In April 2019, Dubai’s Hartland International School became the third school outside the UK to gain the NACE Challenge Award, in recognition of high-quality whole-school provision for more able learners. Amongst the school’s strengths, the Award report highlighted Hartland’s innovative and wide-reaching enrichment programme. Here, Gifted and Talented Coordinator Helen Green shares 10 challenging enrichment activities to try in your own school…

At Hartland International School we believe in the potential of all children to achieve. All students are given access to enrichment activities as part of the school day, four days a week, and many of our more able learners are invited to specific sessions targeted at their strengths and interests. It is an innovative programme which supports our aim of stretch and challenge for all.

All teachers are expected to deliver one or two enrichment activities, depending on their timetable; these sessions are planned for and monitored for consistency and value. Our sports provider delivers sessions to all students once a week. All enrichment activities are financed by the school, except those involving external providers (for example skiing and sailing).

Based on our experience of delivering a diverse and ambitious enrichment programme, here are 10 challenging enrichment activities to engage your more able learners…

1. Debating

Debating is an engaging, active learner-centred activity. Reasoning, research and public speaking are just some of the positives behind learning how to be a great debater. From planning an argument (even if you don’t agree with it), to choosing your words wisely, debating will help you take on whatever life chooses to throw at you. It is always good to have a debate showcase to aim for. Consider collaborating with other schools to hold a debate morning, where students can practise what they have learned over the course of the enrichment course. Alternatively, inviting experts in can also be very motivating (for example through an organisation such as Debate Mate, who offer training as well as running showcase debates).

2. General knowledge

The importance of general knowledge reaches far beyond books and exams. Whether in the classroom or the workplace, good general knowledge can help in all walks of life. Having general knowledge about different countries and geographies helps students to form a perspective about the world and a culture that may be different from their own. In a school with over 60 nationalities, this is especially important to us. This enrichment activity should be offered to all interested students; often it is the more creative students who surprise us with their quest for knowledge of their surroundings. This year we have found resources from Quiz Club to be really useful in supporting children in developing their general knowledge, as well as many library- and research-based enrichment sessions, in preparation for competitions with other schools.

3. Critical thinking

Critical thinking at a critical age… In this enrichment course, learners are taught to reason, construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. Through maths games and problem solving, critical thinking activities aid in making sense of maths problems and develop perseverance in solving them. This enrichment is particularly suitable for higher-ability mathematicians ready for a challenge.

4. Latin for beginners

Learning Latin encourages non-linear, outside-the-box thinking, as well as promoting greater focus and patience. This enrichment could be offered to highly able readers to enhance their enjoyment of literature. However, there are also some really fun Latin for beginner courses around (for example Minimus “the mouse that made Latin cool”), which would appeal to many students.

5. Biz kids

Many students have aspirations to run their own business and young entrepreneurs should be encouraged and supported to brainstorm their ideas; produce and market their product; and of course sell to the consumer. There are many ways to run this enrichment, from a Dragon’s Den-style approach to a young entrepreneurs programme which encourages students to develop their entrepreneurial skills. We spent a term developing, marketing and producing our products and ideas and then sold them to fund further ventures at the end of term.

6. Cooking through literacy

Most young people enjoy the challenge of cooking. If you have cooking facilities in your school, a great way to engage students in reading is to combine a cookery and reading enrichment activity. The Little Library Café has some great resources to facilitate this – providing recipes that are linked to a book, with a short note from the author. Students should be given ample time (maybe while their items are cooking) to be able to read and discuss the book and evaluate why the author chose to include the food in their writing. This is one of our most popular enrichments!

7. Research projects

Through detailed research on a project of interest to them, students develop critical thinking expertise, as well as effective analytical research and communication skills, that are incredibly beneficial. Ultimately research is essential to the development of our globalised society, so this is a great skill to develop from an early age. We find that our more able learners really embrace the challenge of research, being able to evaluate their findings and learn in depth about an area of interest.

8. Lego design challenges

At Hartland, we believe everyone can be good at maths; it is a set of skills that can be learned and practised. Through engineering and design challenges using Lego – such as designing transportation devices, musical monsters, bridges and ultimate playgrounds – our pupils are encouraged to be open-minded and flexible, thus developing the growth mindset that is so important to developing young mathematicians. The challenge for educators is to encourage this mindset and flexibility so that it stays with these young learners throughout their time in education and beyond.

9. Literary Society

Our Literary Society is an invite-only club for adventurous and keen readers in Years 8 and 9, designed to stretch and challenge students who have demonstrated an interest in literature. It combines great stories with stimulating discussion and probing debate. Each week students participate in discussion and activities that are intended to help them display their intellectual and independent thinking skills whilst discovering new literature. It is a safe space where they can explore and discuss without the worry of assessment or judgement. Students at Hartland have recently chosen “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett to discuss. The aim is to invite various guest speakers and other teachers to join and inspire our discussions. We are also hoping to link with a secondary school in the UK to collaborate across the miles.

10. Hour of code

During our coding enrichment, students create animated stories and interactive experiences while learning essential programming concepts with Scratch, such as developing their logic skills; improving their understanding of algorithms and learning how to debug their code. This drag-and-drop, creative environment developed by MIT uses sprites and code blocks to set a foundation of computational thinking. In addition as part of their gaming project, students managed to recreate popular games from the 1980s such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Although this is a challenging activity, many students thrive on this challenge and thoroughly enjoy the experience.

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Read more: 7 ideas to enrich your curriculum for more able learners

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Oracy skills underpin all areas of learning and life – and they certainly shouldn’t be taught only to those who join the school debating club, argues Natasha Goodfellow of the English-Speaking Union. Build oracy into every lesson with these five simple activities – suitable for all learners, phases and subjects.

Think about what you’ve done today. How much time have you spent talking, explaining, listening to deduce meaning or ease conflict? How much time have you spent persuading people to your point of view, or to do something you want doing, versus writing essays or doing maths?

Most communication is verbal, rather than written. And yet oracy receives much less attention in the school curriculum than literacy and numeracy. Even in schools which pride themselves on their oracy results, too often the teaching happens in debate or public speaking clubs as opposed to lesson time.

Why make oracy part of every lesson?

While a lunchtime or after-school club can be a good place to start, participants will generally be self-selecting, precluding many of those who might benefit the most. It’s far better to introduce an oracy element into every lesson.

As good teachers know, oracy is about far more than speaking and listening alone. Oracy activities encourage learners to voice and defend their opinions, to think for themselves and to listen critically. And, perhaps most importantly, they build confidence and resilience. However able an individual may be, it’s one thing to argue a point in an essay; it’s quite another to do that in person, in front of an audience, with others picking holes in your arguments, questioning your thought processes or your conclusions. And it’s another leap again to review the feedback and adjust your opinion or calmly concede that you may have been wrong.

With regular practice, what might initially seem uncomfortable or impossible is soon recognised as simply another skill to be learnt. Happily, it’s all part of a virtuous circle – the better learners are at speaking, the better their written work will be. The firmer their grip on the facts, the more convincing their arguments. And, ultimately, the more they are challenged and asked to think for themselves, the more rewarding their education will be.

Here are five simple oracy activities to incorporate in your daily teaching:

1. Balloon debate

Display a range of themed prompts on the board. For instance, in chemistry or physics you might choose different inventors; in PSHE you might choose “protein”, “fat” and “sugar”. Ask the class to imagine they are in a balloon which is rapidly sinking and that one person or item must be thrown out of the balloon. Each learner should choose a prompt and prepare a short speech explaining why he/she/it deserves to stay in the balloon. For each of the items listed, choose one learner to take part in the debate. The rest of the class should vote for the winners/losers.

2. Draw a line

This activity works well for lessons that synthesise knowledge. For example, you may use it to recap a scheme of work. Draw a line on the board. Label it “best to worst”, “most certain to least certain”, or whatever is appropriate. Learners should copy this line so they have their own personal (or small group) version. Introduce items – for example, in geography, different sources of energy; in history, difference sources of evidence. As you discuss each item and recap its main features, learners should place the item on their own personal line. In small groups or as a class, learners can then discuss any disagreements before placing the item on the collective class line on the board.

3. Where do you stand?

Assign one end of the room “agree” and the other “disagree”. When you give a statement, learners should move to the relevant side of the room depending on whether they agree or disagree. Using quick-fire, true/false questions allows you to swiftly assess understanding of lesson content, while more open questions allow learners to explain and defend their thinking.

4. Talking bursts

At appropriate points in a lesson, ask individual learners to speak for 30 seconds on a theme connected to the subject in hand. This could be in a colloquial mode – an executioner arguing that hanging should not be banned, for example; or a more formal mode – such as a summary of the history of capital punishment. Begin with your more able learners as a model; soon the whole class will be used to this approach.

5. Praise and feedback

Finally, make time for praise and feedback – both during oracy activities and as part of general class discussions. Invite comments on how speeches could be improved in future, and recognise and celebrate learners when they make good arguments or use appropriate vocabulary.

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Natasha Goodfellow is Consultant Editor at the English-Speaking Union where she oversees the publication of the charity’s magazine, Dialogue, and content on its website. She has worked as an English teacher abroad and is now a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Independent and The Week Junior.

NACE is proud to partner with the English-Speaking Union (ESU), an educational charity working to ensure young people have the speaking and listening skills and cultural understanding they need to thrive. The ESU’s Discover Debating programme, a sustainable programme designed to improve listening and speaking skills and self-confidence in Years 5 and 6, is now open for applications, with large subsidies available for schools with high levels of FSM and EAL. To find out more and get involved, visit www.esu.org/discover-debating

Read more:

• 5 reasons to teach oracy skills in your classroom
• 7 strategies to develop oracy skills for all learners
  

Plus: for more oracy-based challenges to use in your classroom, watch our webinar on this topic (member login required).

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Keren Gunn, senior assistant principal for teaching school and staff development at Sir Christopher Hatton Academy, explores the challenges and opportunities of the new top GCSE grade.

Sir Christopher Hatton Academy is an outstanding (Ofsted 2015) mixed comprehensive, the lead sponsor in the Hatton Academies Trust, a teaching school and lead of the Hatton Teaching School Alliance. It achieved its second accreditation with the NACE Challenge Award in 2015, and is working towards its third. 

As we review and renew our practice for all learners, I have been reflecting on what the change to the new 9-1 GCSEs means. What will a grade 9 look like; what are the qualities of “grade 9-ness”? How will we teach it effectively, and will we recognise it when we see it? 

We know that according to Ofqual and the DfE, about 20% of the number of students achieving grade 7 or above will achieve a grade 9, and this means about 2.9% of students who would have got an A* would be getting a grade 9 this time round. 

Opportunities and challenges across the curriculum

We see the new grade 9 as a real opportunity, as well as a challenge. From speaking to middle leaders across the academy, the challenges and the opportunities sound remarkably similar across the subjects. The grade 9 system provides huge opportunities for stretching and challenging students, and could allow for real progression and mastery within the curriculum. There are significant opportunities to exploit creative links with business, industry and higher education, for example in food technology or computing and beyond. 

Examples of the innovation taking place include the use of authentic materials in MFL to ensure the language is of a sufficiently high register; adaptation of teaching methods and materials previously used at A-level; and a significant awareness of the need to explicitly teach higher-level thinking skills. The changes also offer an exciting opportunity to re-shape our Key Stage 3 curriculum to develop learners earlier on.

And the challenges? First, the lack of quality exemplar materials from exam boards to guide on the difference between a grade 8 and 9 – particularly significant in subjects like English where we have long been used to a subjective mark scheme, but equally so in mathematics and science, where there are new uncertainties in how questions are likely to be worded. There is also the challenge of delivering additional knowledge-based requirements, while ensuring the skills needed for sophisticated evaluation and analysis are fully developed. 

Developing “grade 9” qualities and skills 

The very quality of being a grade 9 learner is to be independent, enquiring, analytical, critical – and teachers need to be given the best tools, materials and CPD to ensure they can meet these students’ needs. 

One area I have been working on in my own English teaching is the enhancement of targeted academic writing skills, to develop the quality of expression and lexical choices required at grade 9, as well as building contextual and cultural capital as students explore texts. I’ve also used open investigative approaches to poetry, encouraging learners to explore both creative and analytical responses, as well as more formal analysis. After initial work on the Ted Hughes poem “Bayonet Charge”, one student’s response in a first-person piece of creative writing read:

“As the bullets rained down on us the mud caught my feet and held me there as I stumbled frantically. That tear in my eye was not of bravery or patriotism, but of shock and pain. How could our country do that to us? Why would it push us to pain and anguish? I couldn’t comprehend.”  

She had been given time to explore themes, concepts, attitudes and values, enabling her to form independent ideas about the poem, which she will then be able to translate into more formal academic analysis. 

In realising that the message is about challenge for all, we can maximise the opportunity presented by the new GCSEs and embrace the vision of excellence for all students.  

This blog post is based on an article first published in the summer 2017 edition of the NACE Insight newsletter, available for all NACE member schools. To view all past editions of Insight, log in as a member.