Members of Staff
As Head of European Languages, my team currently consists of the following:
1) the Head of the Languages Faculty (my line manager) and teacher of French (one KS3 Spanish class)
2) a Vice Principal who teaches two Spanish classes
3) a part-time French/Spanish teacher.
Meeting
We usually meet on Wednesday afternoons. Last Wednesday the agenda that we agreed upon was to talk about ICT tools that we have been finding useful. In the end, members of staff 2) and 3) (see above) could not attend the meeting, which is often the case. Therefore myself and member of staff 1) discussed using Scoop.It and Duolingo.
Outcome
We both agreed that they were highly effective tools and the key in them being effective was getting the students to use them. Member of staff 1) was so inspired by Duolingo that he resolved to use it to improve his Spanish.
In addition we have decided to write an 'expectations' policy for our students in Years 7-11, and an adapted one for students in Years 12-13 detailing what they should be doing, both in class and out of class to be successful language learners. We added to the policy that students should be using Duolingo several times a week to improve their French or Spanish.
Post-meeting happenings
Since the meeting, the document was shared with members of staff 2) and 3). I have had positive feedback from member of staff 3), to whom I introduced the teacher dashboard function on Duolingo, and she spent class time on it, although upon setting it as homework to her students she was disappointed to find that many of them had not bothered to do it.
Where next?
From here I plan to continue using Duolingo with my classes - it seems to work well, and continue encouraging my team to use it with their classes. As part of the expectations policy I think it will be easier to reinforce that we should be using this tool with our students. I also expect the teacher dashboard function to become more useful to us teachers. At the moment we can only track what our students complete on a weekly basis, but it has been mentioned that we will be able to identify areas of strength or weakness based on question response speeds in individual students and offer tailored support.
