Using & Teaching Educational Technology
Personalising personalised learning
By Terry Freedman
Tue, 31 Jul 2007, 22:53

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.

© Terry Freedman Tue, 31 Jul 2007