On how to extend in secondary English

The experiences of one teacher FWIW

New heights in learning! Photo by Nong on Unsplash

I’m not a big fan of frameworks. They often look kind of neat and visual, but they rarely give much guidance beyond a few examples. Dressed up as being intellectual, they’re often pretty rudimentary once we scratch the surface. I’ve been wondering about the most effective ways to extend gifted and high potential learners. Often gifted education just means more work for the student, little truly new learning, and a bunch of undirected and unsupported time working on projects. As far as value-add from the teacher, these students are often on their own, one way or another. 

The Williams model is one that looks promising at first. But a lot of the suggested activities reflect what good teachers often do. For example the model suggests posing paradoxical questions to explore, but a good teacher will set complex or multifaceted questions as part of a unit plan anyway. On the other hand, many suggestions are just poor teaching: asking students to choose a different mode of delivery that you’re not really planning to teach. My favourite is the old chestnut, the podcast task, or tasks like sketching trench life, where it’s hard to see much cognitive work beyond which shade of brown to use. 

I have been reflecting on how I extend gifted and high potential learners and this piece needs the caveat that some of the examples I will refer to are from a streamed class, which is always easier. I’m relatively new to this area, in the sense that I’ve never thought deeply about it until quite recently. What I have to offer are just ideas, and I’m curious to know what’s worked well for you. I’m going to stick to English and I will stay away from broad brush advice. These ideas are purely subjective and not particularly based on research, but for what they’re worth, here are five strategies.

Curriculum compacting

Compacting is where students have so much prior knowledge and skill, that teaching requires less explanation and fewer repetitions for mastery. Sometimes compacting happens by accident, for example you may find yourself with a lesson to spare. Sometimes we can plan for compacting with good diagnostic tools. I would like to remember to do this more often.  

For me, compacting is often accidental or semi-conscious, where I will speed things up or skip redundant content and skills. Sometimes my creativity will step in and other times I’m left with several weeks to extend my group. Compacting leaves more time for choice and creativity – the core learning has been completed, so we can move to more inefficient but also more interesting and enriching modes. Professor Andrew Martin represents explicit teaching for gifted learners like an inverted pyramid with explicit instruction at the pointy bottom – the opposite would apply for mixed achievement classes. 

Responsive skill teaching

Skill teaching with a high potential group can tend to be just-in-time rather than pre-programmed, because you’re targeting micro skills, adding flair and sometimes encouraging experimentation. You’ll likely be addressing needs that might not be common across the grade. I tend to run little diagnostic, informal tasks early on in a unit to see where the gaps are. For example, high achieving students can often focus on “correct” punctuation, leaving little space for personal voice. So, a lesson on how to create an approachable, stream-of-consciousness style using punctuation that appears casual but is deceptively accurate and highly purposeful, is a great skill for a top set and one where creativity may be lacking. Here, examples from challenging texts can be used as models. Woolf springs to mind, and Vonnegut. 

Reading difficult things

We use critical and other readings, probably at the college rather than navel-gazing level, partly as models for writing and argumentation. I also encourage ‘slow reading’ using the SQ3R method, and I also use critical readings to introduce complex concepts and the way they are articulated. For example, when exploring the links between Indigenous Language and wellbeing, we used some research from the world of health, which used an Indigenous research paradigm, drawing on an alternative scientific epistemology. 

Using complex supplementary material as a stimulus throws up some of the messiness that makes extending students so much fun. We used a Masters thesis on Indigenous literature as a model for an extended essay. Our choice of Masters thesis was written by a Second Nations scholar, who included a positionality statement, therefore we planned to include a positionality statement. It was a fascinating way to get to know student experiences of race, and a chance for them to reflect on what they had learned about Indigenous culture across the curriculum. But it wasn’t imposed and that led to some interesting conversations too. 

Choice with guardrails

I’m not a fan of allowing free choice in ‘product’ as much as content. The task I mentioned above, the thesis-style task, had an element of constrained choice. Students could choose any female Indigenous creator to focus on from a selection of fantastic women with fascinating and diverse backgrounds. They could ‘pitch’ someone from outside this list, but most chose from my well-curated selection, from artists like Destiny Deacon to young playwrights like Nakkiah Lui, who hails from Mount Druitt in Sydney. 

Having the Masters exemplar meant I could provide just-in-time scaffolding for those who needed a bit of extra support with structure, or students who found it hard to discern a structure within, for example, a three-page-long introduction. By limiting the medium, I knew students would walk away with specific skills, like how to plan a long piece, how to use Zotero and accurately reference, and how to create a table of contents. In other words, it helped me to sensibly constrain what I might be required to teach. 

Big fancy words

It might well be that I’m lucky to work with strong students who also don’t hate English. This allows me to introduce the kind of concepts that would get a first year literature student excited. Looking at Atwood’s rendition of Homer’s Odyssey, we looked at big chuncky conceptual terms like Postmodernism, metafiction, pastiche, dominant and grand narratives. 

In a lot of ways I teach these terms just like any other new vocabulary – explicitly. I define, I give examples and I give models of usage embedded within examples of analysis of the text. Intertextuality might be a whole lesson. Similarly, Postmodernism will need to be backed up with a mini history of literary movements, perhaps even over several lessons. 

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I’m still developing my knowledge and experience in this area. Likewise teaching about Indigenous culture, and teaching Indigenous literature. I have a great human resource at my school who is breaking new ground in how to upskill us non-Indigenous teachers while mitigating the cultural load that comes with this kind of work.

The takeaway here, and this is my belief, is that gifted and high potential learners need to be taught new things. And if they have a ton of background knowledge already, then it’s our job to find something new to teach them.