How to Personalise Challenge for Pupils Working at Greater Depth

How should teachers challenge pupils working at greater depth without simply giving them harder work?

Personalising challenge means starting with the individual pupil rather than automatically giving them a more difficult task. Pupils working at greater depth may already have secure knowledge, strong independence or particular strengths, but they will also have areas where they can develop further.

In this post, I explore how teachers can use what they know about individual pupils, including their strengths, interests, characteristics and areas for development, to provide more purposeful challenge.

When deciding how to meet the needs of pupils who you consider to be working at greater depth, there are several avenues to take.

I've written already of how you might give them certain kinds of task, and about how it's not just about the tasks you give pupils. I've also written about some general principles of challenge and about how to make sure you are challenging all pupils, not just the ones you've assessed as working at greater depth.

6 Ways To Challenge Pupils Working At Greater Depth

In my blog post entitled 'Greater Depth: General Principles Of Challenge For Higher Prior Attaining Pupils' I proposed the following 6 ways for how teachers might go about challenging pupils who they believe to be working at greater depth in any given subject.

1. More (and More Complex) Knowledge

2. Provide Opportunities For Children To Demonstrate And Do Something With Their Knowledge

3. Teach Masterclasses

4. Remove Scaffolds and Support To Encourage Independence

5. Communicate High Expectations

6. Personalise The Challenge

How to Personalise Challenge for Pupils Working at Greater Depth

Although I still think all of the above are useful ways to think about challenge, the approach I have increasingly gravitated towards when working with schools is to personalise the challenge.

This means moving beyond the idea that pupils working at greater depth simply need harder work, more work or a different task.

Instead, we need to ask: what does this particular pupil need to develop next?

A pupil might need to become more independent, for example, while another might need to develop their ability to explain their thinking, persevere when something is difficult, take greater risks or apply their knowledge in an unfamiliar context.

The challenge therefore comes from identifying what the pupil needs next and then adapting our teaching accordingly.

Personalised Challenge Is Not the Same as Giving a Different Task

It can be tempting to think that personalising challenge means giving individual pupils different or more difficult tasks. But this isn't necessarily the case.

There is a difference between:

• giving a pupil a harder task

• giving a pupil more work

• giving a pupil something different

• identifying what that particular pupil needs next and responding to it

The fourth approach is the one I am most interested in.

A pupil working at greater depth may already have secure knowledge and be able to work independently. Giving them an even harder task might therefore add little useful challenge. Instead, they might need to develop a particular aspect of their thinking, become more precise in their explanations, apply their knowledge in a less familiar context or develop a characteristic such as resilience or willingness to learn from mistakes.

This is closely related to adaptive teaching. Rather than assuming that every pupil working at greater depth needs the same type of challenge, we can adjust the level of support, independence, questioning, modelling, scaffolding and feedback according to what an individual pupil needs.

This is the thinking behind my Mixing Desk Model for adaptive teaching. The aim isn't to create a different task for every pupil. It is to adjust the different elements of teaching so that pupils receive the support or challenge they need while continuing to work towards ambitious curriculum goals.

I previously summarised personalising the challenge like this:

"Personalisation can come as a result of assessment - we find out that they know something or can do something already, and adjust their future learning accordingly. But personalisation could be more than this. We could take into account their interests, strengths and weaknesses, personality traits and so on. In order to engage them and encourage them to produce something excellent we might tap into their hobbies and interests. Conversely, in order to challenge them and to encourage them out of their comfort zone, we might not allow children, for example, to write yet another story if they are already demonstrating excellence in this area. In this case the child might be challenged to produce a piece of written work within another genre that they are less comfortable with.

Often, children who are working at greater depth will know what they find easy (and often what they find boring as a result) so it may be worth consulting the child about this in order to determine ways of working that might challenge the child. Sometimes a child might have ideas about how they want to challenge themselves which could be tapped into in classroom work."

Having done more work and thinking in this area, I'd like to bring in something else I've shared.

Characteristics of Pupils Working at Greater Depth

In my blog post 'Assessment: How Can I Identify Greater Depth Children In Foundation Subjects?' (I've also written about why we should identify children working at greater depth, if you need convincing) I shared some general, non-subject specific characteristics of pupils working at greater depth which I adapted from Todd Kettler's 'Critical Thinking Skills Among Elementary School Students: Comparing Identified Gifted and General Education Student Performance':

• Greater processing speed for both simple and complex tasks;

• More thorough problem solving using a wider array of strategies;

• Using more metacognitive strategies;

• Sustaining attention;

• Employing superior memory and more efficient retrieval processes;

• Advanced abstracting and generalising;

• Learning with less direct teaching.

The purpose of sharing that list was as a basis for recognising pupils who might be working at greater depth.

In a recent article for Teach Primary Magazine, I shared a list of potential characteristics of pupils who might have the potential to work at greater depth. These kinds of traits can also be used to identify pupils who are working at greater depth when linked to successful meeting of age-related expectations:

• Is ambitious

• Possesses a belief that they will succeed

• Displays high levels of effort

• Has a hunger for learning

• Appears to learn at a quicker pace

• Is willing to learn from mistakes

• Shows resilience when things are hard

• Always goes the extra mile

• Demonstrates attention to detail

• Seems to have an inherent ability

• Holds a long-term view of achievement

• Is creative and innovative

• Possesses a problem-solving mindset

I've developed similar lists of character traits with other schools I've worked with too.

Identifying Personality Traits or Characteristics to Develop in Pupils Working at Greater Depth

It is in identifying these characteristics that I think we can begin to provide the most useful kind of personalised challenge.

The important thing is not to expect every pupil working at greater depth to demonstrate every characteristic. A pupil might be highly resilient, attentive and willing to persevere but still find it difficult to learn from mistakes. Another might be highly creative and independent but need to develop their ability to explain and justify their thinking.

These differences give us something useful to work with. Rather than simply asking, "How can I make this work harder?", we can ask, "What would help this pupil develop further?" The answer might be a different question, a different level of independence, a particular type of feedback, an opportunity to work in an unfamiliar context or a deliberate opportunity to practise a characteristic that is less well developed.

And often, when dealing with primary-aged pupils, even those who are clearly working at greater depth by whatever metric are not the finished article, the perfect specimen. We all have things we can develop, things we can improve on, things we can get better at.

And that's where the character traits can come in handy again. They can be used as a guide for teachers to set next steps for those pupils.

For example, a child might show resilience when things are hard, always go the extra mile and demonstrate attention to detail but they might not yet be willing to learn from their mistakes, and might hold themselves to high standards in such a way that impacts them negatively. Here we have a clear way to begin to challenge the child - an obvious next step for them which will require a bespoke approach to teaching them.

Developing Characteristics Through Subject-Specific Challenge

It might be the case that a child only displays some of these characteristics when working in a particular subject. If that is the case, you can begin by challenging them to develop further characteristics within that subject. In other subjects they may not have the same levels of confidence, interest or motivation.

Alternatively, we might challenge pupils to transfer characteristics they demonstrate in one subject into another. For example, if a child uses particularly effective metacognitive strategies in history, could they begin to apply those strategies to their approach to mathematics?

This is another reason why personalised challenge needs to be based on what we know about the individual pupil rather than on assumptions about what all pupils working at greater depth need.

For a practical example of this approach, see 'Greater Depth: Pupil Pen Portraits and Personalised Challenge'

Personalised Challenge Is Not Just Harder Work

There is a danger that "challenge" becomes synonymous with "harder".

For pupils working at greater depth, however, challenge might come from doing something more complex, but it might also come from having to work more independently, apply knowledge in a new context, explain or justify thinking more precisely, tackle an unfamiliar problem or develop an aspect of their learning behaviour.

This is why I don't think we need a separate "greater depth task" for every pupil.

Sometimes the task can remain the same while the challenge comes from how the pupil approaches it, the questions they are asked, the support they receive, the level of independence expected or the way they are asked to apply what they know.

For more on this, see 'Greater Depth: More Than Harder Tasks'. If you're looking for practical ways to design challenging tasks for pupils working at greater depth, see my 'Greater Depth Toolkit for Task Design'.

Personalised Challenge Starts With Knowing the Pupil

Personalising challenge depends on knowing enough about the pupil to make a sensible decision about what they need next.

This doesn't mean creating elaborate profiles or constantly collecting more assessment information. It means paying attention to what pupils know, what they can do, how they approach learning and where there are still opportunities for development.

I have written more about identifying pupils working at greater depth, including in foundation subjects, in 'Assessment: How Can I Identify Greater Depth Children in Foundation Subjects?'

How Can Teachers Make Personalised Challenge Work?

There isn't one strategy for developing every characteristic in every pupil. The most useful response will depend on the pupil, the subject, the knowledge being taught and the particular characteristic or area for development. That's partly the point.

Personalised challenge requires teachers to know their pupils well enough to make informed decisions about what to adjust and why. It also requires us to resist the temptation to equate challenge with harder work or different tasks.

Sometimes the most appropriate challenge will be to remove a scaffold. Sometimes it will be to ask a more demanding question. Sometimes it will be to expect greater independence. Sometimes it will be to deliberately move a pupil outside a familiar area of strength.

The important thing is that the challenge has a purpose: it should help the pupil develop. That might not be simple to achieve, but it could be a powerful way for schools to think differently about provision for pupils working at greater depth.

Need to develop your school's approach to greater depth?

Identifying pupils working at greater depth is only part of the challenge. The next step is working out how to provide meaningful challenge that responds to what individual pupils actually need.

I can work with you to develop a practical approach to greater depth that fits your curriculum, your pupils and your teachers, without creating unnecessary workload.

Your next three steps

1. Find out how I can help your school

2. Contact me and we'll have a conversation  about your school's current approach and priorities

3. We'll work together to develop a practical approach to challenge that works for your pupils and your staff