There are some terms, perhaps many terms, that we all think
we understand -- and then something happens to make you question whether you
really understood it properly at all. Alternatively, but at the same time, you
might realise that you have understood it perfectly well all along.
In other words, someone says something that somehow changes everything for
you. And quite often, the simpler, and in some sense the more obvious, the
comment, the more profound the effect.
A few weeks ago, I had a great awakening in terms of "personalised learning".
Cynics define this as differentiation, which, as they rightly point out, we've
had in our collective consciousness for years. For me, personalisation and
inclusion are something like two sides of the same coin, yet more than that. To
me, the term implies an education that is tailored to the individual not merely
in terms of methodology, but even of the content itself. A difficult goal to
attain perhaps, but since when was that a legitimate reason for
not aiming for it? As the Jewish tradition's "Ethics of the Fathers" states:
The work is not yours to complete -- but neither are you free to desist from taking part in it.
Now, we all believe in the concept of challenging children. But, in the
context of personalised learning, what exactly does that mean? We often think in
terms of setting different tasks to challenge different children, which is, of
course, an aspect of differentiation. But in a presentation I attended a few
weeks ago, a colleague from the QCA pointed out something which was at once both
startling and obvious. Here is what he said:
If I were to ask you to walk along a plank that was placed on the floor, all
of you would do it. If I were to then place the plank between two tables, fewer
of you would do it. And if I were to then place it between two rooftops, hardly
any of you would do it.
Yet it's the same plank throughout. What changes is your perception of risk.
The task is the same, but the challenge is greater as the perceived risk
increases.
Isn't that obvious? Yet isn't it so eloquent as well? Next time you're
thinking of challenging a child, think about the child as well as the task. Fear
of failure is what makes the difference.
So what does that mean in practical terms, in the educational
technology-enhanced lesson?
For me, it means making the effort to reduce perceived risk. Here are some
ideas:
- Think about the interface. Excel, for example, is pretty horrible to anyone
not familiar with spreadsheets. Use either a simpler-looking program, or change
the interface yourself, which is pretty easy to do through the formatting
options.
- Get rid of the guessing game aspect of using programs like Excel. For
example, instead of only instructing the students to enter
their name in cell D4, make D4 yellow. Help them to not make a silly
mistake.
- Make failure fun. In Excel, again, I used to insert a bit of VBA code that
caused a message to pop up if they entered their name in the wrong cell. The
message was something like "Hey, Buster. I said the YELLOW cell. Why do I
bother?" OK, it didn't have them rolling in the aisles, but you get the point,
right?
- Limit the options. For example, if you want the students to write a newspaper
article, but to not have to worry about formatting, insert placeholder text,
ready-formatted, like "The Headline Goes Here". In other words, make it possible
for them to achieve a good-looking result without being distracted by, and
possibly failing because of, irrelevant (at the time) facets of the program
being used.
- The same goes for research. There is nothing wrong in hand-holding to some
extent by giving hints and tips on good searching techniques, and even a few
good, but disparate, websites on the topic to get the students started.
Education should not be a guessing game!
None of what I've said here is intended to suggest that we dumb down what we
do, or that we go all out to protect our students from failure. Far from it:
challenge, failure, and recovery from failure are essential. But what we
do need to do is remove the fear of failure.
We need to proactively use educational technology's capabilities to make
students realise that a failure doesn't have to mean personal devastation.
Helping students to embrace failure and to face challenges is, in fact, a
crucially important aspect of personalised learning.
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