'I've finished early, so what should I do?'

I have always been an over planner and I was often advised by observers to reduce the number of tasks that I expect my pupils to achieve during lessons. Pupils rushing to complete tasks and hands shooting in the air to cheerfully announce that they have finished the set task (J'ai fini!) was common place in my classroom. I even used to give rewards to the first one to finish the task! I used to ask early finishers to do a few more exercises or gave them another similar worksheet to fill the time until the rest of the class had finished.
My work on metacognition led me to understand that this might not be an effective use of lesson time. Pupils felt that they were working really hard, but the reality was that they were staying in their comfort zone and I was limiting what they were able to achieve.
I, therefore, began to create a bank of resources designed to encourage pupils to improve their outcomes and to deepen their own learning. At the time, I had read The Lazy Teacher's Handbook by Jim Smith and I was also looking for ways to encourage my students to do more while I did less. I started by looking at my worksheets and tweaked them to allow pupils to select their own level of challenge. I told all students to start at the question that they perceived to be difficult and not to bother with the rest.

There was a strong sense of achievement amongst the students particularly when I deliberately used coaching phrases such as "I would be surprised if you are able to do that without using your book" or "are you sure that you can't mange to do the red section too?"

As a department we also developed a bank of reading comprehension cards which we categorised according to level of difficulty and not according to age or year group. My head of department came up with the idea of using karate belt colours to rank the level of difficulty. Pupils were again encouraged to select their own level of challenge and pupils felt a strong sense of pride when they successfully understood a 'black belt' reading card. 

As I started to experiment with metacognition in my classroom, I created a metacognitive activities board that I stuck at the back of my room and I called it the 'I've finished early so what should I do?' board. I know, catchy isn't it? I tried to link each task to my metacognitive processes headings of prediction, comprehension, connections, analysis, application and reflection. 

Pupils are usually not allowed to move to USEFUL or INNOVATIVE until they have completed all tasks on the ESSENTIAL board. This encourages them to slow down and quality assure their main lesson outcome before they move on to other things. The sounds of 'j'ai fini' have started to reduce and I am not really that busy in lessons anymore! Pupils tell me that they enjoy being able to choose their tasks and they like how they make them think a bit differently.

Thanks for reading, Becky  BexK06