The term ‘Personalized Learning’ has recently achieved “flavour of the month” status and is getting increasing mileage. The Minister of Education, Steve Maharey, is championing the concept as a cornerstone of 21st century learning and the Ministry of Education has distributed a booklet on the subject. For some it is seen as something new but in reality it is an old dog dressed up in new clothes based on work in North America since at least the 1970’s and in the United Kingdom since the 1980’s. In the New Zealand context, many schools with an interest and commitment to pedagogy have been exploring the concept independently of Ministry support or interest and sometimes with impediments from the review agency.
Gwen Gawith did much of the New Zealand pioneering work under the ‘action research’ label and the Living Heritage Project Path provided an excellent model. The ‘action research’ label morphed into the ‘inquiry based learning model’ to simply ‘inquiry learning’. For at least the last decade a number of New Zealand schools have developed and refined the pedagogy of inquiry learning, many based on the philosophy of the Canadian educator, Lane Clarke.

The Ministry view of personalized learning captures the key: changing the learning focus of pupils from passive recipients to active learners who have far greater engagement with their learning which in turn makes it more meaningful to them. The role of the teacher changes from the didactic font of all knowledge to that of the facilitator, the coach, the prompter and encourager. ICT is a very important component which does create home based equity issues.

Personalized learning in its wider form also sits well with the New Zealand inclusive classroom approach. Our individualized approach to both literacy and numeracy based on individual assessment and individual and small group teaching and the New Zealand concept of the generalist classroom teacher being responsible for the inclusive needs of their pupils is also an aspect of personalized learning. Both John Hattie and Russell Bishop stress the importance of teacher engagement with individual pupils as a critical aspect of subsequent school achievement. Jenkins and Keefe in Phi Delta Kappa (Vol 83, No 6, 2002) discuss the six basic elements of personalized instruction in the North American context.

  1. A dual teacher role of coach and advisor.
  2. A diagnosis of relevant student learning characteristics.
  3. A collegial school culture.
  4. An interactive learning environment.
  5. Flexible scheduling and pacing.
  6. Authentic assessment.

The year 2000 Report of the British Columbia Ministry of Education identified three goals of education:

  1. Learning requires the active participation of the learners.
  2. Students learn in a variety of different ways and at different rates.
  3. Learning is an individual and a social process.

This is the rationale for inquiry / personalized learning. We are trying to teach pupils how to learn (not knowledge) and if we are successful, to create life-long learners.

In our school context, we began inquiry learning in 2003. It was in response to a school philosophy of continuous improvement and a belief that we talk a lot about curriculum but not enough about pedagogy. While dozing at a NZPF Conference in 2002, one sentence from all of the presenters awoke me from my slumber “we need to change schools from a place of teaching to a place of learning.” This was the stimulation to investigate how we could do this and how we could things better. Our answer was our ‘New Learning Paradigm’ in which we changed our school timetable and curriculum coverage and introduced school wide inquiry learning of integrated term long topics covering Social Studies, Science, and Technology with aspects of the Arts and Literacy. This is described on our website under ‘Inquiry Learning Project.’

It is based heavily on the work of Lane Clarke and the stages are:

  1. Immersion / Motivation
  2. What We Know
  3. What We Want to Know
  4. Where We Can Find Out
  5. How We Can Present Our Findings
  6. Future Step

The approach is heavy on thinking and research skills, incorporates learning styles and multiple intelligences, encourages learning outcomes to include possible presentation using the Arts (dance, drama, models, performance etc) and changes the role of the teacher to that of the encourager, coach, prompter, facilitator. Does the model work for all children? It works best for brighter and average children but not so well for slower children – but then traditional teaching didn’t serve them so well either. The theory is that the teacher is freed up to work individually with the slower children and that they can be strategically placed within other groups within the room.

This approach allows us to try and create life long learners who know how to learn. There is more indepth coverage of topics and creates excitement and engagement in children’s learning. Individual learning styles are better catered for. There is more creativity and experimentation. Favourite units are those of Flight, Space and the Business / Technology Design and Sell a Product unit. Impediments are largely teachers who can’t let go and still stifle the creativity by reliance on the didactic approach. My concern is that schools should adopt this approach not because it is currently in vogue but as part of a carefully considered school philosophy that place pedagogy and a genuine commitment to improved learning as paramount in the life of the school.