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Personalising learning

January 18, 2012 in learning

If you go into a classroom at the beginning of a lesson you will more than likely find the learners facing the teacher at the front of the room. The lesson will start and 15 minutes* later the class will have been given the go ahead to do their work. If the teacher teaches in this way for every lesson during the school day, the learners will be listening for at least 1 hour or put it another way, learners in such classrooms spend just over 8 days of a school year listening to lesson introductions. That’s for a teacher who manages to make their lesson introductions succinct. Listening time increases to almost 11 days for a 20 minute intro and an agonising 13.5 days for a 25 minute intro teacher. This needs to change.

Lesson introductions are important but some teachers use a lesson introduction for every lesson which cuts into learning time as you can see. If you remove the lesson introduction completely you are left with a full day of learning. Some may argue that introductions are important and I would not disagree, my issue is the time misspent on introductions when many learners know what to do and just want to go and get on with it. Yet teachers are restricted by their current planning which in many cases involves an introduction, main activity and a plenary at the end. For every lesson! I am not using this post to pour scorn on this tried and trusted teaching recipe but to encourage you to unlearn how you teach and to consider not using introductions for every lesson but allow learners to ‘get on with the learning’.

Over this new school term I am using a Personalised Learning approach with my class. Every learner has received a Personal Journey which has been drawn up by both myself and the learner. The PJ lasts for one week but can be carried into another week if required. Learners use the PJ every day from the moment they come into my class. After registration they get on with their learning. There are no introductions. Every learner is on task within 1 minute and if you were to have a look around you might find some doing Numeracy, other doing Literacy and others working on their own personal learning project. They can take a break when they wish, they can walk around the room, they can use the floor or wherever around the room they feel will help them with their learning. Some will seek me out for extra help and guidance, I have plenty of time to see every child in the room and provide instant feedback on their learning. And there are no behaviour issues as we have a strong working relationship built on trust and respect.

I have never been more excited with learning than I am now, I have never had as much time to focus on teaching as I do now, I have never had as much time to spend with every learner on what they need to move their learning forward as I do now. And this is only day 3. Personalising Learning is nothing new but it is for me. I have started my own Personal Journey and I hope you can join me as I post my findings here and on Twitter using #pledu

Tags: classroom, creativity, ideas, inspiring, organisation, pedagogy, teaching
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Set learning free in 100 words

December 14, 2011 in learning, thoughts

Where ever I am

1 – Throw away your planning and be the teacher you always should have been. Listen to your class, respond to what they need to push their learning forward. Assess their learning as you go, feedback to every learner. Try not to overplan, forget the detail and be confident in changing direction as and where learning takes you. Let the learners control the learning, give them opportunities to decide what they want to learn. Give them control to set their own learning agenda even if it means they only do Maths all day. Take back learning in your classroom.

Set learning free.

Tags: creative, creativity, ideas, inspiration, Inspirational, inspiring, learning, teaching
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Cross curricular gamified learning

November 28, 2011 in gamification, learning, lesson ideas, Resources in the classroom

Over the next 2 weeks I will be using a collaborative working plan based on the story of Santa being lost as part of my gamified learning in the classroom. I started the plan using Google Docs and posted a link to it on Twitter, within half an hour the plan had grown to 5 pages of cross curricular ideas and activities. You can acces the doc and add your own ideas to the plan here.

To begin the week I used the following presentation. The first slide takes time to work out but my class got there after a few questions and answers. One thing you must try to do is to take a step back, do not rush in with answers. Let the learners find the solution, give them time. Let them finish their ideas and accept every idea as part of the solution because even incorrect answers will help find the correct one. I decided to put ( ) around the 2 numbers and that did the trick, immediately a lot of voices told me the numbers must be coordinates. So off they went to find were the coordinates would lead to. They found Santa was on Henderson Island part of the Pitcairn Islands , located in the South Pacific Ocean. It’s very remote so Santa truly needed their help. The next slides let them think first about what items they would take from the list to help Santa survive. They had to discuss with each other why they would take certain items and I listened in to many interesting suggestions e.g. Santa really needs to take the chocolate because he can not only eat it, he can make a drink out of it so that’s two out of one! Many of the children automatically wanted to build rafts but after looking closely at their Google Map they thought it might be better to sit tight on the island until help arrived.

Searching formed a huge part of the challenge, children had to use search strings to find specific information that could help them decide what to do to help Santa. Wikipedia articles were quickly scanned for important information and shared with the groups. Each group went off on different though flows to begin with and even after collaborating with each other, many stayed on their original courses with just a little variation. One group is convinced that Santa can survive a journey by raft to Pitcairn Island so tomorrow my additional challenge to them is working out how long that journey might take.

Towards the end of the morning one group hit on a fantastic idea. They had been using the Google Map to decide if using a raft would be a good idea but then hit on staying on the island until help arrived. Why? I asked. One girl in the group called me over to demonstrate how she had used Google Maps photo layers to discover that there were quite a few photos taken of the island by visitors on boats! She quickly came to the conclusion that the islands were actually not as remote as first thought and used another search online to discover visitpitcairn. It was an exciting moment as it was one area of Google maps that I had not shown to the class but obviously one learner had. She quickly demonstrated her skill to others and very soon everyone was using the photos plugin of Google Maps to view the photos themselves.

A mystery awaits

View more presentations from Kevin McLaughlin.

Every day I use the gamified approach I am more convinced it is a wonderful method of inspiring children’s curiosity and develop their creative problem solving. With today’s emphasis on assessments for learning, testing for league tables, ‘playing the game’ to stay off Ofsted’s radar, gamifying your learning may be risky to some but it is certainly worth it.