Personalized Learning

Description

From the Viccso "Personalized Learning Report;

"There is obviously a long history of personalisation both as an ideal and as a practice in schools, colleges and universities. Educators already have a rich repertoire of ways to assess students’ respective strengths, weaknesses and learning needs, and tailor teaching methods and the curriculum in response. Certainly parents favour an education that supports their children to become well-rounded individuals and caters to their individual needs (Saulwick Muller Social Research, 2006: 31). Personalised learning builds on these practices and aspirations.

Given what we know by way of research findings and the ideas and creative work of teachers over decades – notwithstanding the resource, time, curricular and system constraints on what schools and educators can provide – four key dimensions of personalised learning are as follows.

The first is co-creation and control: the extent to which all students can lead, manage and co-create (Leadbeater, 2004) their own learning, participate in significant decisions affecting student learning, and progressively (as is age-appropriate) take control of their own learning journey. The journey is for the individual, not a narrowly defined, institutionally prescribed academic, vocational or other ‘pathway’, and thus supports his or her basic right to all-round personal development.

Student voice drives this personalisation (Fielding, 2004; Hargreaves, 2004). Student talk via the power of dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2008) is pivotal. Alexander places emphasis on rethinking and adjusting the balance of writing and talk in the curriculum; redressing the balance of written and oral tasks and activities; and shifting from random, brief interactions to sustained and longer ones. Dialogic teaching serves to develop student learning and understanding and mainstream student voice, participation and leadership. Students’ skills in time management are also critical.

The second is deeper and more powerful learning: the extent to which students’ personal everyday experiences, ideas and insights and formal school instruction are combined to engender deeper student learning, knowledge and understanding. As per Vygotsky’s insights, which inform the best ways to challenge deficit views of students’ backgrounds, when students’ personal experiences and ideas and an educator’s scientific concepts and understandings (which are not limited to science subjects) merge, learning is deeper. Teachers often use classroom talk (such as paraphrasing strategies to extend students’ vocabulary and inviting students to converse about their concrete, empirical and personal experiences and interpretations) to merge the two.

By contrast, concepts abstractly presented to students (as with an old-style academic curriculum) with little or no connection to their concrete, empirical and personal experiences may amount to empty formalism (Renshaw & Brown, 2007). On the other hand, concrete, empirical and personal experiences remain limited in their depth and generality if not connected to more scientific ideas, concepts and understandings. Both extremes make it more difficult for students of diverse backgrounds to develop their own personal and empowering blend of both deep academic knowledge and understanding and practical and applied learning and real world problem-solving.

The third dimension is whole life learning: the extent to which students’ learning can draw upon, and make robust connections between, the multiple areas of their life (e.g., Abbot et al., 2009; West-Burnham, 2010). These include the school, extra-curricular settings, home, workplaces, community and community organisations, sport and recreation, and culture and ethnicity. Challenges are how best to monitor the development of the whole student as distinct from only assessing progress in specific subjects (Johnson, 2004), and to empower students, parents and the community (Banks, 2004) as real learning partners. The Harvard Family Research Project (2008) uses the term ‘complementary learning’ for integrating school and non-school learning.

The fourth is personal futures planning: the extent to which students are able to make use of planning to target individual and common life and learning goals and to specify activities that may enable the attainment of these goals (e.g., Duckett and Jones, 2006). Some schools are, through the joint work of teachers, students, parents and others as well as the optimum use of new technologies, reworking personal learning plans for students to better support the needs and aspirations of learners as well as longer-term goal-setting for learning and personal well-being.

All four of the above dimensions are interlinked. If one is diminished, the other three are weakened. Together, the dimensions comprise a coherent model of personalised learning.

In feedback to the author, many teachers affirmed that these dimensions, in the words of one educator, comprise "a powerful paradigm for change in education". Likewise, among the many responses from parents, one parent described the model as "an excellent starting-point for working out what all school community members should be striving for", and another parent made the point that this kind of model "can open pathways of communication across all stakeholders at the local school level", as a basis for deep dialogue between teachers, parents and students." (http://www.viccso.org.au/big-ideas/personalised-learning)