My thinking’s centering around the term ‘personalising learning’ at the moment as I’ve a School Priorities Group meeting to attend next week, followed by a meeting with the Head to look at ways in which the curriculum at my school can ‘evolve’. By that I mean ‘move towards a more technology-integrated learning environment in which subjects are not so rigidly divided’. In what follows I’m going to try and use what others have written this week as a structure upon which to hang some of my thoughts… :p

Although I’m not entirely comfortable with using ‘personalising learning’, that’s the buzz-term at the moment, so it’s what we’ve got to work with. At my more cynical moments I think that the move to ‘personalise’ learning is simply another way to pretty much maintain the status quo as much as possible whilst increasing the size of schools. That is to say, ‘personalise’ learning for those who struggle with the ‘normal’ curriculum and carry on as normal with the rest. What we really need as a fundamental overhaul of the system. Never mind tinkering with the school leaving age, or the length of the school day, education needs to change to be relevant to learners in the 21st century. The following diagram by Kathy Sierra sums the problem up nicely:

The focus of her post is on maths and engineering, but in the middle is this gem:

Our educational institutions–at every level–need drastic changes or we’re all screwed. The generation of students we’re turning out today need skills nobody really cared about 50, 40, even 20 years ago. Where we used to prepare students for a “job for life”, now we must prepare students to be jobless. We must prepare them to think fast, learn faster, and unlearn even faster (“yes, that drug was the appropriate way to treat the XYZ disease, but that was so last week. THIS week we now realize it’ll kill you.”)

The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.

I agree, but it’s really difficult to do this given the current constraints: curriculum, expectations (schools and parents), lack of previous engagement/stimulation, etc. Teachers can only work within the parameters or framework which is given to them. It is, however, understandable how the current system developed. You have to focus on the bottom end, upon raising students to a minimum standard. The problem with the type of education system I’d like is that implementing it would pretty much depend on excellent teachers with unlimited supplies of energy. As an anonymous commenter on Kathy’s blog states:

It all is moot, the educational system is going to go through fads. You can’t teach the internal motivation necessary for success, it is a summation of life experience, some of which you wouldn’t want to teach. Look at how successful first and second generation immigrants are compared to third. Why? Because they had to struggle. Look at how some cultural groups are more succesful at maintaining, well, success, over generations. There’s a zeitgeist for the right side of your Venn diagrams, it can’t be institutionalized in a free society.

Fair enough, perhaps you can’t institutionalize the zeitgeist, but you can create a culture within an educational institution whereby effort, achievement, creativity, inquisitiveness and resourcefulness are rewarded and recognised. Another good point is raised in the comments by ‘kath’ that many teachers go into the profession having been successful at the system when they were at school. Thus they have no stimulus for implementing changes (other than meeting quotas and targets, of course). There are some teachers, however (me included) who came into teaching with the express purpose of changing the profession. The trouble is making oneself heard above the cacophony r.e. levels, sub-levels and targets… :(

The problem is, as Will Richardson mentions in his post Owning the Teaching…and the Learning, teachers have forgotten how to be learners:

I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students. Many will say that they understand to varying degrees the changes that are occurring, that the Web is in many ways rewriting the rules of communication and socialization, that the world our students enter when they leave us will be much different from the ones we ourselves were prepared for. But it feels like there is this unspoken belief among most that we can deal with these changes without changing ourselves. And that’s is a huge problem.

Teachers presume that the world the current school generation will eventually inherit in their middle age is like the one that they themselves currently inhabit. But even now Generation M (which includes me – born in 1980!) inhabit a world very different from the ones in which their teachers reside. Will again:

Our students will by and large have the ability to learn anything, anywhere, anytime (if they can’t already.) The level of their collaboration and connections with colleagues and peers in online environments will be of a type that is hard for most of us to imagine (myself included.) The information and knowledge that they will be awash in will require skills and literacies that most of us simply do not have. Their futures (and to some extent their “presents�) look very little like our vision of what it means to be educated.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if I’m struggling to keep up with the pace of change – someone who can be considered to be just inside ‘Generation M’ – then how far out of touch are other teachers? How on earth can they expect to have the information, literacies and connectedness to help their students deal with the world as it is to come?

Teachers should have the technical expertise (via extensive professional development) to be able to choose the correct tool for the job. At the moment this is impossible due to teaching commitments and the structure and hierarchy of the average school. As I have mentioned before, teachers should be like lifeguards – they should ‘know the waters’ and allow students to take risks when ‘entering the stream’, resulting in real learning. Lessons shouldn’t be tied to inflexible schemes of work directed towards recurring summative assessments – they should be more freeform, actually giving something back to human knowledge through student content creation. Ideally I’d like to see something like lesson plans being ditched in favour of something like six word learning plans.

We need to move towards what can be called ‘School 2.0′ which was, in fact, the subject of one of the presentations at the K12 Online Conference. I’d certainly echo what Marcie Hull says in that presentation about it being about utilizing technology, but with a recognition of the nature of change being at the core. It’s about helping students to deal with a world where virtually the only constant they will experience will be constant change! There is no point in perpetuating a pre-Internet system of education: knowledge is now ‘on-tap’ (via Google, etc.) It’s the way in which we connect and use this knowledge which is important… :)

The ease by which we can connect with people – within institutions, within communities, and even on the other side of the world means that we need to change the way in which schools are run. Parents need to have more involvement, not just in terms of being made aware of praise and problems but with planning and what’s going on in the day-to-day life of the school. In the video to which I’ve just referred – Planning the 21st Century School – it’s mentioned that schools have no excuse for not emailing parents notices and bulletins to keep them ‘in the loop’. I agree. The curriculum and even the ethos of the school needs to have a lot more input from various parties.

If this happened I think that (hopefully) there would be a balance between academic qualifications and real-world application. Not only would this mean that departments would have to involve themselves in collaborative planning, but those who have relevant knowledge and expertise could also take part. Technology is key for bringing people together for School 2.0. But at the end of the day, it’s not about the technology – that’s just a tool. It’s about addressing the original age-old problems: inequality, how to produce effective life-long learners, and ensuring real-world application. That’s what personalising learning means to me. :D

Links I didn’t have time to mention:

• How People Learn 1, How People Learn 2, How Students Learn (via Don Duggan-Haas’ comment on Kathy Sierra’s post)
• Sir Ken Robinson’s presentation at the TED Conference about Creativity
• Wes Fryer – Feedback on ‘Cultivating Digital Educators’

(Photo credits: Memory Void (detail), Library-a-Go-Go: Value Immeasurable, and shida mosaic (detail) found at Flickr)