Learning Challenge Lessons, Secondary English Language Arts

20 Lessons to Guide Students Through the Learning Pit

Jill Nottingham, James Nottingham, Mark Bollom, Joanne Nugent, Lorna Pringle

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781544330525
• eBook ISBN: 9781544330501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Practical strategies for bringing The Learning Challenge to life in your secondary ELA classroom

The Learning Challenge has captured the imaginations of educators, students, and their parents by introducing the idea of  Learning Pit"—a state of cognitive conflict that causes students to think more deeply, critically, and strategically until they discover their "eureka!" moment. 

Now, fans of the The Learning Challenge who want practical examples and ready-to-use lessons for their secondary ELA classrooms need not look any further. This book provides teachers with everything they need to run thoughtful, dialogue-driven challenges so that students engage more deeply with the classics and develop literary skills critical to ELA standards. Students will analyze texts in lessons grounded in cognitive conflicts such as

• We are all responsible for our own actions, and yet we sometimes act because we are following orders or instructions from others (Lesson 1: Who was responsible for the death of William in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?)
• To be successful you cannot fail, but most successful people have experienced many failures along the way (Lesson 7: Was Jay Gatsby a success?)
• Love is impossible to define, and yet everyone knows what love is (Lesson 11: Is Romeo really in love?)

From detailed lesson plans and activities for running Learning Challenges in the classroom, to full-color activity cards that enhance each lesson, this must-have resource offers relevant and timely instructional strategies on topics that interest and engage secondary students.

Part I: Setting the Scene

Chapter 1 Preparing to Use the Lesson Ideas

1.0 Introduction

This book shares a range of excellent lesson ideas to help you guide your students through the Learning Pit. Here you will find guidance for setting up and running lessons around topics as thought-provoking as exploration, language, fairness, time and friendship. Each lesson has a set of resources to use with your students as well as recommended activities to make progress from first thoughts to deep understanding.

To make the most of each lesson idea in this book, we recommend that you also read the following books.

The Learning Challenge

The Learning Challenge (Nottingham, 2017) describes the theory and practice of guiding students through the ‘Learning Pit’. It covers everything from background to rationale, from establishing a learning culture to techniques for challenging, motivating and guiding students from surface level knowledge to deeper understanding. It shows how contradictions and uncertainties can be used to think more deeply, and how being ‘in the pit’ makes learning more rigorous and engaging.

Challenging Learning Through Dialogue

Challenging Learning Through Dialogue (Nottingham, Nottingham and Renton, 2017) shares some of the best strategies for using dialogue to enhance learning. It includes examples of the strategies used in the lessons within this book and Philosophy for Children (P4C) techniques to help students learn how to think, how to be reasonable, how to make moral decisions, and how to understand another person’s point of view.

These two books will give you a deeper insight into how to use the lesson ideas in this book more effectively. The main sections to read before trying out any of the lesson ideas in this book include the following.

The Learning Challenge

An introduction to the Learning Challenge: Chapter 1

1. Values and ground rules for engaging students: Sections 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4
2. Identifying concepts: Sections 4.2, 4.2.1 and 4.3
3. Creating and selecting questions: Sections 4.4 and 4.5
4. Generating cognitive conflict: Chapter 5
5. Constructing answers and the ‘eureka’ moment: Sections 6.1, 6.4 and 6.5
6. Reviewing and metacognition techniques: Sections 7.1 and 7.2

Challenging Learning Through Dialogue

The difference between dialogue and discussion: Sections 2.0 and 2.6

1. Creating the right environment for dialogue: Sections 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3
2. Using dialogue to develop reasoning and reasonableness: Chapter 4
3. Groupings and ground rules: Chapter 5
4. Opinion Lines and Corners: Sections 7.2 and 7.3
5. How to run a Mystery: Sections 8.1, 8.2, 8.4 and 8.6
6. Philosophy for Children: Sections 11.1, 11.2 and 11.4

Once you have read these sections, you will be in a much better position to make the most of the lesson ideas in this book. For now, though, here are some brief notes to get you started.

1.1 The Learning Challenge

James Nottingham created the Learning Challenge in 2003 as a way to help his students think and talk about learning. It is rather like a child-friendly representation of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (1978) in that it describes the move from actual to potential understanding. Since its inception, the Learning Challenge has captured the imagination of educators, students and their parents. It has featured in many periodicals, articles and books, and it now appears on classroom walls around the world.

The Learning Challenge promotes challenge, dialogue and a growth mindset. It offers participants the opportunity to think and talk about their own learning. It encourages a depth of enquiry that moves learners from surface-level knowledge to deep understanding. It encourages an exploration of causation and impact; an interpretation and comparison of meaning; a classification and sequencing of detail; and a recognition and analysis of pattern. It builds learners’ resilience, determination and curiosity. And it nurtures a love of learning.

At the heart of the Learning Challenge is ‘the pit’. A person could be said to be ‘in the pit’ when they are in a state of cognitive conflict – that is to say, when a person has two or more ideas that make sense to them, but when compared side by side they appear to be in conflict with each other. Each of the lesson plans in this book are designed to create that exact situation, so that your students need to think more deeply about the topic.

Examples of the sort of cognitive conflicts you will find in this book include:

• We are all responsible for our own actions, and yet sometimes we act because we are following orders or instructions from others (Lesson 1: Who was responsible for the death of William in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?).
• Monstrous people are born that way, but monstrous people develop in response to the conditions around them (Lesson 4: Was Heathcliff a monster?).
• Love is impossible to define and yet everyone knows what love is (Lesson 11: Is Romeo really in love?).
• We are free to make choices, but our choices are influenced (Lesson 16: Does the poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ show us how to make the right choice?).
• Happiness is a choice, but happiness is also a spontaneous response to events (Lesson 18: Did Anne Frank experience happiness?).
• A great speech can only persuade us of something we want to believe, but perhaps a great speech can make us think we want to believe something (Lesson 19: Why was Winston Churchill’s speech effective?).

When your students think through these or other examples of cognitive conflict, then they will find themselves ‘in the pit’.

It is important to note that learners are not in the pit when they have no idea. The pit represents moving beyond a single, basic idea into the situation of having multiple ideas that are as yet unsorted. This happens when a learner purposefully explores inconsistencies, exceptions and contradictions in their own or others’ thinking so as to discover a richer, more complex understanding. That is why each of the lesson ideas aims to move participants out of their comfort zone. This is a deliberate and strategic objective. It is neither incidental nor casual. It is not something that happens parenthetically. The very purpose of the lessons is to get your students into the pit (and back out again)!

Timing and Pacing

To achieve this, we recommend that you use the four steps of the Learning Challenge. You don’t have to include all of these steps in just one lesson, and, indeed, you may not be able to because of time. We have included recommendations for each stage, but we have not said how you might time each step because this would depend on a number of variables, such as the needs of your students, their prior learning and your context or setting. For example, you might wish to set the scene and cover stage 1 before the lesson and you might like to invite your students to complete stage 4 at a later date – perhaps for homework or within informal small-group extension activities. You might find that you need (or want) to spend longer exploring the concept and creating cognitive conflict around that concept through extending the questioning and developing the dialogue that stems from that questioning. It really is up to you! Nothing is set in stone – which is why we have put them forward as lesson ‘ideas’ rather than lesson ‘plans’.

The four steps of the Learning Challenge are as follows.

Figure 1.1: The Learning Challenge

Stage 1: Concept

The lesson activities begin by familiarising your students with the underlying concepts. It is not necessary for all participants to understand all the concepts. So long as some of your students have some understanding of one or more of the concepts then the lesson activities should work well.

Stage 2: Conflict

The next stage is to create some cognitive conflict around one or more of the concepts. The recommended questions associated with each lesson plan should help you achieve this, as should the structured activities. Remember that the key to the Learning Challenge is to get your students ‘into the pit’ by creating cognitive conflict in their minds. This deliberate creation of a dilemma is what makes the Learning Challenge such a good model for challenge and enquiry, reasoning and reasonableness, and is precisely what each of the lesson ideas is designed to achieve.

Stage 3: Construct

After exploring the concepts for a while (and we’re being purposefully ambiguous by saying ‘for a while’ because it depends on context) your students will begin to make links and construct meaning. They will do this by examining options, connecting ideas together and explaining cause and effect. Often (though not always) this leads them to a sense of ‘eureka’ in which they find new clarity. Each lesson idea includes some recommended activities to help them reach this eureka moment by ‘climbing out of the pit’.

Stage 4: Consider

After achieving a sense of eureka, your students should reflect on their learning journey. They can do this by considering how they progressed from simplistic ideas (stage 1), to the identification of more complex and conflicting ideas (stage 2), through to a deeper understanding of how all these ideas interrelate to each other (stage 3). Now at stage 4, they can think about the best ways to relate and apply their new understanding to different contexts.

Lesson Ideas Format

In Chapter 2, you’ll find a description of the lesson activities that support the journey through the steps of the Learning Challenge. In Part II of this book, you’ll find the Lesson Ideas. For clarity and consistency, the Lesson Ideas have been presented so that each one follows the same format and structure, using headings and sub-headings that are common to every lesson. This structure clearly hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Series
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Index of Concepts
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• About the Contributors
• The Language of Learning
• Part I: Setting the Scene
• Chapter 1 Preparing to Use the Lesson Ideas
• Chapter 2 The Lesson Activities
• Part II: The Lesson Ideas
• Lesson 1 Who Was Responsible for the Death of William in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?
• Lesson 2 Do We Feel Sympathy for Scrooge in Stave 1 of A Christmas Carol ?
• Lesson 3 How Are Dreams Presented in Jane Eyre?
• Lesson 4 Who Was Responsible for the Death of William in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?
• Lesson 5 Does Louisa May Alcott’s Novel Little Women Accept or Challenge Gender Stereotypes?
• Lesson 6 Was Toto Dorothy’s Only True Friend?
• Lesson 7 Which Is the Most Important Symbol in The Great Gatsby?
• Lesson 8 Which Example of Foreshadowing in Of Mice and Men Has the Most Impact on the Reader?
• Lesson 9 Was It Acceptable for Liesel to Steal in The Book Thief?
• Lesson 10 Was Macbeth Really a Tragic Hero?
• Lesson 11 Is Romeo Really In Love?
• Lesson 12 Who Has the Most Power in Romeo and Juliet?
• Lesson 13 Is Tybalt a Villain or a Victim?
• Lesson 14 Is Fame Important?
• Lesson 15 Was Wilfred Owen a Patriot or a Pacifist?
• Lesson 16 Does the Poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ Show Us How to Make the Right Choice?
• Lesson 17 Was the Californian Gold Rush of 1848 the Main Cause of Conflict Between Native and European Americans?
• Lesson 18 Did Anne Frank Experience Happiness?
• Lesson 19 Why Was Winston Churchill’s Speech Effective?
• Lesson 20 What Was the Intent of President Reagan’s Speech at Moscow State University in 1988?
• References
• References
• Photocopiable Masters
• Index
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