25/09/2026
Our social focus this week is on ‘maintaining appropriate challenge’ and it’s easy to hear that phrase and picture one particular kind of lesson - an open problem, students working in small groups or perhaps a rich task on display on a screen or whiteboard. But challenge isn't a genre of lesson, rather it's a decision that you make however you are teaching. It's also a decision worth revisiting mid-lesson when you ask yourself whether the level of challenge is right for everyone in the room.
Where a lesson takes a more explicit approach, you might be asking yourself:
▪ how demanding is this worked example for the students in this class?
▪ what tells me a student is ready for scaffolding to be removed and how do I remove it?
▪ when I check for understanding, is the question pitched so the answer actually tells me something valuable?
Where students are working on a more open or investigative task, the questions are different:
▪ can every student find a way in, and what happens to the one who can't?
▪ what prompt opens a different door into the same mathematics for a student who is stuck?
▪ what deepens the mathematics for a student who finds the task straightforward?
These questions look different but lean into the same process. The support a student needs when an idea is new will hold that same student back once they have grasped it. Left in place, a scaffold stops being support and becomes a ceiling. So in both these lessons the work is identical: pitch the support to what this student already knows, then take it away as they learn. That is what 'maintaining' means when we talk about maintaining appropriate challenge.
If you want to take this further, research with Australian early years teachers looked at how they actually use enabling and extending prompts, including the finding that most waited at least five minutes before making an enabling prompt available.
To better understand what maintaining challenge might look like in a more explicitly taught lesson, Mathematics Hub's guidance covers worked examples, while this Evidence Snack from Peps Mccrea explores the idea of fading. Links are below:
Using enabling and extending prompts in the early primary years, James Russo and colleagues, MERGA:
🔗https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED623752.pdf
Worked examples, Mathematics Hub:
🔗 https://www.mathematicshub.edu.au/plan-teach-and-assess/teaching/teaching-strategies/worked-examples/
Concreteness fading, Peps Mccrea
🔗 https://snacks.pepsmccrea.com/p/concreteness-fading
