I love languages. When I look back at my life choices, the one thing that I can’t imagine is not being able to speak a different language. I wasn’t brought up bilingual, so all my skills and understanding started in the secondary school classroom in a comprehensive school in Wales and have blossomed from there. This is why I am so passionate about the skills that we teach the pupils sitting in front of us.
I have taught in and been responsible for language departments in a wide range of secondary schools, including mixed comprehensives, single-sex comprehensives, a boys’ grammar school and a British international school and what I love about HPL is that it gives me the vocabulary and the evidence to explain why I do things the way I do. HPL also provides us with a tool to guide our self-reflection and to expand the way in which we teach to enable the pupils sitting in front of us to fully develop their potential.
The principles for teaching and learning identified by HPL can become a real touchstone for us as curriculums and qualifications change – we have evidence of how best to provide our pupils with the skills they need to learn. Not just now, but as they move forward into a world of work that demands that workers change, adapt and learn.
HPL can help us to give pupils the skills they need to become successful language learners and give them access to something that they will have for the rest of their lives.
- Deanne Wiseman
The vocabulary in the ACPs and VAAs are giving me a new way to motivate struggling students. Students are starting to see that there is a route to high performance in MFL, other than just being naturally gifted in the discipline!
I have done lots of work with my pupils on "linking" - previous knowledge, vocabulary they know, using their mother tongue to find cognates and near cognates. I'm hoping pupils are seeing that languages can't simply be compartmentalised into GCSE topics.
We encourage pupils to share their opinions and the way how they manage challenging tasks. Pupils built up a collaborative learning environment where students work together, share ideas, and learn from each other. Promoting teamwork and communication skills. This motivate pupils in learning challenging topics. Of course, hard working and resilience are important.
So nice to hear from you. You are very right about this. There's absolutely an overlap between attributes. I think that hardworking is a really interesting one for the classroom, though. That and realising, I feel, go very much hand in hand. I find that I speak to my classes a lot about these two ACPs as they can be very passive and slow to engage with tasks. I think in terms of listening, hardworking is evident when pupils employ techniques such as reading ahead, annotating ahead of listening and looking up words as part of their predictive preparation work. Obviously, you can see the links between this and meta-thinking in terms of preparation, too. I don't think you need to separate the attributes necessarily, though. Good learners will employ several attributes at any given time when working on an activity, so always feel free to model and make explicit all the ACPs and VAAs that pupils are employing!