Personalised learning is where students are given more choice of what, when and how they learn. Students can therefore learn at their own pace in order to fully understand the material that they are studying.
Unfortunately, there are many common misconception around just what personalised learning actually is. Leadbeater summarises quite nicely what is and isn’t personalised learning:
What is personalised learning?
Personalised Learning Is:
Personalised learning is not:
Personalised learning in North Canterbury could look like this:
· Individual students have a personal daily timetable which provides a combination of individual activity, longer learning episodes, and opportunities for collaborative activities.
· All children take part in sessions that build up their learning skills.
· They reflect on what they enjoy about learning and what they find hard.
· Parents are involved, and the teacher talks to them on a regular basis.
· Teachers design the formal learning that goes on in the school but do not deliver all of it; this is the domain of teaching assistants working with smaller groups.
· Part of the culture of the school is for older students to mentor younger students in such activities as music, dance, and gaming.
· Other adults support children throughout the school as counsellors, artists, teachers, and supporters of learning.
· This additional support frees teachers to focus on designing learning, liaising with parents, and advising students one-to-one.
· All lesson plans, complete with homework, are held on the intranet which is supported by a team of technicians.
· Learning takes place in many different spaces across the school, not just in classrooms.
· The school works intensively with preschools, primary schools and the community to transition students effectively through their learning journey and into the wider community. Studies show that drop off in involvement in community, social, education, and sporting activities occurs when transitioning from primary to secondary and secondary beyond. We are all, individually and collectively, poorer for this sad reality.
Much of what is written here, we are already doing. But are we doing it within the context of personalised learning? No. At secondary level, we are trapped by timetable constraints and the reality of NCEA.
“Personalised learning will only become possible when more resources are deployed more flexibly in order to meet the different needs of different children. Collaboration will be vital in achieving this, through devising new ways to use existing resources more effectively.” (Leadbeater)
Through co-constructing challenges, engagement will be enhanced. As Leadbeater states, Personalised learning is learner led learning, within a framework of standards. The goal is to motivate children and parents to become active investors in their own education. Through this partnership between home and school, students will feel more invested in their own learning.
Collaboration is central to determining successful outcomes in personalised learning. Personalised learning will only become possible when resources are deployed more flexibly in order to meet the different needs of different children. Collaboration will be vital in achieving this, through devising new ways to use existing resources more effectively. It is not a question of obtaining new resources. The answer lies in utilising what we already have. How can collaboration across schools, for example, facilitate this? Collaboration across our Community of Learning (Puketeraki) can avoid duplication of resources, share our specialist teachers more effectively across the wider community, ensure that resources reach the schools that need them most, and, more importantly, ensure that innovative practice is shared across all schools in our Community of Learning.
Leadership is critical when considering personalised learning. It cannot happen is isolation. For it requires schools to radically rethink how they operate. Current resources – teachers, parents, assistants, peers, technology, time and buildings – have to be used with more flexibly.
As a community, we are already starting to start implement elements of personalised learning. Seventeen local schools (primary schools and Rangiora High School) have been involved in our journey for the past three years; we have just been joined by local early childcare centres. At Rangiora High School, teachers at junior level are working collaboratively to create learning opportunities that allow more flexibility. I would not, however, call this ‘personalised learning’ as such. Another thing we do not do well is to include parents in decision-making. It is almost as though the intensity of primary school and the inclusion of parents is no longer allowed. Why is this? Is it the size of our school? Do parents feel excluded? Why?
Personalised learning is critical in the 21st century. Traditional schools, based around deadlines, timetables, teaching to the majority…this approach suited the workplace environment of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The future of work will not be around clocking in and clocking out, following orders from the boss and being unquestioning and servile. Now, more than ever, there are many ways of achieving stated outcomes. The future of work is all about problem-solving, time management, and using a variety of skills and media to produce different pathways to achieving similar outcomes. By utilising a personalised learning approach, all students from all manner of backgrounds will be able to respond to these challenges in their own way, in their own time, and through using their particular skill-set.