Personalising learning
Professor David Hargreaves
EMB, Hong Kong, 13 September 2005
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
Labour education policy
low trust
competition
EXCELLENCE!
centralism
choice
diversity
system excellence
personal excellence
innovation
networks
collaboration
lateralism
high trust
EQUITY!
1 out of 10
from Downing Street to classroom reality
Peter Hyman
Vintage, 2005
Approach to strategy
Government
Momentum
‘initiatives’ to avoid drift
Conflict
radical policy decisions
Novelty
fresh ideas
School
Empowerment
broad goals
Partnership
support
Consistency
focus
Personalising learning
Personalised learning demands that
every aspect of teaching and support
is designed around a pupil’s needs…
David Miliband, September 2003
The challenge is to meet more needs
of more students more fully than
was possible/desirable in the past.
Transformation is:
significant, systematic and
sustained change that results
in high levels of achievement
for all students in all settings
Brian Caldwell
Transformation is the
transition from the nineteenth
to the twenty-first century
educational imaginary
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.’
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
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
The PL gateways are the
path to transformation
The nine interconnected gateways to PL:
the conferences and the pamphlets
Student voice
Design&Organisation
Workforce reform
Mentoring&Coaching
Advice&guidance
Assessment for Learning

Learning to learn
New technologies
Curriculum
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
Three types of challenge
Adaptive challenge
Cultural challenge
Technical challenge
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
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!
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?
The Assessment for Learning gateway
The multiple purposes of assessment include:
Assessment for recording
Assessment for reporting
Assessment for selection
Assessment for learning
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
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
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
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
Assessment for learning
 leads to higher test scores
 enhances meta-cognition and
aids learning to learn
Questions
Should we adopt AfL?
If so, how should we do it?
What problems might we encounter
and how would we overcome them?
The Student Voice gateway
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
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
Questions
Do you think there is a role for student
voice in improving our schools?
If so, what action should we take?
The Learning to Learn gateway
Learning to learn means reflecting on one’s
learning and intentionally applying the results
of one’s reflection to further learning.
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
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
All schemes have meta-cognition in common
Meta-cognition is the capacity to
monitor, evaluate, control and change
how one thinks and learns.
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
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 it’s appropriate to seek help from the teacher
(“I’m stuck and the several strategies I’ve tried aren’t
working, and I don’t get the help I need from other sources
I’ve tried, so I must turn to the teacher”).
Two forms of engagement
The teacher chooses the learning objectives; directs
the ways students engage with tasks;determines 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
How might we ensure
continuity and progression
in learning to learn?
About Learning
www.demos.co.uk
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?