Professor David Hargreaves

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Personalising learning
Professor David Hargreaves
EMB, Hong Kong, 13 September 2005
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English education policy 1979-2005

• The Thatcher years 1979-1997
• The slow transition from individualism to
  centralism

Education reform Act 1988 National
curriculum,testing and inspection
The Blair years 1997-2005 The slow transition
from centralism to lateralism
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Labour education policy
EXCELLENCE!
EQUITY!
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1 out of 10 from Downing Street to classroom
reality Peter Hyman Vintage, 2005
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Approach to strategy
School
Government
Momentum
Empowerment
broad goals
initiatives to avoid drift
Partnership
Conflict
radical policy decisions
support
Consistency
Novelty
fresh ideas
focus
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Personalising learning
Personalised learning demands that every aspect
of teaching and support is designed around a
pupils needs David Miliband,
September 2003
The challenge is to meet more needs of more
students more fully than was possible/desirable
in the past.
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Transformation is significant, systematic and
sustained change that results in high levels of
achievement for all students in all
settings Brian Caldwell
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Transformation is the transition from the
nineteenth to the twenty-first
century educational imaginary
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A social imaginary
Charles Taylor
...the inescapable idea of moral order how
we ought 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
expectations that are normally met the common
understanding that makes possible common
practices and a widely shared sense of
legitimacy.
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The 19C educational imaginary

• schools prepare students for their fixed station
  in life

• intelligence is mono-dimensional, fixed and
  innate

• schooling limited for the majority

• school is a place with clear, rigid boundaries

• roles are sharply defined and segregated

• schools and teachers are autonomous units

• education is producer-led

• school is designed and organised like a factory

• schools become similar to one another over time

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The 21C educational imaginary

• students identities and destinies are fluid

• multiple intelligences are plastic and learnable

• education is lifelong, formal and informal

• education is unconstrained by time and place

• roles are blurred and overlapping

• schools and teachers are embedded in networks

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

• schools are designed for personalisation

• schools become different from one another over
  time

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The PL gateways are the path to transformation
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The nine interconnected gateways to PL the
conferences and the pamphlets
Student voice
DesignOrganisation
Assessment for Learning
?
Workforce reform
Learning to learn
New technologies
MentoringCoaching
Curriculum
Adviceguidance
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Personalising learning means meeting more needs
of more students than ever before. PL is the path
to the transformation that is the educational
imaginary of the twenty-first century
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Three types of challenge
Adaptive challenge
Cultural challenge
Technical challenge
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Emerging features in development
All gateways are still under construction
No school is advanced in every gateway
Some gateways are better developed than others
The gateways interact in complex ways
Every gateway can be a radical innovation
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Gateway commonalities - their interactive effects
1. Engagement - with learning the school
2. Responsibility - for learning behaviour
3. Independence in learning - meta-cognitive
control
4. Confidence - articulate point of view
present an argument/suggestion interpersonal
skills
5. Maturity in relationships - more open and
honest with greater mutual respect
6. Co-construction of education- in the design of
teaching, learning, assessment, school life
Note the sequence!
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Questions
What are our 19th century and our 21st century
imaginaries?
How are we making the transition?
Is this approach to personalising learning
relevant to our situation?
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The Assessment for Learning gateway
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The multiple purposes of assessment include
Assessment for recording
Assessment for reporting
Assessment for selection
Assessment for learning
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Assessment for learning
is the process of identifying what the learner
has or has not achieved in order to plan the next
steps in learning
It is the process by which the teacher provides
feedback to learners on their performance in such
a way that either the teacher adjusts the
teaching in order to help students learn more
effectively or learners change their approach
to the learning task or both of these
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Through assessment for learning, the learner a

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

i.e. develops the notion of a standard

• monitors the quality of his/her own performance

i.e. can compare own performance with the
standard

• sees how the quality of performance can be
  improved

i.e.engages in the action that closes the
gap between own performance and the standard
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Asking questions
Normal impact of Q-and-A sessions
Question - answer - evaluation
Question - no answer - move to another student
Increase teacher wait time
Force student thinking time
Bounce the questioning
Phone a friend
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Marking work
Normal impact of marking/grading
Ignore comments
Compare with peers
Comments only - no marks or grades
Assessment by peers

• explicit mark schemes and grade criteria

• examples of work meeting range of criteria

• traffic lights

• peer tutoring

Student self-assessment
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Assessment for learning

• leads to higher test scores

• enhances meta-cognition and
• aids learning to learn

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Questions
Should we adopt AfL?
If so, how should we do it?
What problems might we encounter and how would
we overcome them?
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The Student Voice gateway
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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
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Versions of student voice
1. School councils and school governance
2. Students as sources of useful data
3. Students as researchers
4. Student co-constructors of education
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Questions
Do you think there is a role for student voice
in improving our schools?
If so, what action should we take?
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The Learning to Learn gateway
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Learning to learn means reflecting on ones
learning and intentionally applying the results
of ones reflection to further learning.
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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

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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
development of oneself as a learner
Reciprocity - is able to learn with other people
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All schemes have meta-cognition in common
Meta-cognition is the capacity to monitor,
evaluate, control and change how one thinks and
learns.
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L2L involves

• understanding the demands that a learning task
  makes

• knowing about intellectual processes and how
  they work

• 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
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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 its appropriate to seek help from the
  teacher (Im stuck and the several strategies
  Ive tried arent working, and I dont get the
  help I need from other sources Ive tried, so I
  must turn to the teacher).

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Two forms of engagement
The teacher chooses the learning objectives
directs the ways students engage with
tasksdetermines the timing and 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 the engagement determines the
outcomes evaluates the extent of success in
learning.
independent engagement in learning
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How might we ensure continuity and
progression in learning to learn?
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About Learningwww.demos.co.uk
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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?