High Performance Learning (HPL) in action at our Junior School

At the beginning of this year in February we presented the High Performance Learning (HPL) framework to parents.  Since then we have made excellent progress and in this blog I thought it would be helpful to focus on what we have done and most importantly how it is helping your daughter's in their learning.  

Over the past few weeks instead of a 'word of the week' we have had a 'character of the week'. We started after Easter with Esmerelda the Elephant, our first HPL character who represents meta-thinking, and we are now up to Octavia the Owl who represents analysing.

These thinking skills may seem too broad or indeed complex for young children but we have simplified them into 'I am able to...' sentences (see the classroom posters that can be downloaded below) and through our weekly focus we are getting to know these characters and their individual personalities.

In order to make them come to life some of the pupils even imagined the characters becoming real in school every night and interacting with one another, can you imagine what adventures they must have. 'Night at St Mary's' rather than 'Night at the Museum'! In fact, over the half term break we will be holding a creative writing competition based on this title, more information about this exciting competition will follow next week. Through this and the new 'character house point' stickers we are fully embedding HPL thinking skills into our teaching and learning so that the pupils are becoming more effective learners. This is also backed up by evidence, in their recent report on meta-cognition the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) found that there is extensive evidence that it has a high impact on learning.    

At this point I would like to ask for your help at home. Please engage with your daughters about the characters and therefore thinking skills. Talk through examples of how your brain works, what strategies do you use when you find something difficult? Model how you set about a difficult problem and encourage your daughter to think about the thinking skills involved. Which one she is using when doing her homework?

You can download a copy of the posters we use in school below, both a Pre-prep and Prep version and before half term, your daughter will bring home an A5 version of this to use while doing her homework.  

Download our Pre-prep poster

Download our Prep poster

To keep in touch with developments on how HPL is being implemented, and all other news, please do sign up to the new Junior School Twitter feed which we launched this week. We look forward to engaging with you on our new account!