We’ve helped hundreds of great schools find their strategy, and personalised learning features in most of their plans. But what that means in practice varies wildly.
For some, it boils down to a fanciful idea of creating individual plans to meet individuals’ needs that are often delivered directly to the individual via their ‘i’ device: the iPad, iPhone or similar flat-pack plastic and glass device. (Fanciful, because it rarely pans out without creating a ton of work for little impact).
For others, it’s more about students’ identity: they’re happy to have moved from treating the class as a singular identity to seeing it as 25 or 30 separate individuals. It many ways, this opens up a wealth of opportunity. In other ways, it creates new tensions.
Education systems communicate what they value through what they prioritise. The challenge for us all is that most systems fail to prioritise at all. They lob initiative after initiative.
Many education systems “prioritise” personalisation while simultaenously demanding more collaboration and teamwork.
You think it’s confusing? Imagine how students feel. How are we to reconcile these two opposing positions?
I recently sat at the back of classrooms for one week solid in several schools in Western Australia. As an observer, the answer to that question became clearer.
What we should be focusing on right now are our relationships.
In schools we tend to concentrate on the tactics of curriculum design and what students will learn. We concentrate on pedagogy and how students learn, or on the learning environment and where students will learn. All of these are important and valuable.
But we rarely ask, what are the types of relationships schools should model and encourage for everyone, adults and young people alike?
While addressing the needs and aspirations of individuals is a valuable pursuit, framing it as autonomy rather than personalisation might lead to healthier outcomes for the individuals and the collective.
Firstly, personalisation sounds like it’s being tailored to the student by someone who ‘knows’ what that student needs. Autonomy sounds like students are empowered to identify their own areas of need.
Secondly, being autonomous, and learning how to make decisions will help young people quickly learn the ramifications of those decisions, because invariably they will be affected by their decisions, too – both for good and bad.
Now there’s an innovative priority for schools to choose: to show that the collective is just as important (if not more so) than the individual.