Professor David Hargreaves

Personalising learning

EMB, Hong Kong, 13 September 2005

English education policy 1979-2005

The Thatcher years: 1979-1997

The slow transition from individualism to centralism

The Blair years: 1997-2005

The slow transition from centralism to lateralism

Education reform Act 1988National curriculum,testing and inspection

Labour education policy

diversity choice

system excellence

competition centralism

collaboration

lateralism

networks

personal excellence

innovation

low trust

high trust

EXCELLENCE!

EQUITY!

1 out of 10from Downing Street to classroom reality

Peter Hyman

Vintage, 2005

Approach to strategy

Momentum Empowerment

Conflict

Novelty

Partnership

Consistency

‘initiatives’ to avoid drift broad goals

radical policy decisions support

fresh ideas focus

Government School

Personalised learning demands that every aspect of teaching and support is designed around a pupil’s needs…

David Miliband, September 2003

Personalising learning

The challenge is to meet more needs of more students more fully than

was possible/desirable in the past.

Transformation is:

significant, systematic and sustained change that results in high levels of achievement for all students in all settings

Brian Caldwell

Transformation is thetransition from the nineteenth

to the twenty-first centuryeducational imaginary

A social imaginary Charles Taylor

‘...the inescapable idea of moral order… how weought to live together in society.

…the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between themselves and their fellows, the expectationsthat are normally met… the common understandingthat makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.’

The 19C educational imaginary

• schools prepare students for their fixed station in life

• schooling limited for the majority

• school is a place with clear, rigid boundaries

• roles are sharply defined and segregated

• education is producer-led

• schools and teachers are autonomous units

• intelligence is mono-dimensional, fixed and innate

• school is designed and organised like a factory

• schools become similar to one another over time

The 21C educational imaginary

• students’ identities and destinies are fluid

• education is lifelong, formal and informal

• education is unconstrained by time and place

• roles are blurred and overlapping

• education is user-led (but who exactly are they?)

• schools and teachers are embedded in networks

• multiple intelligences are plastic and learnable

• schools are designed for personalisation• schools become different from one another over time

The PL gateways are the path to transformation

Curriculum

Design&Organisation

New technologies

Assessment for Learning

Workforce reform

Student voice

Learning to learn

Advice&guidance

Mentoring&Coaching

The nine interconnected gateways to PL:the conferences and the pamphlets

Personalising learning means meeting more needs of more

students than ever before.PL is the path to the

transformation that is theeducational imaginary

of the twenty-first century

Technical challenge

Three types of challenge

Cultural challenge

Adaptive challenge

All gateways are still under construction

No school is advanced in every gateway

Emerging features in development

The gateways interact in complex ways

Some gateways are better developed than others

Every gateway can be a radical innovation

1. Engagement - with learning & the school

2. Responsibility - for learning & behaviour

5. Maturity in relationships - more open and honest with greater mutual respect

4. Confidence - articulate point of view & present an argument/suggestion; interpersonal skills

6. Co-construction of education- in the design of teaching, learning, assessment, school life

3. Independence in learning - meta-cognitive control

Gateway commonalities - their interactive effects

Note the sequence!

Questions

Is this approach to personalisinglearning relevant to our situation?

What are our 19th century and our21st century imaginaries?

How are we making the transition?

The Assessment for Learning gateway

Assessment for recording

Assessment for reporting

Assessment for selection

Assessment for learning

The multiple purposes of assessment include:

Assessment for learning

is the process of identifying what the learner has or hasnot achieved in order to plan the next steps in learning

It is the process by which the teacher provides feedback tolearners on their performance in such a way that

either

the teacher adjusts the teaching in order to help studentslearn more effectively

or

learners change their approach to the learning task

or both of these

Through assessment for learning, the learner… a

comes to hold a concept of performance similar to that held by the teacher

monitors the quality of his/her own performance

sees how the quality of performance can be improved

i.e. develops the notion of a standard

i.e. can compare own performance with the standard

i.e.engages in the action that closes the gapbetween own performance and the standard

Asking questions

Question - answer - evaluation

Question - no answer - move to another student

Increase teacher wait time

Force student thinking time

Bounce the questioning

‘Phone a friend

Normal impact of Q-and-A sessions

Marking work

Normal impact of marking/grading

Ignore comments

Compare with peers

Comments only - no marks or grades

Student self-assessment

Assessment by peers

explicit mark schemes and grade criteria

traffic lights

examples of work meeting range of criteria

peer tutoring

Assessment for learning

leads to higher test scores

enhances meta-cognition and aids learning to learn

Questions

Should we adopt AfL?

If so, how should we do it?

What problems might we encounter and how would we overcome them?

The Student Voice gateway

Student voice

How students come to have a greater say and more active role

in the construction of their education

i.e. how they are taught and how they learn

1. School councils and school governance

3. Students as researchers

4. Student co-constructors of education

2. Students as sources of useful data

Versions of student voice

Questions

Do you think there is a role for student voice in improving our schools?

If so, what action should we take?

The Learning to Learn gateway

Learning to learn means reflecting on one’s learning and intentionally applying the results

of one’s reflection to further learning.

L2L - 0ne approach

making learning an object of attention

making learning an object of conversation

making learning an object of reflection

making learning an object of learning

L2L: a second approach

Remembering - is able to recall

Resilience - has habit of persistence with difficulty

Resourcefulness - uses variety of learning strategies

Reflection - thinks about learning and developmentof oneself as a learner

Reciprocity - is able to learn with other people

Meta-cognition is the capacity tomonitor, evaluate, control and change

how one thinks and learns.

All schemes have meta-cognition in common

• understanding the demands that a learning task makes

• knowing about intellectual processes and how they work

L2L involves:

• generating and considering strategies to cope with the task

• getting better at choosing the strategies that are the most appropriate for the task

• monitoring and evaluating the subsequent learning behaviour through feedback on the extent to which the chosen strategies have led to success with the task.

from About Learning

Independent learners…• become aware of the difference between memorising and

understanding material, and realise that these require different mental strategies (“can I remember this? is this something I need to remember? have I really grasped what this is about? could I explain it to another person?” )

• recognise which parts of the material are difficult and demand more attention (“this bit is easy, but I need to spend more time on that bit”)

• question or test themselves that they are understanding the material (“how am I doing? does it make sense to me?”)

• learn when it’s appropriate to seek help from the teacher (“I’m stuck and the several strategies I’ve tried aren’t working, and I don’t get the help I need from other sources I’ve tried, so I must turn to the teacher”).

The teacher chooses the learning objectives; directsthe ways students engage with tasks;determines the timingand duration of tasks; decides the outcomes of learning; provides the evaluations of learning and learners.

= dependent engagement in learning

The learner chooses the purpose of the learning; selects the content; decides the modes and timing of theengagement; determines the outcomes; evaluates theextent of success in learning.

= independent engagement in learning

Two forms of engagement

How might we ensure continuity and progression

in learning to learn?

About Learning

www.demos.co.uk

Questions

Do you think more could and should be done to promote independent learning in students at all levels?

If so, what action should we take?