Questioning techniques.

10. Code Breaking • Can you break the following codes?

11. Practical strategies. • What if? • How is this like? • Code breaking. • Concept mapping. • Core principles. • Creative writing. • Create _______ to solve a problem. • Construct a different problem/question using the same data/to generate the same answer. • Dingbats. • Before, before, after,after. • Whats the rule. • Questioning techniques.

12. Dingbats 1 - 0 Each picture shows one of the reasons why the First World War ended. Why did the First World War end? How did you reach that conclusion?

13. Practical strategies. • What if? • How is this like? • Code breaking. • Concept mapping. • Core principles. • Creative writing. • Create _______ to solve a problem. • Construct a different problem/question using the same data/to generate the same answer. • Before, before, after,after. • Dingbats. • Whats the rule. • Questioning techniques.

14. Questioning techniques for the most able. • Planned Higher Order questions. • Piggybacking. • Challenge thinking process. • Challenge answers – what if? • Students generate their own questions (using a stimulus).

15. Review What do you perceive are the remaining barriers to effective provision for gifted and talented students? What positives have come out of the session? What ideas do you have to help future development of gifted and talented provision? How are you feeling now about provision?