Book Review: Teach to the Top by Megan Mansworth

By Holly Youlden

At the end of last year, I spent a chunk of time auditing the provision we offer as a school for students we might describe as More Able or having High Prior Attainment. I spoke to staff, students, middle leaders, observed lessons and had a student in every year group “shadowed” to gain insight into the type of stretch and challenge students were actually experiencing in a typical day of lessons. The results of this audit were not surprising:

• Students are excited and enjoy subjects they feel a good level of challenge in but are frustrated if tasks are not accessible to them
• Staff feel somewhat confident in how to support more able students but were very keen for more training in this area

This year, I am lucky to be in the Stretch and Challenge PLC which, after our first meeting, enabled me to reflect on these findings. One of the things that struck me was, although I had spent several years acquiring experience teaching very able students, I had not recently had a chance to think deeply about the ways in which I approach my teaching to stretch and challenge these students. This led me to read Teach to the Top, a brand new book by Megan Mansworth, an English teacher, leader and current PhD student in Literary Linguistics.

What is the book about? Teach to the Top advertises itself as a “research-informed guide to aspirational teaching”. One of the first things Mansworth writes is to clarify that teaching to the top does not mean taking approaches that prioritise high attainers. Instead, it looks to “consistently teach high-level ideas and knowledge” and make them accessible to all in the class. Echoing Sherrington in The Learning Rainforest and work by Reynolds and Farrels in the 1990s, learning happens best when expectations are high for all, including stretching the highest attaining members of a group. Mansworth then explores several key elements which she believes are essential for teachers to truly stretch their classes and create this culture of high expectation in the classroom.

First up was the subject knowledge of the teachers and how it is impossible for a teacher to have the “inner confidence” required for high-level questioning and quality explanations if subject knowledge is “fragile”. The second was a focus on curriculum, and thinking about how we build our medium and long-term planning to embed challenge, depth and what we assign value to in our curriculum. This also involves the pedagogical content knowledge, and how well teachers understand how best to teach particular topics or areas of content. Next was providing opportunities in lessons for students to think hard, reflect and discuss big ideas. Mansworth emphasised that this requires a distinct change in language from staff away from grade-focused language, which can cultivate a culture of students obsessed with exams, rather than learning. Finally, the book explored recent research by Smagorinsky (2018) which highlights how the concept of Zones of Proximal Development is often misapplied and stops many teachers from stretching students far enough. Mansworth highlights that we should not be reducing the aspiration of a lesson, irrespective of which set it may be or the prior attainment of students, but instead provide better access points and scaffolding so that all students are able to reach those high levels of thinking. Techniques discussed included Socratic questioning, asking students to generate questions about challenging resources and counterfactual thinking (i.e. “what if” questions) to help generate challenge in our lessons.

Overall the book provided a critical exploration of a lot of research and boiled it down to a short, sharp, straightforward guide with lots of questions to help teachers reflect and refine their own approaches.

Questions to think about:

• How regularly do you audit your own subject knowledge? How do you keep your subject knowledge up to date?
• How could you make the most of the subject knowledge of colleagues at WA? Beyond?
• Is the content of your lessons demanding? Is it accessible? Will all students have the opportunity to explore tricky concepts or ideas?
• How can we design activities that encourage deep thinking or add challenge?