Challenge and Enrichment for Ambitious Economics Students

This week I was delighted to travel down to Stratford upon Avon to join the annual gathering of the BASS group of schools. BASS stands for Boys Academically Selective Schools and draws schools from a large range of schools across the UK. The setting at King Edward VI School, Stratford upon Avon was stunning - our conference venue is reputed to have been Shakespeare's classroom!There are lots of these cluster meetings held at this time of year. As the exam season reaches a conclusion, many teachers are preparing schemes of work, crafting new lesson ideas and drawing up plans for supporting their students as they bid for university places. My talk focused on some of the strategies that I have used in recent years to aid the many students in my own school who are ambitious to win places to read Economics and related disciplines on hugely competitive courses. Here is the essence of what I covered - I am pleased to say that we have used all twelve of them in the last year - offering a large number of students an opportunity to invest some of their hard-pressed time in some enrichment and extension projects. The vast majority of our students apply for university courses. At a time when a given set of grades are almost taken as a given by admissions tutors, finding a competitive edge in the application process is given added currency with every passing year. But most of all, these added activities are fun to do and enrich our own teaching.The overall challenge ........ 12 suggestions for academic challenge and enrichment....................

• Leave the Syllabus Behind! For me this is the most important approach - to help students become aware of new, contrarian, unorthodox and challenging ideas that rarely if ever make their way into the syllabus or do so after a decade or so! Even with the prospects of syllabus reform on the near horizon, there is so much that is genuinely interesting that lies outside the syllabus. My instinct is always to build this into teaching although those with a stronger emotional attachment to mark schemes might disagree! Point one leads naturally to point 2 .....
  
• Really Ambitious Reading - many boys are reluctant to read but ambitious students should regard this as an essential part of their preparation for top courses. Stay clear of textbooks, find interest articles on the web (Project Syndicate is a good start), delve into the comment and analysis publications such as the Economist and Prospect Magazine. Find some authors of new books on topics of particular interest and which challenge what you have been studying in routine lessons
  

• Student Blogs / Mag / You Tube Channel - I have seen a number of schools and colleges make great progress with this - creating a team of blog editors, launching their own school economics magazine or short video clips on You Tube. Articulate, fresh and often compelling writing from students can be leveraged on different platforms and provides robust evidence of a commitment to independent learning and taking a subject beyond the narrow confines of the syllabus.
  
• Enrol Students on a MOOC - a MOOC stands for a 'massive open online course' and there are many that might serve well on channels such as iTunes U and - for example - the development economics course created the Marginal Revolution blog. Brent Hoberman wrote in the Guardian recently about the rapid growth of MOOCs - click here for his piece
  
• Student-run Working Walls - give over walls of department rooms or other spaces for students to take responsibility for their own working walls. Click here for a blog on this drawing on an idea from Innes Robinson
  
• Summer Schools - more summer school programmes are established each year but they fill up quickly. Many are truly excellent and transformative for the students concerned, offering new insights, ambitious programmes and lots of help with university entrance procedures.
  
• Inter-School Debates and Competitions - we have run these with success - invite a local school or college to a debate on one or more issues of the day. Run a university challenge style event. Get the competitive juices flowing.
  
• Run an Academic Symposium - Another successful project for us in recent years, establishing an academic symposium with another school - indeed there are several of these run each year giving Oxbridge students in particular the chance to hone their discussion skills ahead of interviews and deepen their understanding of how other students build and sustain an argument.
  
• Student Society / Academic Visits - much depends here on your proximity to local universities, academic bodies and speakers willing to travel. My aim each week is to go into London for at least one lecture, talk, presentation or film that has a connection with our academic work. The LSE public lectures in particular are superb. Giving students a chance to run a society and organize an after-school event can be a incredibly positive experience for them and also great marketing for the department! Here is an example of an event put on by students and teachers at Greenhead College.
  

• Essay Competitions - Perhaps point 10 should have been right at the top too! I expect all of my students who are planning a university bid to research and write at least one essay for either an internal or an external competition such as the one run by the RES which finishes at the end of June. Preparing, writing, editing and referencing longer essays is vital in helping to bridge the gap between school and university and it sends an important signal to me as a teacher about a student's commitment. I know that many schools now organize their own internal essay competitions to give students a chance to shine during the summer holidays; there are big positive spill-overs for when they come to finish UCAS personal statements.
  
• Skype Seminars - if you find it tough to get business personalities, writers and so on to come to your school and college, why not organize a Skype session with them?
  
• Academic engagement with Twitter and blogs - many students are reluctant to use social media tools for academic enrichment but others take on the challenge and add experts to their followers profile or go further and make direct contact to ask about their work or the courses on offer at their universities.
  

I have deliberately left out work experience from my dozen suggestions! There are lots of good reasons for applying for work placements and similar opportunities but many parents are obsessed by it whereas often the time during the summer can be much better spent focusing on developing an academic edge and much deeper sense of contextual awareness.

Here at Tutor2u, Jon, Graham, Michelle and the team have been busy working on a range of new activities for classroom use - many of which have been showcased at events such as WOW Economics and TBBLE.

For more on our PowerPoint games learning projects and products - click here

Some of the games lend themselves to a flipped-approach, namely to give a copy of the game to students for them to develop their own quizzes and challenges either to test each other or perhaps to test the teacher!

Teachers and their students are often severely pressed for time and have much else going on in their lives inside and outside of school. The quality of teaching and learning during routine school days is also absolutely critical to success.

But I hope there might be one or two ideas in the list above for extra-curricular activities that might be worth considering for stretching and challenging your able and ambitious students. Please do get in touch if you would like to develop a conversation on this, I am always looking out for innovative and interesting ideas for challenging our students to become more ambitious in their work.

The latest edition of my UCAS Guidance Notes for Economics is now available - if you would like a copy please send me an email and I will post one to you by return.

UCAS Advice for Economics from tutor2u