In From Able to Remarkable: Help your students become expert learners, Robert Massey provides a pathway to help teachers guide their students through the gauntlets of the gifted, the underpasses of underachievement and the roadblocks to remarkable on their learning journeys.
What makes remarkable students remarkable? Attributes such as resilience, curiosity and intelligence may come to mind and we might also add others, such as intuition and tenacity. But what has helped make them what they are?
Were they born this way, or did their 'remarkabilities' emerge during their schooling? Such questions may make teachers feel uneasy, prompting them to reflect on the sometimes limiting scope of what is often labelled as 'gifted and talented provision' in their school.
Robert Massey argues, however, that these remarkabilities are there, latent and dormant, in many more students than we might at first acknowledge. In From Able to Remarkable Robert shares a rich variety of practical, cross-curricular strategies designed to help teachers unearth and nurture these capabilities and signpost a route to the top for every learner.
Informed by educational research and evidence from the field of cognitive science, the book talks teachers through a wide range of effective teaching and learning techniques all of which are appropriate for use with all pupils and not only with top sets or high attainers. Robert also shares ideas on how teachers can improve their students' abilities to receive, respond to and then deliver feedback on both their own work and that of others. To complement the feedback process, he presents practical methods to help teachers make questioning, self-review and greater student ownership of their questioning within lessons a staple of day-to-day classroom interaction.
Venturing beyond the classroom, the book also explores approaches to whole-school provision for high-attaining students and offers some robust stretch and challenge to educational leaders in considering what widespread excellence in education might look like.
Suitable for teachers and gifted and talented coordinators in both primary and secondary schools.