Making Personalised Learning A Reality

Making Personalised Learning a Reality Forty Schools including Primaries, Secondaries and FE colleges are now using Personalisation by Pieces (PbyP) which Carole Whitty, Deputy General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers described as “a revolutionary tool which opens the door to a new pedagogical paradigm.” In this article I aim to share with you some of the remarkable achievements of children using PbyP. For the last 18 years I have been attempting to find ways of allowing learners to gain more control over their own progression. In 1993 as head of a Science and Technology faculty in an average sized secondary school, I worked out ways of sharing assessment criteria with students and their parents. This had a dramatic impact on the departmental results raising them from 35% A*-C up to 67% A*-C. As a Deputy Head in 2000 I extended this model to a framework that supported children across all subjects and finally in 2004 the model helped children in my school to achieve among the highest value added scores nationally. This earned me an audience with David Milliband to look at how a similar system could be rolled out more widely. Milliband suggested that to replicate the results I had achieved in my own school, nationally would require a system which could be adopted gradually regardless of the starting point of the school. Over the past three years I have been breaking the process up into ‘Pieces’ so that a school can take on as much as they are able and then grow the project piece by piece at a pace which is appropriate for them. I released the system for sale in April last year and since then it has been described as an ‘outstanding feature’ in two OFSTED reports, been described by the children as ‘better than Bebo’, described by teachers as ‘the future of skills assessment’ and included in exemplar practice by BECTA, QCA, Microsoft, Futurelab and even the national BETT awards. What is the PbyP learning cycle? There is a lot of discussion about lifelong learning but what actually are the aspects of learning that help us to continually improve throughout our lives and what kind of experiences should we be giving children to improve their chances of being lifelong learners? I identified a learning cycle that describes learning from pre-school to adult and have described it as follows • Setting yourself challenges: Personal goals and targets are often inspired by other people because they are easier if you know what success will look like. This could be learning to walk through to your professional development targets. • Enlisting the help of others: Mentors of all kinds can encourage you to go for it or support you when you have taken on too much. They can also help you when you need someone to push you and give you some motivation. • Making use of opportunities: Whatever target you have set yourself, you need to have the opportunities available so you can practice and succeed. • Collecting Evidence: People instinctively make sure someone takes a photo when they do a bungee jump, it isn’t just for exam boards that we like to store

• •

evidence of our achievements. We object if the evidence gathering becomes more important or time consuming than the achievement. Assessment: This ranges from telling someone about it and getting a ‘well done’ right up to a formal qualification. It involves others in your learning to confirm, praise and balance your achievements Starting the cycle again: having achieved or not achieved your targets you can decide to try again or try something different.

School should provide learners of all ages with opportunities and structures that help to strengthen this learning muscle. PbyP takes each stage of the cycle and builds up tools around it to help the child be successful. The cycle part 1: How does every child set themselves achievable targets? PbyP takes competencies which are traditionally quite hard to measure and breaks them up into 9 target statements. For example, the skill of ‘presenting to an audience’ could have a level 1 statement such as ‘Stand up and do a show and tell to the people in your class’ and a level 9 statement that might be “present to 1000 of your peers and be evaluated as excellent by over 50% of them”. Both these statements and the seven between them are designed to be understood by the target audience. For this reason they are not, nor could they ever be, a full description of all the skills involved in ‘presenting to an audience’ but they do allow the learner to engage with the first step in a ‘skills ladder’ that will take them all the way up to level 9 if they wish and are able. The new Personal Learning and Thinking Skills from the QCA we have broken up into 24 ladders so at any time there are 24 targets for children to choose from, each representing their own personal next steps. These skill ladders could be printed out and posted on the walls, printed into children’s planners or could be part of a paper based portfolio and this is indeed how a few of the 40 PbyP schools have adopted the first ‘piece’. But the process becomes much more powerful when ICT is used. Using the web based version of PbyP, a child can not only access all the targets from any location and any device, they can also be inspired by the achievements of others because behind every target is an ever increasing collection of work from other learners on the system who have successfully met this target. The cycle part 2: How is the evidence that children submit in PbyP assessed ? Children currently in PbyP are submitting an average of three pieces of evidence a week towards their targets, even during the holidays so where is it all going? The philosophy behind PbyP is around empowering learners to be in control of learning so the logical place to send the work is to other learners in PbyP who have already achieved this particular target. 80% of the work currently submitted by primary age children is assessed in this way and 65% of the work of secondary age students. The accuracy of such peer assessment has astounded all of us as has the speed with which children respond and the considered responses they give. Of those not assessed by other children, most are because there are no children who have yet achieved the higher levels to enable them to assess in this way, the rest have been caught by our rather oversensitive internal security systems and are awaiting their teacher to verify they have done nothing wrong in the system. Remarkably we have had only five

cases of children actually doing anything wrong including copying since we started. We all thought it was going to much higher than this which probably shows that the OEDC research that placed UK children as the least trusted by teachers out of the 21 countries they investigated is sadly truer than we appreciated when designing the system. How does this improve learning? Once learning is unleashed it is difficult to predict the ways in which children take it. For example in the Five Island School, children as young as ten are using PbyP to structure their leadership programme in which they teach younger children ICT. In Capel-le-Frith Primary they are using handheld devices to record videos of themselves describing their work. In the Marches Secondary School they have used PbyP as a homework replacement so that KS4 children can self direct their leaning but teachers can check it is delivering progress. In Pearl Hyde school children have used it to gain accreditation for independently managing the school pond. In reality, each of the 40 schools have approached using PbyP in different ways and each are demonstrating progression. The use has varied from groups as small as 5 students working with a teacher through to whole school implementations. It has demonstrated increased work rates and even holiday working from groups that are low achieving and poorly motivated as well as some outstanding co-development with students that are ‘Gifted and Talented’ For conclusive evidence it is too young a system but in 39 of the 40 schools, use, accuracy and quality of work has improved since implementation and continues to do so. Anecdotal evidence from schools is that parental involvement in learning is increasing and the proportion of evidence sourced by children from clubs and events outside school is growing. All of this points to greater engagement and involvement in learning which I have every confidence will show up in increased examination performance. Schools that are examination driven will be hard to convince of the benefits of 21st century learning skills and in such schools it is true that PbyP submission and peer assessment tend to happen much more in the time after and before school rather than in school hours but as James Blomfield from Capel le Frith reported “I’ve never seen them ask for extra homework before” What happens to the roles of teachers in PbyP? A profession that cuts it’s links with research is bound to start developing practice which actually runs counter to what it is trying to achieve. The research evidence confirms my belief that teachers must be role models for genuine learning. Children need to see teachers reflecting on their practice, setting themselves targets, getting feedback and improving. If, as in Finland, teachers were required to engage with small scale action research each year then this would serve to model these behaviours and it would also provide easier connection between students and teachers when having learning conversations. It is unfortunate that one of the by-products of a highly structured National Curriculum is the decrease in innovation by teachers which makes the slightly more chaotic requirements of personalised learning harder for schools to implement. One

of the key requirements of personalisation therefore is to provide greater structure for teachers through frameworks that provide them with clear scope for personal innovation whilst at the same time providing clear monitoring methods both for them to reflect on their own successes and for senior managers to check that individuals are making progress. Teachers using PbyP have already begun to report increased excitement and personal innovation. As Merlin John former editor with the TES put it. “From that light-bulb moment it’s exciting and the potential is massive for those sensible enough to take the first step.” How do schools get started with PbyP Thankfully, every school has at least one teacher who both feels passionately about providing children with lifelong competencies and has a desire to personally innovate and reflect on their own practice. Give PbyP to such teachers and anything from five children to work with and watch the development piece by piece. To find out more, contact me ([email protected]) or visit www.camb-ed.net or www.pbyp.co.uk/PC_guides.html Case Study – the Five Islands School Headteacher Andrew Penman wanted to provide an afternoon each week that could be used to deliver skills based learning. Rather than do this through a taught course such as ‘thinking skills’ or the RSA ‘opening minds’ he decided that he wanted to provide a wide range of opportunities that would make the most of the fact that the school has children from pre-school to age 16. He decided to use PbyP as the framework around which to build all these activities. Initially he surveyed staff and students to see what kind of activities people would be able to offer. This process uncovered a whole range of hidden talents and interests in the staff as well as bringing in suggestions for using local expertise from the community. Liz Turner, a teacher at the school, then covered the logistics such as how many children each activity would accommodate, rooms needed etc but most importantly, what skills the activity could potentially deliver. Teachers were given printed versions of the skills ladders and asked to indicate which specific targets they felt their activity would meet. Liz provided every teacher with a PowerPoint that had a structure on it but did not restrict their ideas. The basic structure was: • Week 1 – share the ladder statement(s) that you are hoping to deliver with the children. • Week 3 – review how progress against the statements is happening using an example of evidence collected by one of the children • Week 6 – Final reflection on if the activity really did allow children to evidence these statements or not. Activities which could not link themselves to a ladder statement were not pursued.

PbyP was launched with staff in a staff meeting. Liz and Ben signed up their names as managers of the system and all other staff were encouraged to put their email addresses into PbyP so they could be alerted if a child in their tutor group needed support. The school brought me in so that together with Liz and Ben we were able to launch PbyP with all the children from age 8 to 16 (the KS1 and pre-school versions of PbyP were not available at this stage). This involved finding times when children were able to have access to a computer either as pairs or one each, giving them their usernames and passwords and asking them to download the step by step learner guide at www.pbyp.co.uk/PC_guides.html. Year 5 to year 11 took about fifteen minutes to familiarise themselves with the system allowing tutor times to be used in some cases. For years 3 and 4 Sam, a teacher in the primary phase asked the year 5 and 6 students to organise training for the younger students so they could get one to one attention. This opportunity also allowed the year 5 and 6 students to start collecting evidence of their own skills. Liz produced a booklet for children that gave some information about each course, what age range and skill levels it was suitable for, what skill statements it hoped to meet and which teacher or pupils would be giving it. She then decided to ask year 11 to be the first to choose their courses followed by year 10 and so on, explaining that this project would be running for many years and everyone would eventually get the benefit of the full choice the year 11s had had this time. Having signed up lists for each activity these were then typed up and circulated to the staff who would be doing the course in time for the first activities to start the following September. Surprising results began emerging immediately, firstly, having signed students up in the summer term ready for the September start we were surprised to find that considerable quantities of work were submitted in the summer holidays. The children were using home and leisure experiences to evidence progression in core competencies. By the time September came around almost all of the students had not only submitted work but had also assessed the work of others. As the term started we did indeed see a spike of activity on the Wednesday afternoon during the project but surprisingly, most work was submitted by students after school between the hours of 5 and 9 pm. After 6 months, the use profile has begun to change in a number of key ways. Firstly submission of work has increasingly moved into lesson times either indicating that the status of competencies has moved to a position where it is encouraged in curriculum time or students have found more sophisticated ways of being subversive!! Secondly the types of files used have begun to move away from being just documents and towards more use of multimedia to evidence work. Finally, the amount of work submitted each week has continued to grow dispelling the ‘honeymoon period’ concerns that accompany any ICT related project. We have seen the same patterns of adoption occurring in every phase of education, with all abilities and all age range in every institution that has started up. With the launch of the Secondary competency based new curriculum, the release of diplomas and the review of the primary curriculum we should see the importance of competencies tracking grow nationally. It will be fascinating to watch the impact in

PbyP as competencies begin to take on their rightful status as the core purpose of lifelong education.