Chilli Challenges are a brilliant tool for any teacher to work with differentiation, they provide motivation and aspiration for all learners. Each child can have access to a mild, hot and sizzling challenge.
MILD – This is where you can see their existing knowledge or ensure the fundamentals of a topic. Ensuring that they can all achieve this will help you, showing you where best to take them next.
HOT – This is where you can allow the children to apply their knowledge, whether through a different context or through a word problem.
SIZZLING – This is where the children can demonstrate their understanding of the topic, showing you exactly what they do know. This also provides you the opportunity to also incorporate other areas of learning into the questions, testing the children to combine more than one topic area together.
These challenges can be done in a couple of ways:
Option 1:
The class as a whole has a collective set of challenges, which increase in difficulty, complexity or tie in to other learning as they progress. With everyone starting on the Mild challenge and working their way up.
This progression system, is good to reinforce the learning and ensuring that the children are comfortable with the ideas and the learning, allowing you to see areas of strengths and weaknesses and where best to guide them next.
Option 2:
Is all about providing the children with choice, suppling them with ideas and the children have the opportunity to access their own ideas at their own level.
Now most children will want to go for the sizzling challenge first and foremost, but this will allow them to understand that they need to know the hot and the mild knowledge first before they can build up to the sizzling challenge.
This also helps reinforce the growth mindset principle that we want to enforce with the chilli challenges,
“I can’t do the sizzling challenge yet, but I will do the hot challenge and then try again.”
This too links with the language of the chilli challenges, while it helps with differentiation, there is less stigma around the learning of MUST , SHOULD, COULD. It shows the children the progression of the learning, meaning that everyone can get to the sizzling challenge, rather than assuming that some children won’t/can’t.
Check out the video below, where I go more in depth into these ideas, as well as coving some examples that you could use in your own classroom.
Let me know you thoughts in the comments below!
Mrs Underwood
