Personalised learning

I have been thinking a lot about personalised learning lately. Last night, during a panel discussion for the Plymouth Education Society, I made a statement that the current UK National Curriculum doesn't make a lot of room for personalised learning. I quoted Ken Robinson who has claimed that the current model of school is based on an industrialised or 'factory' model, where children are 'processed in batches' according to their year groups. This model patently doesn't work, because it fails to take into account the variations in performance and ability within year groups. What happens next is that schools try to redress this imbalance by streaming kids - placing them into sets so that the 'brighter ones' get the chance to shine, while the 'less bright ones' are not left behind. That's all very well for the school management, but it can also be very devisive, and stigmatises some children. It may also be premised on faulty assessment methods.

Standardised assessment militates against personalised learning too. Many schools practice assessment of learning using a criterion referenced assessment. While this is an improvement over norm referenced assessment, it still fails students. What schools should be doing is assessing for learning - providing students with personalised feedback on their performance referenced against their own previous personal attainment - what we refer to as ipsative assessment. Thankfully some schools are now adopting this approach through for example, APP - Assessing Pupil Progress, or PLP - Personal Learning Plans. But it's not happening quickly or widely enough.

Today I sat in a seminar led by Professor Jim Campbell, of the University of Warwick. Jim had given us a paper he had published in 2007 to read and critique. It was entitled: Personalised Learning: Ambiguities in Theory and Practice. Reading the paper made me think hard about what we actually mean by personalised learning. In the paper Campbell et al draw upon Leadbeater's model of surface and deep personalisation, where the student steadily progresses from consumer to producer behaviour. There is a great deal of cross over here with personal learning environments (PLEs) of course, particularly in relation to user generated content and sharing within a community of practice. This is an area I intend to explore in more detail in future blog posts.

Reference

Campbell, R. J. et al (2007) Personalised Learning: Ambiguities in Theory and Practice. British Journal of Educational Studies, 55 (2), 135-154.

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