English for Gifted and Talented Students

11-18 Years

Geoff Dean

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412936057, 9781412936040
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

?Geoff Dean?s English for Gifted and Talented Students 11-18 is a principled and pragmatic book that will provide Heads of Department with a foundation in this important area of curriculum development? - English Drama Media

?The really surprising thing about Geoff Dean?s book is that you come away from it with more than you expected....[This] book shows the English teacher how to plan for and deliver those life-changing moments in the classroom? - G & T Update

Includes CD-Rom

`This is a sourcebook of ideas and gives valuable information about the latest research on learning and teaching, as well as signposting the way forward in providing for the most able in English. It recognises the questions posed by new technologies, and gives guidance on how to harness these changes to help equip talented young people for life in the twenty first century? - Jude Brigley, Director of Learning and Teaching at Cardiff High School, and Chair of NACE CYMRU

Are you stuck for ways to stretch your best English students?

By focusing on what excites and motivates all learners, this book provides you with a clear guide to ensuring sound provision for your gifted and talented students.

Included is advice on:

o how to identify more able students

o what to do to get other staff on board

o successful strategies for working with more able students

o using ICT effectively in lessons and activities

o how to measure students? progress

o personalised learning

There is an accompanying CD which contains photocopiable material which will help you plan your lessons and departmental strategy.

1

Why it is so Important to Address the Needs of More Able Students in English

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What this chapter is about

• possible opposition to more able identification
• why it is important to identify more able students
• the eight ‘P’s of identification
• ways of identifying more able students
• problems of identification

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Undertaking to deal effectively with the more able students in school involves extra work, sustained energy and genuine long-term commitment. Yet teachers who have understood these implications and are still prepared to provide appropriately for that group will be instrumental in bringing about a changed student body with a refreshingly new approach to their studies, capable of achieving improved results, making any extra effort thoroughly worthwhile. Teachers should find their commitment and investment of extra time being rewarded with increased professional enjoyment and success.

Possible opposition to more able identification

As increasing attention has been paid to more able students in the past decade, there have been arguments in some quarters that they are not a deserving separate group. Attending to the needs and requirements of its more able, the argument continues, is an essential duty of any school staff, because schools exist to meet the needs of all their students. Good schools will, therefore, naturally subsume the needs of the more able within a properly formulated and scrupulously applied whole-school inclusive teaching and learning policy. Such a position would certainly be true of an ideal school situation, and ought to be the ultimate position to which all schools should aspire, but it is a long way from the reality that currently exists. Until all students are fully and appropriately provided for, it will be necessary for some degree of special attention to be paid to vulnerable minorities, including those students considered as ‘more able’, to ensure that they succeed at the appropriate levels.

A few critics, such as Professor John White, formerly a teacher of educational philosophy at the Institute of Education in London, make stronger cases about the possible dangers of social engineering hidden away in the particular provision for the more able.

I would claim, however, that British education has for too long failed to pay proper attention to the needs of the more able. A number of reasons have been proposed to explain this neglect, including a propensity to be embarrassed by and feel awkward in the presence of those who make a show of intellectual superiority. As David Miliband, a former Minister of State for Education, remarked in a speech in 2004:

Until five years ago, bright students were too often confronted by the very British mentality which says it’s wrong to celebrate success, and worse still to actively encourage it. The bright student was too often embarrassed by being labelled a smart-alec. (Miliband 2004)

In some institutions, able young people are derided and insulted by a few of their peers with names such as ‘boff’ or ‘nerd’ and unprintably worse epithets, as ways of underlining their status as unacceptable outsiders. Some students, running this gauntlet daily, have to be very courageous or thick-skinned to withstand such provocations. In such circumstances, only the truly unusual or determined manage to resist a very common urge to conform to their peers and continue, against the odds, to demonstrate their true abilities. These situations may not be universal, but sufficient numbers of teachers I meet on courses recognise these particular difficulties when considering supporting their more able students to suggest it is a major national problem.

The dominant mode of teaching in the subject English from the late 1960s has been increasingly inclined towards a mixed ability model, where all students in a class were treated ‘equitably’. Unfortunately, ‘equally’ was too often misinterpreted as ‘the same’. A great many schools see it as their first duty to support those students who encounter problems with reading and writing in the secondary school, and, in the main, have been less prepared to ensure that an appropriate and commensurate level of challenge and support was made available for those who cope very successfully with the English curriculum. In fact, teachers were often grateful to have a proportion of more able students, who would – they sometimes reasoned – require less attention. More time would then be available to devote to the members of the weaker group.

Some teachers also showed an antipathy towards the establishment of an elitist ‘upper’ group. Such identification was occasionally regarded as morally objectionable and clearly ‘wrong’. I know that these perceptions existed, because I saw them at first hand in my early days as an LEA English Adviser. Occasionally, the situation was twisted in quite absurd ways. The more able students were invited to extracurricular clubs or societies, and even residential out-of-school events, where their abilities led to more advanced and challenging tasks and activities, but that same greater ability was not actually acknowledged or provided for appropriately in the mainstream English lessons.

The least satisfactory provision was made where more able students were correctly identified but the result of identification was that they were expected to do more work. They might be required to write longer pieces or read ‘harder’ novels, as if doing ‘more of the same’ was the best way of ‘getting better’ – whatever ‘getting better’ meant in those circumstances (often not very precisely defined). If there is one solution that more able students always hate, it is being asked to do more activity or study than their peers, as they believe that they are being punished for their greater ability.

Why it is important to identify more able students

The eight ‘P’s of more able provision

Pride

First, identification should involve a degree of pride. Everybody should want to be proud that the department is determined to encourage and make progress with its very best students. The school should be proud that it has a department capable of addressing the needs and ambitions of its very best students. It should also be proud of its able students and prepared to celebrate the unexpected and extraordinary things they might well be capable of performing. The students, in turn, should be proud that they are being purposefully challenged and have the opportunity to demonstrate their most creative and personal attributes. They should want to share their successes with others, and expect the respect and admiration of their peers. Parents should be proud of the quality and richness of the work their children produce, and the extra buzz that they feel as a result of the level of commitment and interest of those young people might then have in their studies.

Other ways of representing this exigency are developed in the following further seven ‘P’s.

Personal

It is the core purpose of every school to ensure that every student has his/her particular unique needs met, and that every student achieves at the level of which s/he is capable. Any provision that fails to achieve less than this goal is a serious shortfall that needs immediate and continued attention. Somewhere, in every school prospectus, there will be a statement claiming that every student is ‘valued’ and entitled to this treatment. It must be regarded as more than a merely rhetorical statement, and parents should be in a position to ask about seeing the evidence of such claims when paying their early visits to the school. The recent government commitment on this matter is very deliberately entitled Every Child Matters.

Professional

Every teacher should want to be part of the apparatus by which their students achieve at their highest possible level. It should never be sufficient to be ‘satisfactory’, merely keeping students occupied at unsatisfactory levels of attainment. The research of Jean Ruddock and her colleagues at Cambridge University School of Education shows conclusively that too little attention is paid to many students’ former learning and achievement in the two years following transfer to secondary schools, and a large proportion of more able students claim that they are bored and dissatisfied with the early years of their secondary schooling (Galton, Gray and Ruddock 2003). Giving serious consideration to the requirements of the more able students, and recognising the sorts of academic feats of which they are capable, is a way of raising teacher expectations, not only for this identified group but also for that of their peers.

Much importance is ascribed these days to ‘assessment for learning’ and a fuller consideration of that idea is pursued in detail in other parts of this book. Yet a broader interpretation of the term ‘assessment for learning’, meaning all that is known about the student beyond mere statistical details, will require teachers to seek detailed knowledge about the strengths, interests and range of qualities their learners bring to the classroom. All those minutiae are a very helpful prerequisite for the fuller learning process.

Political

Many more able young people leave or are kept out of the maintained education system in England because their parents perceive that they will not be adequately provided for in their local secondary school. Of course, not all able students come from middle-class backgrounds with the capacity to make alternative school arrangements, but state school teachers have to face up to this realistic challenge and prove not only that more able students can be appropriately catered for in maintained schools but also that they will achieve as well in public examinations and in their future lives. Teachers in maintained schools in certain areas have to challenge the mythology that only independent schools can fully satisfy the needs of the more able, and impress on parents who can afford to purchase a private education that it will be money wasted. At the other end of the social scale, teachers may have to raise the expectations and horizons of their able pupils, who may be hampered by a lack of ambition.

Progress

All students should be able to make progress and improve in any educational enterprise they are pursuing, whatever their academic starting point. I have regularly asked Heads of English, for instance, how they intend to improve the reading abilities of their most able readers, and been met with blank expressions in response. This is rarely an area of progression given any real attention. Yet there is never a ceiling in learning; and no learner ever reaches the end of a learning journey. There is always more to learn, or other ways in which to explore and apply what is already known. Carefully paying attention to the next stage of each student’s development should always be uppermost in the minds of teachers dealing with more able students. Teachers should, as a matter of course, be asking themselves ‘what next?’ in respect of any student’s development. Students should also be asked where they wish to take or further exercise their learning, and so give greater weight to the influence and power of their own student voice in this enterprise.

Prospective

The young people covered by the scope of this book could go on to be the potential leaders, professionals, decision-makers, producers and creative ground breakers of tomorrow. They may include the authors, poets and dramatists of the next generation. Our society needs them to be as skilled, confident, well prepared and open-minded as possible, and, just as importantly, as aware as possible of their latent potential for achieving true fulfilment in their future lives. Early and fully attentive identification of these students can lead to the design of appropriate and well-designed courses, capable of yielding wide-ranging benefits. But such provision should not be exclusively for the benefit of the more able; we want all our young people to be fully, ultimately, what they are capable of being. Raising expectations for the more able should lead on to raising expectations about all young people.

Pleasure

More able students in English should be able to derive huge pleasure from their studies; they have the potential to involve themselves deeply and to establish coherent links across their curriculum-based activities and their own interests. If their teachers know these students well, and acknowledge that they bring into their schooling involvement and expertise from other areas of language and linguistic enterprise, they will be in a better position to devise uniquely focused, alternative approaches to the courses of study, incorporating those pursuits in their planning for learning. A ‘one size fits all’ attitude is becoming increasingly challenged in course design, and it is particularly inappropriate in respect of the more able. There should be many ways in which an area of learning can be shared by a number of students, but separate pathways to the learning outcomes should be constructed to suit individual interpretation.

Paradigm

Paying the proper attention to the more able students in the class can also have hugely positive effects on all other students. When more able students are confident and comfortable, they are more likely to offer models of response and creativity that might not come as easily to their more mainstream peers. They will demonstrate superior feats of insight or suggest directions of thinking from which their classmates could derive extra stimulus and guidance. Teachers often adjust their own expectations of what all students can achieve when they are able to experience confident, empowered students working at their most fluent.

Personalisation

A further topic – personalisation – could be added to this list at this point. It is a significant notion with the capacity to absorb and have impact on the whole of the rationale outlined above. Because of its emerging important potential, it will be considered in greater detail later in this book.

Possible ways in which more able students in English might be identified

More able students in English can be identified in a number of ways. It is always better if teachers use a range of identification procedures to give the process greater credibility, and do not merely depend on isolated incidents (although these should never be overlooked, as we will explore fu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• How to Use this Book
• How to Use the CD-Rom
• CD-Rom Contents
• 1 Why it is so Important to Address the Needs of More Able Students in English
• 2 Who are the More Able in English?
• 3 Providing the Best Learning Environment for More Able Students in English
• 4 Learning in English
• 5 Personalisation and other Support Structures in English
• 6 Activities to Support and Challenge More Able English Students in Secondary Schools
• References
• Index