HPL: a spring board for already high-performing learners
Over the past term a number of my fortnightly blogs have focused on different aspects of the school’s new High Performance Learning (HPL) philosophy – looking at HPL in relation to sport, food, well-being and single-sex education – and in this final blog of term I’d like to focus on HPL in relation to students who are already thought of as high performers.
Regular readers will already be familiar with the HPL philosophy: the brain is more malleable than previously thought and so, in contrast with traditional views that intelligence and high performance are the reserve of only a handful of students who are ‘innately talented’, high performance is in fact achievable for all learners.
The philosophy provides a practical toolkit to pinpoint the different learning behaviours (Values, Attitudes and Attributes or VAAs) and thinking skills (Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics or ACPs) that are required for high performance. Learners are able to use this toolkit to reflect on the behaviours or skills that might be slowing down progress, and to identify and develop the techniques they need to master in order to overcome hurdles and move forwards. To learn more about how students and staff have started to embed HPL into learning, please click here to read the latest issue of our termly school magazine Accolade, which is dedicated to the school's implementation of HPL.
Some people have concerns that an approach of this nature, while supporting ‘less natural’ high flyers, might not benefit those who are already excelling. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. The very same behaviours and thinking skills that can be used by learners who are finding things more difficult, whether in one area or across a range of challenges, will equally help learners who are already thriving, to perform at a more advanced level or across a greater breadth of tasks.
HPL is all about lifting aspirations for all, wherever students might currently be on the attainment spectrum.
That many high performers already demonstrate some of the behaviours and thinking skills required for high academic achievement, as set out by HPL, only goes to show that each of these VAAs and ACPs holds up under scrutiny. But, however well students may already be doing, they can no doubt further develop their attitudes and skills to perfect their work, as long as they have been able to identify the reasons behind their successes in the first place. This is the beauty of the practical nature of the HPL toolkit, which lists 20 specific ways of thinking (ACPs) and identifies 10 behaviours (VAAs) of successful learners. It’s also important for learners to be able to transfer positive behaviours and thinking skills from areas where they may already be thriving into areas in which success comes less easily, and so the more familiar students become with the language of HPL, the more they will be able to make self-assessments about what’s working well and what’s not, and use HPL as a spring board to take their learning even further.
As a school we widely celebrate our high achievers’ accomplishments, from Chemistry and Physics successes to Gold Arts Awards, and Technology tournament triumphs to our U16 undefeated County netball champions, and so in this final blog of term I wanted to take some time to celebrate our scholarships programme. The aim of our scholarships is to celebrate students’ outstanding academic, creative and sporting achievements and service to the wider community. They are designed to give girls recognition for accomplishments and abilities, but we also want them to act as a driving force to encourage students to take ownership of developing their gifts and talents further.
To help them in this, scholars receive dedicated support from teachers both within their particular area of talent – from Art, Creative Writing, Music and dance, to sport, Textiles, ‘all-round academic’, and design, and as an ethical Mary Ward scholar – and through a range of additional opportunities to encourage the development of broader skills in a more general sense.
Art: Our Head of Art regularly invites practitioners in to school as part of our extra-curricular programme for Art scholars and, in the Autumn Term, sculptor Mo Gardner visited the Art Centre to demonstrate to our Art scholars how to produce sculptures carved out of stone. This term the girls have worked with sculptor Andrew Lainchbury who has been creating life size clay busts based on the concept of self-portraiture.
Creative Writing: Creative Writing scholars enjoyed a lunchtime workshop earlier in the year with visiting author (Alexander) Gordon Smith, at which they heard about his decision, aged 11, to become a horror writer; how to overcome writer’s block; and the impact that writing for a publisher rather than for yourself can have on creative writing. He explained that an author’s job is essentially to “cause trouble for your characters” and that, in real life, we all have to overcome obstacles, so a good story ensures characters are never the same at the end of the book as they were at the start.
Sport: Year 10 and Year 11 sport scholars enjoyed an opportunity to visit Wimbledon High School at the start of the year to attend the Girls' Schools Association (GSA) Girls Go Gold conference. The conference is an opportunity to bring keen and talented sportswomen together for a day of training sessions and inspirational talks and the girls had the chance to train with successful tennis, netball and hockey players and particularly enjoyed the hockey session led by Olympic Gold Medalist Crista Cullen. They also had the chance to listen to a number of talks on topics such as psychology and nutrition, and to take part in a workshop about life as a professional sports person. A particular highlight for the group was the Q&A session with special guests Frank Lampard and Helen Glover MBE.
Academic: Academic scholars from Year 7 to Year 9 host a balloon debate each year for an audience of Year 6 pupils. This year the girls competing each represented a brand that they thought was ‘vital for the human race’ and needed to convince the Year 6 pupils of why their chosen brand was most vital, in order to keep their place in the balloon. Brands selected ranged from Unicef, Google, and Apple to NASA, YouTube and John Lewis, and the Year 6 audience narrowed the shortlist down to six finalists: WaterAid, Calpol, Unicef, GSK, Boots and NASA.
As well as being given opportunities like those outlined above, in which there is the potential for our highest flyers to become passive learners as result of having so many enrichment opportunities laid on for them, we want to ensure they are actively investing in their own development too. A task set by Mrs Kate Latham for our academic scholars over the Easter break does just this, while also prompting scholars to act as role models to their peers and contribute to the wider life of the school too.
The Advanced Learner Challenge invites scholars to take on three new challenges: to try something new; to enrich their learning; and to inspire others to learn. Some scholars have opted to try something new that is linked to their scholarship area – for instance one of our Music scholars is taking up a new instrument for her challenge – while others are learning a new language or taking up something completely unrelated to their school studies, such as knitting. The idea is for the girls to experiment and learn from any mistakes they make and to do something a little out of their comfort zone – to adopt HPL behaviours and thinking skills in new challenges. To enrich their learning students can read around their subjects or take an online course, or perhaps take the opportunity of the longer Easter break to attend a gallery or museum, to extend their creativity, or immerse themselves in a new situation.
We are delighted that our scholars tend to happily share their interests, ambitions and talents among the wider school community and the third part of the challenge – to inspire others to learn – embeds this further in our scholars’ minds. Students can offer to give an assembly, lead a discussion, create a display or even share suggestions with teachers for home learning resources they can recommend. Of course we also have our annual scholars’ evening in the Summer Term in which our scholars showcase their work and share their passions, and I warmly invite parents to come along to this event to find out more about the sorts of projects our scholars are involved in.
So, while we are thrilled to have adopted HPL in order to ensure there is ‘room at the top’ for all learners, we are also particularly excited to see the ways in which those already excelling are being equipped to achieve even more and, by doing so, ‘lift the lid’ and raise the bar for everyone else too.