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ACEL WA The Learning Pit: Improving Students’ Attitudes Towards Challenge
with James Nottingham

ACEL hereby invite you to participate in a day with James Nottingham. In the morning, James will share the benefits of challenge as well as its pitfalls. In the afternoon, he will put everything into practice by leading two demonstration lessons for you to observe. It is hoped that you will be able to attend all day, but you are welcome to join us just for the morning if that suits your diary better.

Workshop Outline

Morning Content (9.00am – 12.00pm)
Learning begins at the edge of challenge. Stay in your comfort zone and you will rehearse, practice and consolidate (all important endeavours). Learning, however, is the process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, and understanding and to do so, you must go beyond what you are capable of right now. Vygotsky called this stepping into the Zone of Proximal Development. James Nottingham calls this going through the Learning Pit.

The benefits of challenge include the stirring of thinking (Willingham, 2022); the boosting of self-efficacy (Ciftci & Yildiz, 2019); and the ability to make lessons ‘stick’ longer (Roediger et al., 2011). The pitfalls include one size does not fit all – it has to be closely matched to each student; benefits that are abstract and so far in the distance that students require evidence of impact before they will engage; and the idea that it should be viewed by students as the best option even though so many school routines and forms of praise imply otherwise.

During the morning, James will cover the detail of all of this and, more importantly, what can be done about it to encourage students to willingly step out of their comfort more of the time.

Afternoon Content (1.00pm – 4.15pm)
James will lead two demonstration lessons. It is anticipated that one will be in a primary classroom and one in a secondary (although this will be adjusted if most or all delegates are from one phase). During both lessons, James will put the challenge techniques he describes in the morning into practice so you can see some of the best ways to guide students through the Learning Pit. Afterwards, there will be a Q&A session to help tease out the decisions James made and the alternatives he could have opted for.

James Nottingham

James is creator of the Learning Pit and author of 11 books on teaching and leading. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, he was a teaching assistant, teacher and then leader in primary and secondary schools in the UK. Then in 2006, he set up Challenging Learning, an independent consultancy group. He grew this into seven companies in seven countries (including Australia), employing 30 staff. He has now returned to what he loves most: giving keynote speeches, leading practical workshops and working longer-term with schools.

James is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Future 500, a ‘definitive list of the UK’s most forward thinking and creative innovators’.