Dr Keith Watson, NACE Associate
In recent years many new developments in teaching have been most welcome and have helped the shift towards a more research-informed profession. NACE’s recent report Making space for able learners – Cognitive challenge: principles into practice provides examples of strategies used for the design and management of cognitively challenging learning opportunities, including reference to Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction (2010) which outline many of these strategies.
These principles of instruction are particularly influential in current teaching, which is pleasing to the many good teachers who have been used them for years, although they may not have attached that exact language to what they were doing. These principles are especially helpful for early career teachers, but like all principles they need to be constantly reflected upon. I was always taken by Professor Deborah Eyre’s reference to “structured tinkering” (2002): not wholesale change but building upon key principles and existing practice.
This is where “cutaway” comes in – another of the strategies identified in the NACE report, and one which I would like to encourage you to “tinker” with in your approach to ability grouping and ensuring appropriately challenging learning for all.
What is “cutaway” and why use it?
The “cutaway” approach involves setting high-attaining students off to start their independent work earlier than the vast majority of the class, while the teacher continues to provide direct instruction/ modelling to the main group. In this way the high attainers can begin their independent work more quickly and can avoid being bored by the whole class instruction which they can find too easy, even when the teacher is trying to “teach to the top”. Once the rest of the class has begun their independent work, the teacher can then focus on the higher attaining group to consolidate the independent work and extend them further.
There are more nuances which I will explain later, but you may wonder, how did this way of working come about?
An often-quoted figure from the National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY) was that gifted students may already have acquired knowledge of 40-50% of their lessons before they are taught. If I am honest, this was 100% in some of my old lessons! With whole class teaching, retrieval practice tasks and modelling (all essential elements in a lesson), there are clear dangers of pupils being asked to work on things they already know well. There is the issue of what Freeman, (quoted in Ofsted, 2005:3), called the “three-time problem” where: “Pupils who absorb the information the first time develop a technique of mentally switching off for the second and the third, then switching on again for the next new point, involving considerable mental skill.” Why waste this time?
The idea of “cutaway” was consolidated when I carried out a research project involving the use of learning logs to improve teaching provision for more able learners (Watson, 2005). In this project teachers adapted their teaching based on pupil feedback. The teachers realised that, in a primary classroom, keeping the pupils too long “on the carpet” was inappropriate and the length of time available to work at a high level was being minimised. One of the teachers reflected: “Sometimes during shared work on the carpet, when revising work from previous lessons to check the understanding of other pupils, I feel aware of the more able children wanting to move on straight away and find it difficult to balance the needs of all the children within the Year 5 class.”
It therefore became common in lessons (though not all lessons) to cutaway pupils when they were ready to begin independent work. By using “cutaway” the pupils use time more effectively, develop greater independence, can move through work more quickly and carry out more extended and more challenging tasks. The method was commented upon favourably during a HMI inspection that my school received and has ever since been a mainstay of teaching at the school.
Who, when and how to cutaway
So how does a teacher decide when and who to cutaway? The method is not needed in all lessons, the cutaway group should vary based upon AfL, and at its best it involves pupils deciding whether they feel they need more modelling/explanation from the teacher or are ready to be cutaway. In a recent NACE blogpost on ability grouping, Dr Ann McCarthy emphasises that in using cutaway “the teacher constantly assesses pupils’ learning and needs and directs their learning to maximise opportunities, growth and development” and pupils “leave and join the shared learning community”. This underlines the importance of the AfL nature of the strategy and the importance of developing learners’ metacognition, which was another key finding in the NACE report.
Sometimes the cutaway approach is decided on before a lesson by the teacher based upon previous work. In GCSE history, a basic retrieval task on the Norman invasion could be time wasted for a more able pupil who has secure knowledge, whereas being cutaway to do an independent task centred on the role of the Pope in supporting William would be more challenging and worthwhile. It comes down to one key question a teacher needs to ask themselves when speaking to the whole class: “Who do I need here now?” Who needs to retrieve this knowledge? Who needs to hear this explanation? Who needs to see this model or complete this example? If a small group of higher attainers do not need this, then why slow the pace of their learning? Why not start them either on the same work independently or more challenging work to accelerate learning?
Why not play around with this idea? Explain your thinking to the pupils and see how they respond. Sometimes, at the end of one lesson, a task for the next lesson can be explained and the pupils could start the next lesson by working on that task straight away. The 2015 Ofsted handbook said, “The vast majority of pupils will progress through the programmes of study at the same rate”, and ideally, they will. However, a few pupils will progress at a faster rate and therefore need adapted provision. The NACE research and accompanying CPD programme suggests the use of “cutaway” can achieve this and it is well worth all teachers doing some “structured tinkering” with this strategy.
References
Additional reading and support
Share your views
How do you use ability grouping, and why? Share your experiences by commenting on this blog post or by contacting communications@nace.co.uk
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