b'High Performance LearningThe English department gets in touch with the futureFor the past eighteen months, Ellesmere College has followed an exciting, evidence-based approach to teaching called High Performance Learning (HPL), focusing on a more creative and holistic view of learning in order to develop advanced cognitive performance, and a set of behaviours and attitudes that will create a more rounded work- and life-ready student.Tomorrows schools will need to help students think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. They will need to help students develop a strong sense of right and wrong, and sensitivity to the claims that others make. These are the words of Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the OECD. He suggests that schools must shift rapidly from the transmission of knowledge as an end in itself to the development of what have become known as 21st Century skills, something that HPL consciously encourages. In the English Department, HPL means that familiar works of prose, drama and poetry are approached in innovative and imaginative ways. Adult visitors to the English classrooms will encounter an approach that is quite different to their own school days. As in the world beyond, how we learn is as important as what we learn.To develop a students creativity, it is not an uncommon sight to witness a Shakespearean comedy re-worked into a silent movie, a gritty novel about 1930s America re-imagined in play dough, or the heart-rending tale of a woman watching narwhal being hunted in the Arctic being depicted in a stop-motion animation. In fact, one of the key tenets of HPL, that students need the space to fail in order to learn from their mistakes, means that they are given a lot of freedom when it comes to how they respond to a literary piece. Since the advent of HPL, A-Level Literature and International Baccalaureate students have become familiar with blogs and digital notebooks as they choose how to record their learning in the medium that will best allow them to revise. Another area where HPL has changed things, is the classroom space itself. All of our English rooms have been equipped with cutting-edge touchscreen plasma displays, which have been kindly funded by Enhance Ellesmere donations. In the strange times caused by the coronavirus, live performances are becoming uncomfortably distant memories, but watching The Duchess of Malfi reach its shocking denouement on a wide screen is still a visceral experience and leads to profound debate about the nature of justice and revenge, thereby developing students concern for society. Taking a Year 10 class on a tour of the various settings they will encounter in the course is made possible by Google Earth and sees us visit California as we trace Lennie and Georges footsteps in Of Mice and Men, before heading back across the Atlantic and north of the border for The Scottish Play, then to the Midlands for An Inspector Calls and across to Ypres and Sarajevo for war poetry. We then head east as we look at literary nonfiction and stop off in Bhutan, Pakistan and Hong Kong before crossing the Pacific and reaching Greenland, then heading south to Somalia and Nigeria. A simple tour like this shows students how the texts they study span the globe. From hi-tech to low-tech, play dough to plasma screens, English lessons cover the familiar literature from the past, but do so with an eye to preparing students for the future. Ellesmere College Newsletter Michaelmas 2020 37'