How ICAS helps Te Aratai College to extend their students

In a system where teachers often manage classes of 20+ students, one of their greatest challenges is meeting the unique needs of each individual.

At Te Aratai College in Christchurch, Garth Lewis is well aware of this fact. As Assistant Head of Maths, it’s his job to ensure that the college’s students are progressing well for his subject – students of every ability.

But teaching in a college with many high-needs students makes this trickier than you might expect. These students need extra focus and support, and this creates a risk of overlooking the students at the other end of the scale – those who perform above standard:

To ensure that the college’s brightest students are being challenged, they recently reviewed their extension program and started to include more extra-curricular activities that push these kinds of learners to their academic limits. One of these activities is ICAS.

As a tough academic competition that tests students’ higher-order thinking skills, ICAS allows Garth to challenge his students in unique ways and ensure they’re getting the work they need to succeed – not just “regular” learning from the curriculum, but activities that really stretch their minds.

Garth doesn’t just think these kinds of opportunities are important. He believes they can have an enormous impact on certain students, especially because of their economic demographic. It’s about showing them that despite not growing up in a wealthy neighbourhood or coming from a privileged background, they still have the potential to light up the sky.

Without competitions like ICAS or Cantamath (which the college also participates in), these students would miss out on opportunities to prove their academic mettle. For Garth and Te Aratai college, they’ve proved a valuable method for meeting the needs of their brightest students and helping to teach inclusively (though ICAS can also be beneficial for students of every ability).

On the topic of inclusive teaching, the ICAS competition helps with this in another important way: through students’ results data. Garth uses this information to better understand how to extend his brightest students even further:

With a stronger understanding of how these students performed for specific skill areas in Mathematics, fortified with insights from other assessments, Garth can pinpoint exactly what they need to focus on:

Because ICAS and other academic competitions are helping Garth’s maths students perform at their very best, and have become a valuable component of their extension program, he’d like to widen the circle and see them being used in other subjects:

We’re delighted that Garth has found so much worth in ICAS for his high-ability students, and that is helps them to teach inclusively. We hope to see the college participate in a few more subjects this year!

References

1. Ben Wilbrink, 1997, Assessment in historical perspective, Studies in Educational Evaluation