Hey everyone, wanted to come on here and right a small piece about how I’ve been pushing my students more since Term 1’s started. Specifically, I’ve been making great use of our centre resources – mostly, textbooks from higher grades.

Week 1 is always a slow week at school. Many of my students feel like the stuff they’re doing is just too easy, or not moving at a challenging enough pace. Previously, I’d just find more resources from their current grade’s syllabus and smash those out with them. More recently, however (especially if the stuff is mostly revision material and I can see that they’re all over the concepts) I’ve been grabbing textbooks from the year above them and challenging them to have a go at those questions instead.

For one, they get the immediate “I’m doing more advanced work than I have to be doing” feeling, which is great for their self-esteem, confidence, motivation and actually makes them work harder (they feel like they’re getting an massive lead on their classmates who they can probably guess aren’t doing this level of work at home).

It also creates a new standard for what “work” should feel like, so that when they get back into their classrooms at school, that material feels (at least relatively) much more like a breeze and like they completely kill it!!

If the current concepts don’t make sense to your students, I would seriously recommend staying on the fundamentals and making sure that they’re super solid on those before doing any of this extra stuff. But, if it’s obvious that they’re all over the current stuff and itching for more, I don’t see any scenario in which grabbing more advanced material for our students to have a crack at isn’t super beneficial for them!!

Thanks for reading guys 😀

Thomas Koutavas