Personalising Learning
This discussion on Personalising Learning is in three parts.
Part One
When I was working as a school Principal and consultant in the
UK, the then newly appointed Minister, David Milliband, started talking about Personalising Learning. It was all very conceptual stuff, and the practical teacherly types amongst us were wondering how on earth we would implement these seemingly endless demands for “customised service for our clients”. It all sounded much more at home in a direct marketing company or a boutique pharmaceutical manufacturer, and out of place in classrooms of 30 or more students and limited budgets.
What I failed to understand is that Personalising Learning isn’t a product or service, it’s an organising principle. In my previous studies with Professor John Burnham West, he had talked about how education needed to become tailor-made to the student, and relevant and unique to them. He also talked about schools dying from within due to endless “improvements” – tinkering, altering, amending – when what was required for the 21st century was school transformation. It was putting all these ideas together under Personalising Learning that was my personal challenge, as well as the professional challenges at work.
When undertaking these changes at the school I was working at, a whole new, shared, rich language about achievement, progress, expectation, started to go through the entire community. Parents and students loved the security of knowing where they were and that progress is followed, the pride that their school had aspirations for them, and the confidence that they knew what to do to achieve.
Not every loved it, but it was worth it to get talented people to deliver an excellent education to a community that had stopped expecting anything from their school.
So – what am I saying here? Firstly, we had an individual target setting programme, which was Personalising Learning without us even knowing it. We could say where each individual was, and where they were going, and how they were actively involved in their learning. What I learned from this is that each school can define for itself, their own meaning of Personalising Learning. Secondly, that Personalising Learning doesn’t suit all teachers. But what I learnt was that it showed me how to recognise the excellent ones. Thirdly, Personalising Learning takes the adults out of their comfort zone, because they have to share their control of the learning with their students and their families. And that doesn’t suit all teachers. But what I learnt was it showed me how to celebrate the excellent ones.
To find out more about this school’s transformation, read on…
I had taken over a highly dysfunctional, very low decile, multicultural school in central
London. There were two glaring problems in a sea of issues that struck me straight away. Firstly, it seemed that none of the systems or processes that the school had were for benefit of the students – it was all for the comfort of the adults. From setting budgets that used imaginary income to being able to smoke in the playground while on duty, adults ruled. Secondly, no one knew where the students were at with their achievement, and no one could say where they wanted to be at the end of a school year. There was no imagination about who these students could be, no expectations that they would be successful, and no evidence of value being added to these students education, let alone their chances in life.
This was a school where you didn’t have plan. Standing by the photocopier and pushing in “30” was teaching. This was a school where a group of Year 8 girls had stolen the internal door keys and refused to give them back. One class drove five staff, crying, from the room and into my office. I was hit with eggs thrown by parents on my second day of working there. I loved it.
First thing we did was to set up individual target setting for each student. Teachers had to show, through assessment, the curriculum level of each student at the beginning of the year for reading, writing, number and maths. These were then turned into aspirational goals for each student. My deputy and I met with each teacher, each term, to discuss who was making good progress towards his or her targets, and who wasn’t. And why not. And what was going to be done about it. And what we could do to help.
Parents came to the school each term, with their child to discuss the targets with their teacher and the progress being made. The targets were written in the front of every exercise book and were posted on their desks or tables. Your eyes could never wander without seeing your targets. There was a quiz at every school assembly where students were chosen at random to tell me their targets. Groups of students who had exceeded their targets already were celebrated with prizes like spending the day at a radio station.
ICTPD | Comments (9)9 Responses to “Personalising Learning”
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The tone of the anonymous monologue I am responding to smacks too much of postmodernism to be authentic. I use the term authentic here in the same way as it is used in recent education jargon. The fundamental philosophies that apply to improving any system, whether it be in education, in politics or in the internal combustion engine are implicit – that of altering one element or factor at a time in order to monitor usefully the effect that an attribute has over the efficiency of the whole. I am not suggesting that complex combinations of elements can’t have some effects either, but any idea that by just turning the whole thing round and changing everything to fix it just does not stack up.
The writer admitted that the starting point, namely the school in London, was so bad that practically any reasonable pedagogical move within that system would have improved it. Not all schools are as bad as that one, and many are providing good education if even in certain areas of learning or levels or needs.
When areas needing “fixed” within education are addressed, invariably it is done with an all or nothing approach, and the baby, bath-water and bath are all thrown out together. Postmodernism feeds on the need to eschew all historical elements and events. The leaky building syndrome here in New Zealand is a case in point where clearly the need to take notice of the reasons behind building specifications and construction procedures was expelled and the door firmly slammed on it, leading to new and untested procedures being invented, learned and implemented that led to disaster. Similarly the Primary School reading programmes over the years have used an approach that excluded methods that have only recently are being re-introduced with evident success.
It is too easy to adopt the trendy approaches, and there are a lot of them being bandied about in education today. Like the buzz that surrounded the term “interactive” applied to e-learning, Personalised Learning, for all it is likely to offer education, is a hype – the term has already become a buzzword before its meaning is defined – and the momentum it carries is being buoyed up with this hype in a way that is unlikely to take it to a useful destination.
I am not comfortable with the emphasis on setting targets for students all the time. Surely it is more important to talk to the student and find out what their needs are rather than pushing them into setting a target. What if they have no idea what target they want or maybe they don’t want to set a target. Maybe it’s an organic process for some students not something that can be written down before hand. Pushing teachers and students into setting targets is something i suspect came from the business world and may not be appropriate for education. I can remember one student in my class who was off task the whole time but he still did some neat work but not at all related to what we were doing. He arrived st a goal but it was nothing that either of us could have predicted – he was mucking around initially and it just grew from that.
I agree wholeheartedly with your thoughts on this Nick. A case study of a boy I knew shows precisely how the progress of students can develop without setting goals for them.
In year 8 Joe was a hopeless case. His only interest was Science, though the assessment marks he inthat were put under scrutiny as they were so different from his other results. Though his teachers never gave up on him, there was never any mention of setting goals.
He progressed to year 9 while dropping Latin, for his language teacher was in despair that he would ever learn a single word in that language. His progress in year 10 was not much different. He was warned by the deputy principal that if there was no improvement in his other subjects, especially in English and Mathematics, he would not continue to study Science the following year. Now if that threat can be regarded as a goal then that’s what changed Joe’s life. The thought of giving up Science made him decide for himself what was needed.
With an average achievement of no more than 25% in any assessment in Mathematics or English he decided to approach his teachers and ask for help. His Mathematics teacher gave him a falling-apart Mathematics book that covered all the work for that year and also had many examples throughout with answers at the back. His English teacher got him into the school’s junior debating society. From then on he never looked back. He worked at his Mathematics and achieved an end of year Mathematics examination result that would have given him a prize, but he was accused of cheating, though no real proof could be obtained as to how he did it. He also won a debating competition that year when he stood as a political candidate in a mock election.
The long and the short of it is that all through Joe’s secondary years he had no goals set for him. He simply set his own. As it happened he went on to study Science at university, collected two Science degrees, one of them a PhD, and went on to become a Science teacher in a secondary school.
Thanks for your comments. Target setting is only one of a range of strategies in the Personalised Learning organising principles.
Although, my questions for you would be:
- Why would teachers not know exactly what a student’s achievement level be ?
- Why shouldn’t teachers aspire for their students to achieve better, and express it as an achievement goal?
- Why wouldn’t they share this with the students and their families so they have the same direction and aspiration?
For me, its about appropriately high expectations and sharing it with students, who perhaps otherwise would not have those aspirations.
I have worked mostly in schools where there was over 90% of the student population was from ethnic minorities. In most conversations with parents groups, two major themes emerged – that ethnic minority students were not exposed to high expectations, and that knowledge about the curriculum ( levels, descriptors, targets for achievement ) was always denied access for the families because teachers didn’t share their information, because of their assumptions about the limited understanding of the parents.
Open, accessible, accountable, transperant, shared and agreed teaching & learning goals are a vital part of Personalising Learning.
Your further comments very welcome …
I can see where Bryce is coming from with the points on goal-setting that he brings forward. He puts three questions on which he invites discussion:
1 – “Why would teachers not know exactly what a student’s achievement level be?”
There are a number of reasons why an exact mapping of student achievement is not known by the teacher. Most of them are nothing to do with setting goals or targets. One of the reasons, often not recognised or admitted, is that the particular assessment method applied fails the student by simply not recording what the student has achieved along the learning pathways. Extreme examples of this are a student test that returns a zero mark or an assessment criterion that reports a not achieved. This can be read as indicating that the student has learnt nothing – a very unlikely scenario.
2 – “Why shouldn’t teachers aspire for their students to achieve better, and express it as an achievement goal?”
There is no reason why not, but it is the teacher who has the aspiration and should have the achievement goal, not the student. I have no problem with the teacher having an aspiration and setting his or her own achievement goals to accomplish this.
3 – “Why wouldn’t they share this with the students and their families so they have the same direction and aspiration?”
To expect students and their families to have the same direction and aspiration as the teacher can be fraught with problems and frustration for the teacher, and the imposition of these goals on students can bring about opportunity for failure where success is really what is sought. On of the main reasons why goal setting fails is when goals are imposed on those who are required to reach them.
See:
http://humanresources.about.com/cs/strategichr/a/aadark_goals.htm
But this area should not be regarded as being black and white. I have no doubt that for some students, goal-setting can be used and may achieve some success. But the obligation of having goals, or even having to set their goals, for other students is not necessarily going to achieve the required result. I suspect that the proportion of students is in the minority who can use goal setting effectively.
Goal setting is still relatively new concept in education. We should look to the research findings and opinion on the application of goal setting in areas such as business and commerce where this has been circulating for decades before we adopt re-inventions of the wheel.
Hey! Don’t forget to folow this link for the Furture Pathways info on Personalising Learning.
http://futurepathways-dev/?q=node/5
Sarah
Part Two
The first part of my article on my experiences of Personalising learning in action, I wrote about how we had applied individual target setting in a London school to help raise student achievement. Personalising Learning is a guiding set of organisational principles, so really, every school could have a different response. What I’d like to talk about today is how well TCS has responded to the same strategy, thousands of kilometres away.
In my first year as Director here, I came to grips with the individualised programmes that teachers were writing, especially in Primary. I could see the individualised approach in action, but it fell short of my expectations of Personalising Learning. The use of generic resources without any customisation to a unique student can not deliver Personalising Learning. The first issue was of assessment – if Personalising Learning is about the teacher knowing exactly where the student is and giving timely feedback, then we needed to review what assessments we were using, and make different choices about using tools that gave us highly specific information so that the feedback is just for them. Despite the ongoing demands of implementing the National Numeracy Strategy, our Primary staff at TCS made huge inroads into learning, developing and implementing ASSTLE this year, which gives a unique student a unique profile in English and Maths.
We also started our own pilot on individualised target setting. I met with staff and outlined the way forward – all assessments in reading, writing, maths and number to be completed in March, with a curriculum level / sublevel. Then, teachers were asked to predict curriculum level / sublevel targets for achievement by December. We timetabled at least two formal progress meetings throughout the year with the Maths and English coordinator, to talk about those students in each class list not making expected progress, and what strategies and resources we could be using. Then, at the end of November, we assessed the students again. That way,. we could look at the value we have added to their education, as well as look at the differences between teacher predictive targets setting and actual recorded achievement.
I could see that teachers were both nervous ( how will I be judged if these students don’t meet their targets? ) and interested ( how will this help me focus my teaching for the benefit of my students ? ) One teacher resigned the day after, telling me she didn’t want to be involved in more bureaucracy. But the other 99% of staff could see beyond the pilot as a mere exercise in record keeping – it was a chance to show we make a difference and add value. It was a chance to think and act beyond your cubicle and share the issues and problems of a student not making progress, with professional colleagues, in an open way. It was a chance to be self reflective about teacher assessment and how it compares to test and diagnostic information ( a career – long challenge that we are all improving on ) and a chance for teachers to talk about teaching.
We are now beginning to evaluate the pilot on individual target setting which has now run for one school year at TCS. It’s been very satisfying, exciting and provocative. My third instalment will share those results with you.
P. Bryce Pedersen
It seems that the openness of our discussion, prompted by the request for candid opinion, is not as it first appeared. The original invitation onto this conversations blog was to “speak your mind”.
What we are now witnessing is the development under the name of Personalising Learning that, by the author’s admission, has been in operation since that unfortunate teacher resigned. Presumably she felt strongly enough about the way it was being implemented to do something about it for herself.
But the issue here is that we have been invited to give opinion on what (we think) Personalising Learning is all about while being told authoritatively how it is. I feel that my time in thought and in discussion is being misused if the only reason for this is to promote provocative blogging about what is already being implemented.
It is certainly interesting to read how personalised learning could work in a distance education setting. My first reaction is to be cautious about the results of any trial. This is because the trial runs the risk of being contaminated by what social science researchers call The Hawthorne Effect. In the 1920’s Elton Mayo and his fellow industrial psychologists were asked to study worker productivity in the General Electric factory in Hawthorne, a suburb of Chicago. The study was to see what was the effect of changes in lighting on the workers productivity. No matter how difficult Mayo’s team made working conditions, the experimental group always outperformed the control group. This lead Mayo to develop the principle called the Hawthorne Effect. Simply stated this effect says that a person or group knowing they are being studied will smarten up their act. It’s commonsense really. School boys are less likely to misbehave if they are being closely supervised. Workers will carry out their duties more diligently if the foreman is watching.
For our purposes it matters, because the experimental group of students will be motivated to do better, not because they have a personalised learning programme, but because they are part of a pilot study. We can’t separate the Hawthorne Effect from the results of applying personalised learning.