Developing a Program Integrating Advanced Cognitive and Mental Skills Unique to Excellence Students

Learning in an excellence-track is highly demanding and requires continuous effort. When students encounter difficulty, and sometimes even failure, they are expected to keep trying until they succeed. Although making mistakes is intrinsic to the learning process, failure is not typically rewarded and not perceived as an opportunity for better learning. This cycle of effort and mistake can lead to students giving up and dropping out.

In our endeavor to strengthen the mental resilience of students in excellence classes, we turned to the Feuerstein Institute. Established in 1992 by the late Reuven Feuerstein as the International Center for the Advancement of Learning Potential, the Institute operates education programs in Israel and abroad. Its methodology is based on deep psychological diagnosis of learning potential and on providing science-based tools and strategies to improve thinking and learning.

The Feuerstein Institute proposes to utilize its ‘instrumental enrichment’ program and customize it to the needs of excellence class students. The program will be based on articulating the logic behind the learning process of mathematics at advanced levels. The Institute asserts that raising students’ awareness of the reasoning flow that leads to mistakes and successes will boost their confidence in improving their learning.

In the first stage, a team of experts, including psychologists and mathematics educators, will collaborate with mathematics teachers of middle school excellence classes. Together, they will identify typical errors, common difficulties, and learning profiles characteristic of these classes. In the second stage, the team will develop a training program for 40 mathematics teachers, student workbooks, and diagnostic tools that will be implemented with the 500 students taught by these teachers.

This will be followed by the participation of middle school mathematics teachers from excellence classes in two rounds of 30-hour training each. During this in-service training, the teachers will acquire tools aligned with the national mathematics curriculum and levels 5-6 of the PISA framework. These tools will help students improve their metacognitive skills, develop their self-regulation capacity, increase their confidence, and result in increased retention and success.

Following the in-service training, the teachers will receive individual instructional coaching over two years. If successful, the program will need to develop an operational plan and budget in order to be smoothly incorporated into schools at scale.

* The text above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 599