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Deanne Wiseman

HPL Annual Conference and planning for HPL

Hi all,


It was wonderful to see so many people at the HPL Annual Conference. It really helped to focus my ideas on a few things and I thoroughly enjoyed running my "planning for HPL" workshop. We talked about how to tweak activities to ensure that all ACPs and VAAs are covered. One of these was an activity that I did recently to get pupils talking about a sentence builder by issuing the challenge that they needed to decide which sentence I would grade as the most difficult one in the sentence builder. I gave them 2-3 minutes to discuss this with their partner, explaining their ideas and justifying their decision. Then they wrote down their idea and I revealed the "level of difficulty" that I had assigned each part of the sentence builder. I really enjoyed this activity and it brought in an aspect of empathetic learning that would otherwise have been lacking from using the sentence builder.

Do you have any ideas for tweaks like this that you use - or does this make you think about things that you could do?

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Deanne Wiseman

New Technology, new teaching.

In today’s world of social media and technical communications we have unprecedented opportunities to contact, communicate with and inform our various stakeholders. Lockdowns have pushed us to develop a new skill set of electronic teaching and communications. Everywhere we see Podcasts from all sectors. The question this week is how our HPL community is using this technology. Are you making Podcasts for parents? Are you posting video content online to support home learning? How is it best used? Share with us your experiences in our subject communities and possibly gets some great ideas shared by others.

Personally, I have created quite a large number of videos for my pupils in which I explain exam techniques or provide online learning based on the content from their lessons. I choose to share these using YouTube, which they can access both in school and at home. Is anyone else doing something similar? Do share!

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Deanne Wiseman

Introducing HPL into MFL

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Hi all!

I’m really excited to be leading our discussion for HPL and Languages. I thought it might be nice to start the conversation with thinking about the small changes that we can all make to introduce HPL into our classrooms and to get our pupils thinking about the way they think and the way they behave.

At the very beginning of our journey, this was simply referencing the ACPs and VAAs in lessons and explaining how they were illustrated in the work that we were doing. For example, repetition and practice in a language lesson means a lot more to the pupils when you can explain it in terms of achieving automaticity through hardworking. It has made a real difference to be able to explain the reasoning behind our classroom teaching and means that I can demonstrate how this approach can be successful in different contexts and with different aspects of language. It’s been great to be handed a set of terms to explain to my classes why I do what I do and why I make them do what they do!

How did everyone else get started?
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Deanne Wiseman

The values of HPL

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I was recently asked to write content for an educational blog about my values and how they are demonstrated in the classroom and it started me thinking about how HPL reflect a lot of those values; the most important one being independence. I believe that the greatest thing we can teach our pupils is how to be an independent learner and how to take control of their own progress. Do you all feel the same or is there another aspect that is particularly important to you?
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Deanne Wiseman

How can we assess progression with use of VAAs and ACPs after accreditation?

During HPL Pathway Programmes we look to embed the HPL VAA and ACP vocabulary into our classrooms giving our students, teachers and parents a shared language to talk to and about learning. After accreditation we look to address progression and assessment for the VAAs and ACPs. How do we do this in our schools? How do we do this within subjects? Should this be teacher-led assessment or pupil self-evaluation?
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Deanne Wiseman

Creativity in the Languages Classroom

Anna Craft (2005) talks about "little c" creativity. This  means that knowledge can be new and "creative" as long as it is something new created by the individual learner, so learners are demonstrating little c creativity as soon as they start using grammar rules to create new language. We should be teaching for this type of creativity and independence from the very beginning by making our learners as independent as possible. We tend to start with sentence builders, teasing out the grammar they contain, before moving on to give learners the chance to create their own language using these rules with new vocabulary. Does anyone else teach like this?
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Deanne Wiseman

Languages Webinar - Learning to speak HPL

HPL in the Classroom Webinar: Speaking HPL in the Languages in the Classroom
ACCESS THE RECORDING HERE:

This webinar explores how to “speak HPL” in the language classroom. I guide participants through a consideration of how HPL can be used as a tool for both planning and self-reflection for the teacher and how teachers can use it to enable their pupils to become lifelong language learners.

FGC schools can access the webinar and the presentation here: https://members.highperformancelearning.co.uk/mod/folder/view.php?id=2797

Have you found that specific ACPs and VAAs seem relevant at certain times of the year? If so, do you focus on them when planning?

(Edited by Cassey Benito - original submission Thursday, 21 September 2023, 5:58 PM)

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