NPP 6: A Useful Lens to Focus our Vision as a Department

 Our National Priorities Project is focused on our Year 7 French Exhibition. But this focus is very much intended to be a lens which can be applied to other aspects of our curriculum. Each pupil creates an artwork and writes the description in French, and their work goes on display to the public. This is intended to be challenging, creative, motivating, and to drive the need for grammatical understanding. But can it also be overwhelming, cause inaccuracy, and lead to "one offs" in order to complete a task rather than carefully sequenced long term learning.

Having kicked off our debate of these ideas in the direct context of the French Exhibition, would the same ideas be useful for sharpening our focus on other aspects of our curriculum?

One of the first tasks to be completed was our Department Inclusion Plan. The same ideas that we were questioning in the Art Exhibition came to the fore: How do we balance challenge and support? Do the things we do in order to make the work attractive actually distract from the learning? Should we be focusing on accuracy or communication? What is the balance of personal expression and careful mechanical rehearsal of well sequenced language?

What are the most important things in language learning? If we want to make sure that learning is carefully sequenced and without distractions, should we be stripping language down to the nitty gritty core of grammar and vocabulary? Should be we be ensuring accuracy through tightly controlled mechanical exercises based around retrieval of knowledge? Or is this to deny our pupils the key aspects of language learning such as interaction, self expression, interculturality? And if these seem "overwhelming", is that a reason to abandon them or a reason to explicitly work on developing them?

The Department Inclusion Plan was the result of our discussion as a department on these questions. Rather than narrate our debate, the plan itself serves to document this, so here's the central part of it:

The strength of this document is that it arises directly from what we said, how we think and what we actually do in the classroom every day. It wasn't written by starting with a list of criteria and ticking them off. We may have to now do exactly this - I can see, for example, that we don't mention how we work with teaching assistants. But the central questions in the left hand column come directly from our National Priorities Project work on interrogating our French Art Exhibition. And the strategies in the middle column reflect our vision of teaching and learning. 

It is based on a very real classroom-based awareness of the richness of our subject, with an interplay between language learning and intercultural learning. I don't want to "answer" the fundamental questions of our National Priorities Project prematurely, but it's our job to make sure that grammar, communication, engagment, focus, sequencing, personal expression, accuracy, culture... are not incompatible.

Next Post: As a department, we take apart our entire KS3 curriculum and resources.