For many in education, pressures put on teachers to meet centralised outcomes have compounded the long-established culture of ‘ability labelling’ in the UK education system, in which children are categorised as ‘bright’, ‘average’ or ‘less able’, with expectations set on that basis.
In ability-based classrooms, teachers make assumptions about future attainment and educate as if every child’s potential is predictable, which can lead to damaging notions of ‘fixed ability’, since children often respond to predictions by achieving only what’s expected of them.
Believing that ability-based practices in schools, around which debate has raged for decades, set limits on teachers’ capacity to educate all children, a team of researchers based at the Faculty of Education joined forces with a carefully selected group of teachers who had rejected ability labelling in their classrooms in order to explore and develop a viable alternative.
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Image: Science Festival at Chemistry Dept Credit: Cambridge University
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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