The Challenge of Challenge: Defining What It Means in Your School

I recently started off a teacher training session with the following questions:

1. What do we mean by challenge?

2. Who should we be challenging?

3. How often should we challenge them?

I'd asked roughly the same questions of senior leaders earlier in the day and it led to some interesting discussions.

We realised that there was a chance that when talking about challenge we could be talking at cross-purposes.

When I asked the leaders the questions, I was trying to clarify the purpose of my work with them: when they invited me in to work with them on 'challenge', what exactly did they mean? And what were we aiming for?

The conversations went like this:

Question 1 was given many and various answers.

Question 2 had a unanimous answer.

Question 3 had a limited number of answers.

Which led us back to reconsider the answers to Question 1.

Everyone agreed that all children should be challenged. There was some discussion around whether or not children should be challenged at all times. So we had to talk again about what we meant by challenge.

As we talked, we realised that perhaps we had two main ideas of what challenge was:

• The most prevalent one, the one that sprung to mind for more teachers: 'challenge' means additional, over and above, depth challenge (challenges set once key objectives have been met)

• Least prevalent, but an idea that definitely existed: 'challenge' means pitching work correctly, getting children in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), ensuring work isn't too easy or too hard, making sure that children are thinking hard so that they learn

Because we decided that all children should be challenged, we had to have the second definition as the key definition of challenge. But because we agreed that all children should be challenged, we also needed the first definition - if we acknowledge that in the children in any given class there are a range of starting points, and a varying degree of 'speeds' at which children work, we also need the depth challenge definition (although it is actually incoporated in the second definition).

So, as we progressed in the staff meeting, we used 'challenge' to mean the right level of challenge for the child at that time and began to refer to 'depth challenge' to describe the kind of thing we provide for children working at greater depth, for example.

Once we'd nailed this down, we returned to Question 3 and couldn't think of many reasons why we wouldn't want to challenge children all the time. We did discuss breaks and downtime, and we also talked about ensuring more broadly that confidence isn't knocked and that other aspects of mental health are cared for. We mentioned how experiencing success should be a part of getting the level of challenge right. However, by and large, we decided that when learning is taking place, all children should be being challenged all of the time.

So, a key consideration when planning and teaching children is that they should be appropriately challenged. By 'appropriately' we mean that they should have explanations, models, examples, questions, practice and feedback which meets them where they are - but which isn't too easy, and isn't too hard. This includes for pupils who perhaps had a higher starting point, and worked quickly, achieving the intended outcomes for the lesson, who then needs some sort of 'depth challenge' to ensure that they continue to be challenged.

But the real takeaway from this, because that previous paragraph seems a little obvious, is that there needs to be some agreement as to what is meant by 'challenge'. Because, as obvious as that last paragraph sounds, it is very easy to be talking at cross-purposes.

A Challenge To You, The Reader

Ask your colleagues those 3 questions - do you have alignment on the answers, or does a shared definition need to be created? If your staff answer variously, how can you define what challenge looks like at your school?

Is the idea that challenge is only for those who've finished their normal work creating an environment where children aren't actually challenged as much as they should be?

Are things like additional 'challenge tasks' (as marked out by stickers and stamps) causing children to feel like and think they aren't being challenged? And are you running the risk of them telling 'visitors' that they are never challenged?