A framework to support personalising prescribed school curricula
Abstract
There is a recent advocacy for students to experience their learning as personalised, but this expectation poses challenges for teachers tasked with addressing prescribed curricula. In this article, we draw on relevant literature and our analyses of three case studies to propose a framework within which teachers can achieve both goals. We first clarify what we mean by personalising learning, noting problems in how it is currently conceptualised and enacted. We suggest that any attempt to support students to personalise their learning needs to be contextualised within broader curricular goals, and that its developmental nature entails progressions in specific learner capabilities, and therefore the need for students to be supported in this process. In proposing a framework for this support, we focus on general principles around the what and how of this process rather than on particular discipline areas.
Challenges in personalising learning
Making learning more meaningful for all learners has been a longstanding theme in school education reform (Bransford et al., 2000; Tytler, 2007), with advocacy of personalising learning (PL) a recent contribution. Supporters claim that students’ motivation improves when they have an increased input into topic focus and design, and enact and review their own learning processes (Sebba et al., 2007; Meyer et al., 2008; Schwartz et al., 2011; Prain et al., 2014, 2017; Deed, 2015). Personalised learning is also reputedly more motivating than constant direct instruction (Belenky & Nokes‐Malach, 2012), and encourages more active engagement in problem‐solving (Schwartz et al., 2011). However, this advocacy has led to at least two practices we consider counter‐productive. The first is a hyper‐individualised, techno‐mediated approach to the curriculum to address learner capabilities precisely, and the second entails an open invitation for students to create their own curriculum based on their passions or interests. While well‐intentioned, we argue that for different reasons both practices misconceive the goals and means of PL.
In this article, from a project funded by the Australian Research Council on improving regional low socioeconomic status (SES) students’ learning and well‐being, we propose a framework to support teachers in personalising learning. We first review the relevant literature as a basis for making clear our own take on this approach to learning, as well as our concerns with some practices in its name. We claim that the goals and means of PL need to be understood in the larger context of the diverse purposes of curricular learning, and that PL entails particular developmental processes requiring teachers to identify and support student readiness. We draw on our analyses of three case studies across primary and secondary settings to illustrate these issues, and provide further support for our framework.
Conceptualising and critiquing personalised learning
Advocates broadly agree that students experience their learning as personalised when they perceive it to address their individual needs, capabilities and interests (Hargreaves, 2005; Carr, 2010; McLoughlin & Lee, 2010; Bevan‐Brown et al., 2011). However, this assertion raises questions about the necessary conditions for this sense of meaningfulness to happen. We take a sociocultural view of the goals and means of learning in general (Sfard, 1998; Alterator et al., 2017), where learning is understood as more than just the acquisition of resolved, abstracted knowledge. Students are also learning to participate as co‐learners in a learning community, with its own set of values. They are learning ways to proceed, reason, debate, share and be creative within and across subjects. They are also learning what to value and why in these different ways of knowing, as they gain confidence and commitment to their own goals and perspectives. Therefore, they need continuous teacher‐supported opportunities to explore and share publicly valued meanings and practices derived from the broader community (Moje, 2007). From this perspective, PL is foundational to developing learners who understand how their learning serves not just themselves and their emerging identities, but also the broader community. In this way, PL is potentially compatible with a prescribed curriculum, enabling individual and collective values to be integrated (Prain et al., 2015). Teachers need to provide opportunities for meaningful collaborative student learning as well as independent learning experiences. Students’ initial enthusiasm for an activity can derive from innate or aroused curiosity, and be stimulated by a context and purpose for action or inquiry. This initial meaningfulness is a pre‐condition to developing a productive attitude towards the value and satisfaction of engaging in shared and independent learning.
If we take a sociocultural view of the complex goals and means of effective school learning, then claims that PL should mainly entail hyper‐individualised curricular packages, or high levels of student autonomy and total freedom of choice (Leadbetter, 2006; Bray & McClaskey, 2015), are misconceived. While technologised personal learning pathways in mathematics and other subjects have proliferated in the name of PL, and provide students with opportunities to practise targeted skills in isolation, they cannot serve all the goals and strategies for learning suggested above. Rather, they are valuable complementary support for other learning goals and experiences. These packages have also been critiqued as a narrowing capture by commercial interests of a more rounded educational curriculum, with increased opportunities for unwanted digital surveillance (Williamson, 2016). On the question of full student autonomy in creating curricula, what Leadbetter (2006, p. 102) has termed ‘deep’ as opposed to ‘shallow’ personalised learning, we claim that this assertion is problematic on several counts. It optimistically assumes that learners are ready for and capable of this independence, and know how to proceed to incorporate relevant methods and concepts from prescribed curricula without guidance. Shared, collective dimensions to being a learner or co‐learner are downplayed. This approach also construes meaningfulness as mainly private and individualised rather than mediated by culture, schooling, teachers, peers and the discursive practices of different subjects.
We recognise that differences in learner needs, capabilities and interests (and therefore readiness for PL) represent major challenges for teachers. For us, these differences indicate that the goal of all students taking full responsibility for their learning is aspirational. To take one dimension of learner differences, motivation can be intrinsic, extrinsic or both (Dweck, 2006), may vary depending on whether students perceive immediate or deferred value in their learning, and may also depend on the degree of success experienced with particular subjects. Student engagement also varies because of the differences in the degree to which they identify with the goals and methods of different topics or subjects. Influences of environment, race, gender and social class all affect what learners understand as their needs, capabilities and interests, affecting learner motivation and readiness to take a larger role in their learning. By implication, effective teacher support for students to personalise their learning needs to be highly nuanced, requiring teachers to have a deep knowledge of the capabilities and interests of each of their students as a starting point for planning and enacting this support. Teachers need an intimate understanding of the issues important to students, their families and their communities.
Critiquing personalised learning
Many early critiques of PL on ideological, conceptual and pedagogical grounds seem warranted. Critics have noted its apparent neo‐liberal faith in students making individualistic autonomous choices (Pykett, 2010; Dovemark & Johansson, 2016). For Pykett (2010), PL approaches favour students with middle‐class cultural capital over disadvantaged cohorts, and therefore neglect questions of social justice and equity by focusing on individual achievement. Rogers (2013) questions the extent to which students’ needs, capabilities and interests align with prescribed curricula and regimes of national testing, suggesting that the real interest of educators lies in improving test results rather than catering for individual differences. Dovemark and Johansson (2016) claim that some enactments of PL have discharged teachers from attempting to influence students’ current interests or their amount of effort at school. Other critics suggest that PL is conceptually confused, characterising PL as learner abandonment (Hartley, 2007), or noting unhelpful vagueness about teacher and student roles, and what might count as success (Campbell et al., 2007; Sebba et al., 2007). For Maguire et al. (2013), PL's conceptual vagueness led to dissipation and mutation in its enactment, where early over‐reach in proposed PL strategies and their ambivalent relation to school cultures of accountability in standards explain some ineffectual outcomes. However, these outcomes do not necessarily discredit the possibility of, or the need for, increasing curricular meaningfulness for all learners. We agree with Edwards (2014, p. 208) that this meaningfulness is built when teachers and students ‘work alongside each other on culturally relevant problems which require the student to engage with public meaning’ or discourses relevant to their own current or future experiences and purposes, and to those of their peers. The teacher's role is to ‘help the student continuously expand their interpretations of the problem’ (p. 208) through developing appropriate concepts and skills.
In summary, PL is based on the reasonable assumption that individual differences in student ability, performance levels, needs, readiness to learn and interests necessitate curricular experiences that recognise and address this reality. We propose that PL is misconceived if seen only as a capability of some learners, or as a binary alternative to prescribed curricula and collective learning. We also claim that PL proceeds through stages, implying the need for developmental learning progressions, with nuanced, extended teacher input. In the next section, we review the literature on current teacher strategies claimed to support PL.
Teacher strategies to support personalised learning
Teacher strategies to support PL assume a progression of learner capabilities, in that these strategies fall into a continuum from teacher‐regulated control to co‐regulation/negotiation between teachers and students, through to increased learner independence. How teachers enable students to progress across these three broad categories of learning experiences is at the heart of effective PL.
Teacher‐regulated strategies include teachers taking the major responsibility for student motivation and differentiation of learning experiences (Tomlinson, 1999). Here, teachers design options for students in curricular content, learning processes and assessment methods and provide frameworks for tasks and model strategies. Students are expected to follow teachers’ set goals, topic organisation, student grouping, pace of learning, instructional strategies and selection of supporting resources, with limited scope for student input. Teachers monitor students’ progress, while students are expected to fulfil teacher‐determined learning gains. Within this broad model of teacher‐directed learning, we note that there is still scope for students to have some agency, as evident in the range of options implied in the next set of strategies.
Co‐regulatory strategies include multiple invitations by teachers for students to have increased input into what, when, how and why they learn, and with whom (Bevan‐Brown et al., 2011; Prain et al., 2015). In this way, co‐regulation or shared control of learning is a key way in which students can be guided and encouraged to know how and why to optimise the meaningfulness of what, how and why they learn, and experience practices that enable and consolidate this self‐directedness. Shared control can entail many teacher and student‐negotiated options. Students can negotiate with teachers their learning goals, topic choices, procedural strategies, pace of learning and peer groupings. Teachers can invite students to give feedback on the effectiveness of how teachers organise student learning and adjust practices accordingly (Bevan‐Brown et al., 2011). Students can be invited to identify, choose and use self‐selected resources and technologies through ongoing negotiation with teachers and peers. Students are expected to develop self‐reliance and master negotiated curricular content with teacher guidance and peer support. Within co‐regulation, there are progression options, from partial to more extended student self‐direction, from teacher‐directed student micro‐choices in learning tasks to more independent individual or group inquiry projects conducted over weeks. In terms of curricular organisation, teachers can vary student learning experiences to include: (a) a mix of teacher‐directed workshops, semi‐independent student group work and student independent study; (b) temporary ability groupings for particular topics; and (c) elective inquiry subjects for students to pursue group and individual projects (Prain et al., 2015). In summary, all the options of teacher and student choices around time, space, pace, resources and purpose of learning can be considered and enacted as opportunities for students to practise increased independence. We recognise that choice alone does not automatically equate with meaningfulness for learners, and needs motivation. However, student take‐up of choices can be part of how teachers encourage students to practise more independence and take more responsibility for their learning.
Teachers can further support this independence in multiple ways. They can encourage learners to be self‐motivated and capable of motivating others. They can invite students to take responsibility for goal‐setting, topic choice and pace of learning, and decide on the resources used for learning, seeking teacher and peer input as required. Students can assess themselves and others, seeking and responding to feedback from teachers and peers as required. They can be given opportunities to justify their understandings, and address complex problems demanding novel and unpredictable methods and strategies. They can be supported to understand and advance their own learning processes, preferences and problem‐solving capabilities. While students taking responsibility for motivation and learning direction may be the goal, in practice teachers have a continuing role in enhancing students’ conceptual understanding and meta‐capabilities.
All these strategies across the continuum can contribute to PL and learner‐perceived meaningfulness. Teacher‐regulated strategies can provide models for future independent student application, but in broad developmental terms PL entails students being supported to co‐regulate and self‐regulate their learning. This range of strategies can also occupy very different time‐frames, from within a single lesson through to larger student developmental choices and practices over years of schooling. At the same time, these strategies are likely to provide limited support for PL unless teachers have flexible and deep disciplinary knowledge that enables them to see generative links between learner interests, motivations and capabilities, and the key concepts, methods and capabilities named in prescribed curricula. This adaptive agility and imaginative take‐up of opportunities is foundational to teacher success in supporting PL, and in facilitating learner independence.
Listing possible teacher strategies indicates the wide range of options, but does not necessarily explain deeper conditions that enable teacher support for PL to work. For this, we draw on Edwards’ (2007) cultural materialist perspective on teacher and student roles in supporting quality learning through collaboration.
Theorising teacher and student roles in personalised learning
In theorising these roles, Edwards (2007, p. 4; 2011, 2015) identified the construct of ‘relational agency’, referring to the conditions for productive collaboration. Originally this framework was applied to different professionals working in health services to develop a ‘network of expertise’ that serves shared goals around addressing children's needs. Rather than emphasise individual action, Edwards (2007, p. 6) foregrounds ‘responsibility to and for others’, where a shift to the relational is ‘an important move in the development of meshes of mutual responsibility’. Edwards does not deny the importance of individual professional expertise, but argues that this expertise in an educational setting can be combined with other teachers, and between teachers and students, and between students to support mutual learning goals. Teachers can also work together, sharing expertise across subject divides to support integrated curriculum approaches. We also note that this relational agency is not unbounded, and operates within a ‘nested agency’ (Prain et al., 2013), in that both teachers and students are constrained by structural, cultural and pedagogical assumptions, regulations and practices, and actual and potential roles and responsibilities in school settings. PL can occur when teacher expertise is used to support individual and collective student learning purposes, experiences and reflection. This entails all participants being clear about how and why decisions are made on learning foci and tasks. Participants also need to know why and how effective tools for collaboration can be developed and knowledge shared, and where socially constructed boundaries are continuously reviewed to ensure that shared long‐term goals are actually served (Edwards, 2011). For Edwards (2015, p. 780), teacher agency must entail both responsibility and self‐evaluation, where teachers consider the extent to which their work serves a ‘wider good’ of student and staff well‐being and learning.
While relational agency clearly applies to teachers teaming up to design, implement and evaluate curricula, we consider that teachers’ interactions with students can be viewed similarly. From this perspective, PL entails mutual responsibility, where teachers are responsible for designing and implementing a curriculum, or facilitating an emergent curriculum that (a) engages all students, (b) provides opportunities to vary teaching and learning that addresses group and individual student needs and (c) motivates and develops students’ capacities for independence as learners within a community. For their part, students are responsible for their learning through participation in these curricular tasks, connected experiences and opportunities. Students have nested agency within the constraints on teacher agency around their practices within schools and larger education systems. We consider that students learn to accept responsibility when they believe that their contributions will genuinely be valued, and this depends on the personal relationships built between teachers and students. Teachers are responsible in the first instance for understanding and respecting the potential of each individual student.
In considering how these perspectives might inform and clarify a framework of teacher practice, we next report on three case studies where teachers aimed to support PL. These case studies have been chosen to indicate challenges and possibilities in supporting personalising learning for different student age groups from Years 1 to 9. These year levels refer to years at school from first year onwards. The case studies incorporate qualitative and quantitative data analyses, depending on the scale and particular focus of each case study. We do not present these cases as exemplary, but rather as indicative of challenges and possibilities, and address the following questions in each case study:
- What teacher strategies were used to align student interests and capabilities with prescribed curricular content?
- What were the effects on student learning?
- What are the broader implications for PL progressions and effective integration of PL approaches and prescribed curricula?
First case study: English Years 1–2
This case study focuses on the potential for early childhood educators to personalise the learning experiences of young children. In 2016, a PL approach was trialled in two Year 1/2 English classrooms at a low SES school in Tasmania, Australia. Despite concerns about the extent to which young children can control key elements of their learning (Meyer et al., 2008; Mahony & Hextall, 2009), two teachers and a researcher planned a PL intervention in narrative and persuasive writing. The design‐based research (DBR) approach (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012) focused on equipping the children to reason about writing choices to enhance meaning‐making and involving them in decision‐making about topic focus and audience.
The development of narrative and persuasive writing skills is prescribed by the Australian Curriculum: English for Year 1 and 2 students, with a writing test part of the national testing programme in Year 3 (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority; ACARA, 2016). The school priority given to writing skills informed the intervention's design. The goal was to cover prescribed curricular content through more meaningful writing experiences.
Our analyses of writing samples found that most children struggled with a range of writing features. When asked about their choices and purpose for writing beyond school, they were unable to effectively explain them, either in terms of self or others. They rarely had opportunities to write for audiences beyond their teachers. In conversation with the researchers, the classroom teachers also expressed a lack of knowledge about the language features of these text types, and how to teach them.
Enhanced reasoning and meaning‐making about writing
The intervention began with a narrative unit focusing on enhanced student reasoning. Drawing on literature around effective writing instruction (e.g. Humphrey & Feez, 2016), teachers designed four lessons on narrative structure and language features, including generic narrative stages, the notion of complicating events by introducing multiple problems to the story and character reactions to complicating events. A key component was the development of a shared teacher/student metalanguage to describe, interrogate and justify narrative choices. We claim that meaning‐making potential can be achieved in English when students and teachers discuss how language choices in texts are leveraged to achieve the purposes of various genres.
The teachers each selected a picture book from which to draw examples, and developed a shared metalanguage with students, cumulatively building awareness of narrative features and positioning them to reason about writing choices. In an interview, one teacher commented on ‘the power of the shared language’, which made it ‘a lot easier’ for students to understand writing task expectations.
Pre‐ and post‐unit writing samples showed positive gains in most learners’ writing. The results suggest that, with support, a majority of the low SES children could make valued narrative writing choices (see Table 1).
| Class | Included valued narrative features in texts | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre‐unit narratives | Post‐unit narratives | |||
| No | Yes | No | Yes | |
| Belle's class (13 students) | 74.3% | 25.7% | 23% | 77% |
| Jenny's class (17 students) | 64.7% | 35.3% | 31.4% | 68.6% |
Students were able to reason about their writing choices in diverse ways, drawing on the new metalanguage as they compared their pre‐ and post‐unit narratives in interviews, as the following examples illustrate:
-
- Lara
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- Reactions were important for me to include in the second narrative because then people knew how they [the characters] were feeling. This helped it to make sense.
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- Jack
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- My second one was better because if I didn't have the orientation, the complication or the resolution, then who are the characters, where are they, is there a problem, and how are they going to fix it? So I needed them.
Yet despite writing gains for most children, teacher interviews suggested that the students and teachers did not perceive this experience as motivating, because of the ‘boring’ picture books. In keeping with the DBR approach, the findings informed a second unit on persuasive writing.
Meaningful writing experiences
The teachers retained a focus on enhanced reasoning through shared metalanguage for the second unit, yet sought to increase student motivation by negotiating topic and audience for texts. Students and teachers chose a topic on which there was a variety of opinions, deciding to write to the school principal about the physical education (PE) programme requiring students to run laps of the school oval each day, regardless of weather conditions, urging him to either keep or change the programme.
Informed by Humphrey et al. (2015), select persuasive features included the generic exposition stages, PEE phases within argument paragraphs (i.e. point, explain, example) and evaluative language to persuade the readers. While the unit was taught similarly to the first, with teachers deciding lesson format and assessment, the children appeared more engaged, driven by the possibility that their writing might affect real change. When they sense the social usefulness of their learning, and experience the power of language to shape thoughts and actions, learners may perceive their learning as personally motivating.
Pre‐ and post‐unit writing samples showed similar writing gains, as shown in Table 2.
| Class | Included valued persuasive features in texts | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre‐unit expositions | Post‐unit expositions | |||
| No | Yes | No | Yes | |
| Belle's class (14 students) | 73.8% | 26.2% | 7.1% | 92.9% |
| Jenny's class (19 students) | 87.7% | 12.3% | 31.6% | 68.4% |
Despite similar linguistic gains, in interviews the teachers described the second unit as a much richer learning experience. One teacher commented: ‘Because it was a daily activity they could relate to, students found it easier to adopt a position.’ A summarised report of the children's arguments was sent to the school principal, who visited and discussed their views. This informed the PE programme design in 2017.
This case study illustrates first steps in personalising learning and building reciprocal responsibility between teachers and students (Edwards, 2011). While both units were largely teacher‐regulated, there was some co‐regulation in persuasive writing focus and authentic purpose on a topic relevant to their lives, enhanced student motivation and capacity to reason about writing choices, judging from teacher perceptions. We argue that, despite the challenges, children's learning can be made more meaningful from the beginning of school. This case study highlights how student agency can enhance learning meaningfulness.
Second case study: ‘The shed’ Years 3–5
Teachers in this low SES school aimed to personalise learning in one Year 3–5 learning community in a multi‐campus school in regional Victoria, Australia. Staff interviews and observations were analysed (Merriam, 1998; Denzin & Lincoln, 2008) in this case study of 110 students, their six teachers and four learning support staff (aides), conducted in 2017.
As an invitation for students to develop as self‐directed learners, the teacher community team‐leader (Miss M) designated one closed classroom area in the community as ‘the shed’. This metaphor invited students to ‘tinker’ in this space, thus specifying the intention of self‐paced, purposeful but informal work. Students were expected to use this space and time to address prescribed teacher‐set literacy or numeracy goals based on student achievement data. Each student had a daily personalised timetable planned by Miss M, accessed via their device, which typically included allocated sessions in the shed, teacher‐directed explicit learning ‘workshops’ and group activities outside the shed. The individualised nature of this timetabling meant that student time in the shed varied considerably. Based on perceived learner readiness for self‐directed activity and independent capabilities, student allocations to the shed ranged from one session (of 30 minutes) to over half a day.
Student goals to be pursued in the shed were communicated through the use of digital technologies, with specific applications used to enable students to access explicit teaching video clips about core concepts, and upload work samples as evidence of, or progress towards, success. Students usually had several goals active at any one time and were expected to self‐regulate their work in the shed with teacher support. As Miss M explained, the use of technology‐stored records meant that when she was conferencing a student, she could immediately see their data. Students could ‘see how different they are from each other because they are all working on different things and goals in the shed’. During each shed session, one teacher was also allocated to facilitate self‐directed activity by offering informal support for individual students, and through coaching during one‐on‐one, just‐in‐time ‘conferencing’ sessions. The teachers assumed students would be motivated through self‐directed inquiry approaches and would utilise shed‐time effectively. This approach was supported by teacher‐directed explicit learning ‘workshops’, or mini‐lessons conducted by four other teachers in the flexible learning space. These workshops were generally held for between 20 and 30 minutes, and focused on a specific aspect of the prescribed literacy or numeracy curriculum. Students were allocated to these mini‐lessons based on teachers’ interpretations of achievement data, judgements about how effectively they were working in the shed or through self‐initiated requests during conferencing sessions when students were stuck.
The conferencing sessions were considered pivotal to the success of student learning in the shed. One male teacher (Mr T) explained that the ‘conference sessions let me see the kinds of things kids upload as evidence of achieving their goal. Sometimes I point out resources that might help them; often it is talking about what their data means and trying to identify what will help them progress’. In addition to sound knowledge of the breadth of the prescribed curriculum in literacy and numeracy, given extreme variation in student data, teachers working in the shed also needed to have a range of resources to draw on in providing just‐in‐time advice. Equally important was a shared team understanding of specific learning intentions for each of the workshops to facilitate student referrals during the conferencing sessions. The shed space was decorated with many visual resources to support independently accessed student learning, or be referred to by the teacher during conferencing sessions. As Mr T explained, ‘I have found lately that many of these discussions are teaching kids about what the goals mean. They are all based on curriculum, in the language of the curriculum, so I have to often point them back to the poster’. The poster presented a cyclic process that started with the student's learning goal and encouraged them to identify key words in the goal, describe these words, identify the skills and resources needed and what would count as evidence of goal achievement. Mr T commented, ‘At the moment we are top heavy on organising their goals but we are moving towards kids being able to interpret their own data and set their own goals’.
Despite teacher expectations, the invitation to tinker in the shed was not successful for all students. Through the conferencing sessions, teachers noted that some students lacked the skills to take this up. As Miss M explained, ‘We started to realise that students were on a continuum of independence’. Teachers recognised that organisational skills were necessary to engage in shed activities, and ‘realised we had to run some explicit workshops about how to teach these skills’. Also, some students lacked prerequisite literacy levels to understand the goals and then self‐regulate their learning. This was not necessarily related to the student's age. Mr T commented, ‘the children have to be able to come in and be able to identify key words in their goals, and sometimes they don't… some of the words you as a teacher think they will know. For example, in numeracy, “recall” was a word that they didn't understand. The challenge is how you support them to identify and describe these words independently. We don't want to just tell them; we want them to be able to discover it for themselves’. Notwithstanding the fluid, dynamic role of the shed as a learning space, teachers strongly endorsed this PL approach. Further, returning to the metaphor, they also showed significant commitment through their own ‘tinkering’ of their practices to best support students to work in the shed. Recognising variability in student readiness, the team collaboratively developed a set of indicators to enable them to identify students’ commencing and developing capacity for self‐regulated learning.
Third case study: Mathematics Years 7–9
This case study focuses on teacher strategies to support PL for Year 7–9 students with a wide variation in capability (from Years 4–10), identifying scope for student choices and drawing on a mathematics example.
In 2014, a new approach to the mathematics curriculum and pedagogy was introduced in Years 7, 8 and 9 at an Australian regional college in response to disappointing national testing results. The new approach encompassed teaching teams in flexible learning spaces where 50% of the learning time comprised traditional textbook teaching of concepts and 50% was devoted to rich tasks, defined as ‘cognitively complex tasks that promote the capacity to think, reason and problem solve’ (Simon & Tzur, 2004, p. 92). These tasks were intended to personalise the consolidation of concepts. Teacher strategies included: (1) designing multiple rich tasks for seven levels of the national curriculum (Years 4–10) matching the current levels of student cohort performance; (2) guiding students to choose tasks at their current ability level; (3) explicit instruction to ability level groups; (4) monitoring and just‐in‐time individualised or small‐group tutoring; (5) providing feedback; (6) negotiating rate of progress and (7) reviewing and refining tasks.
All rich tasks were based on specified curriculum learning outcomes. In designing tasks, teachers considered how the demands of the task supported targeted concepts. The rich tasks allowed students to use mathematical concepts to solve real‐world problems. They were open‐ended tasks that allowed entry at different levels and encouraged a variety of responses. In order to complete the tasks, students were encouraged to demonstrate creativity in their thinking, methods and evidence of task completion.
The tasks were available on a website accessible by scanning the appropriate QR code on a mobile phone or tablet. The site included all the resources required for task completion, as well as instructional videos that included explicit teaching of the mathematical concepts. Students could work at their own pace, revisit material they were unsure of, work at home on tasks or catch up if absent from school. Students chose how they demonstrated and justified their learning on a personal blog that could be shared with teachers, other students and parents by means of any mobile technology. Teachers provided online feedback and evaluation of the student blogs.
Students were expected to choose the right level for each mathematics concept by completing a diagnostic test at their year level. Based on whether they found this test too easy (could be done without any assistance), just right (stretching their thinking and requiring occasional assistance) or too hard (needing continual assistance to complete), students chose the appropriate level of task. Students could choose where and with whom they worked in the flexible learning space, enabling peer tutoring across different task demands.
To assess student gains from Year 7 to 9 with the new pedagogy, analysis of numeracy tests (ACARA, 2016) was undertaken for five cohorts: 2010–2012, 2011–2013, 2012–2014, 2013–2015 and 2014–2016. Two of these cohorts had experienced only traditional teaching (2010–2012, 2011–2013), two had experienced the new pedagogy for part of their schooling (2012–2014, 2013–2015) and one had experienced the change in pedagogy for the entire period from Year 7 to Year 9 (2014–2016). Effect size was calculated for cohorts and for individual students by the following method:
The results showed an increase in effect size from beneath the benchmark of 0.8 to at, or slightly above, 0.8 following the introduction of the new pedagogy (Table 3). The average effect size across Australia is 0.8 over 2 years or 0.4 per year (Hattie, 2012, p. 259).
| Cohort | Pedagogy | Effect size |
|---|---|---|
| 2010–2012 | Traditional | 0.54 |
| 2011–2013 | Traditional | 0.46 |
| 2012–2014 | New (trialled) | 0.82 |
| 2013–2015 | New | 0.85 |
| 2014–2016 | New | 0.88 |
The increase in effect size is a combination of an increase in average student gain between Year 7 and Year 9 tests and a smaller standard deviation, suggesting the new pedagogy is not only better at increasing achievement, but also better at ensuring greater consistency.
To test this claim further, the effect size for individual students’ growth who began Year 7 between 2010 and 2014 (the entire period of this study) was calculated and aggregated according to the type of pedagogy and ACARA's (2016, p. iv) ‘bands’. Recognising that students beginning high school are not necessarily functioning at the expected standard for Year 7 students, ACARA has introduced a ‘band’ system that encompasses a range of standards. Placement in a particular band reflects the perceived ability of students coming from primary school, where band 5 is the minimum expected standard for a Year 7 student, band 4 represents below the minimum expected standard and bands 6, 7, 8 and beyond represent degrees of achievement above the national minimum standard (ACARA, 2016, p. iv). Because of the limited sample size, students who obtained a NAPLAN result in band 4 (16 students), band 9 (19 students) or greater than band 9 (12 students) were excluded from the analysis.
The data support the contention that the new pedagogy is more effective at supporting student achievement across most levels of student ability (Table 4). The only students for whom the traditional pedagogy was as effective was the high‐achieving band 8 students (who represent only 11% of the cohort), confirming the tendency for heavily teacher‐directed approaches to learning to be as successful with more able students.
| Students’ starting band (2010–2014) | Number of students | Effect size traditional pedagogy (2010–2012, 2011–2013) | Effect size new pedagogy (2012–2014, 2014–2016) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Band 5 | 122 | 0.33 | 1.04 |
| Band 6 | 245 | 0.46 | 0.75 |
| Band 7 | 209 | 0.25 | 0.49 |
| Band 8 | 75 | 0.74 | 0.71 |
A researcher‐designed survey (Cox et al., 2015) of 203 student responses to the new pedagogy at the college, where they rated the usefulness of various elements of the programme on a Likert scale of 1 (not useful) to 5 (very useful), also showed positive results. Of eight listed elements, students found three the most useful: the teacher teaching me when I need it, individually or in my group (64.5% useful or very useful); working in a group of students at the same level (61.6% useful or very useful); using other technologies (66.5% useful or very useful).
This case study highlights teacher strategies that support students to participate in co‐regulated and self‐regulated student learning. Co‐regulation is evident where students negotiate goals, methods and pace of learning and develop creative solutions to problems. Self‐regulation is evident when students assume increasing control over these processes and offer justified accounts of their topic understandings. In this case, the locus of control shifts from initial teacher‐driven differentiation to student differentiation of what they learn, why they learn, how they learn and with whom. Students’ responses to the teacher strategies and the gains in mathematical performance indicate that this approach to PL in a prescribed curriculum was effective. The case study also highlights the role of mutual responsibility in this process.
Insights into teacher support of personalised learning from these case studies
These case studies resonate with themes noted in the literature, including (a) the developmental nature of PL and (b) the need for teachers to have a deep knowledge of both individual students’ interests and current capabilities, as well as breadth of curricular understanding, in order to facilitate their alignment. The qualitative and quantitative accounts of effects on student learning in these case studies vary in their degree of reliability in focusing on perceived and calculable outcomes. However, taken together they broadly indicate both challenges and potential gains for learners when they experience their learning as personally meaningful. The case studies may also seem to confirm, across the three cases, an age‐based development of PL capabilities. While this seems broadly plausible, the case studies also confirm how much students of the same age can vary in their capacity to want to, or know how to, make their learning meaningful.
Teachers in each case study sought to establish relational agency with students through imaginatively engaging with students’ perspectives, customising tasks to suit their interests and capabilities, trusting them to practise independent thinking and providing scaffolding and feedback. This entailed some but not all of the teacher support strategies we have reviewed, suggesting further potential for supporting PL. In the second and third cases, teachers attempted to incorporate technological resources and other forms of support into the design and organisation of students’ learning experiences, resulting in both opportunities and challenges around fit for purpose. In each case study, students’ learning experiences were purposefully varied (group‐based subject‐specific guidance and discussion; more independent inquiry or self‐directed opportunities) to enable PL to entail both individual and collective meaningfulness. While ‘tinkering’ is referred to explicitly in only one case study as a student activity, it is clear that all the teachers in these case studies were tinkering with their roles and opportunities to support student motivation and learning.
The case studies reconfirm both the multiple developmental dimensions to PL over time, and some practical ways to organise and enact teacher support. These dimensions include: gains in inquiry skills (aims, methods and evaluation); the development of a productive disposition (will to learn); and increasing capacity to take responsibility for independent and collaborative learning intentions, strategies and outcomes. We frame these gains as student actions and values in the context of conceptual understandings, values and problem‐solving capabilities within and across subject domains. We further identify four broad areas where teachers can support students to change over time in their roles and capabilities in their learning. These areas are: motivation to learn; control of learning purposes and processes; learning outcomes; and broad effects on learner attributes. Learning outcomes refers to the skills, knowledge and attitudes indicated in prescribed curricula. Broad effects on learner attributes refers to student beliefs and practices about themselves as learners, the value of learning and their resultant actions as learners. In practice all these areas are interconnected, but it may be useful in terms of teacher support to conceptualise their interplay within stages, where students progress from dependent to co‐regulated to independent but team‐oriented learners.
In the next section we draw on these insights from the literature and the case studies to propose a framework to support teachers in personalising learning. Following Schwarz et al. (2009), we claim that a framework of preferable teacher practices should offer a persuasive explanation of why and how its key components influence outcomes. In this case, teacher enactment strategies should both explain and predict the intended outcome of students taking increasing informed responsibility for their learning, as evident in the mathematics case study. Analysing outcomes should also provide further insights into how the framework can be used, with scope for further refinement. We therefore see this framework as a resource to generate new explanations and predictions about student perceptions of their learning.
A framework to support teachers in personalising learning
At the heart of our framework (see Figure 1) is Edwards’ (2014, p. 2006) construct of ‘relational agency’ and the resultant ‘common knowledge’, or shared understandings by participants of ‘what matters’ to individuals, the learning community of students and beyond to broader local, national and global communities. We consider that teachers are well placed to persuade students that being engaged, effective learners is in the students’ best interests, and to identify what is personally meaningful individually and collectively for their students.
In placing ‘resources’ as crucial to enactments of relational agency, we emphasise all the material and human resources (such as outside experts and mentors) available to support learning. Our category of ‘community of learners’ recognises that from a sociocultural perspective, PL must take into account that learning entails shared activity with a class or learning group and its relation to the broader community, where technology enables and supports but does not supplant learner interactions. Schooling from this perspective cannot be viewed simply as an individual's journey, in principle or in practice. Students need to be inducted into the discursive practices of particular disciplines, entailing questions of how and why knowledge, skills and values are generated and contested in these disciplines and for what purposes, individually and collectively. In this way, the class acts as a model of inquiry into these disciplines. Learning is not a matter of learning value‐free or discourse‐free ideas, or, conversely, unthinking induction into skills and dominant values. The class needs to act as a community of individual and co‐learners that represents/mediates communal knowledge‐production processes. This is instantiated through teachers orchestrating class discussions and inquiry, whereby student ideas and values are fed into the development of shared (recognised but not necessarily coincident) values and ideas. In our framework, we note three major intersecting influences on this core of relational agency between teachers, students and resources (see Figure 1). The school has a responsibility to promote ethical and cultural values, and support student well‐being. Teacher agency is constrained by school rules and by the underlying responsibility to represent the school's values. Students are responsible for recognising and responding to school values as a core aspect of individual and collective well‐being. Where students do not see or take up this responsibility, there is greater need for effective relational agency.
In terms of the curriculum, teachers are expected to show ways to work and think in different disciplines, as represented in curricula, and their meaningful application in students’ lives. Student well‐being and growth depends on the success with which they can become active participants in and across subject discourses. Student choice, interest and identity with respect to subject participation are framed within a process of induction into the knowledge and values of the discipline. As noted in the case studies, learning experiences can be organised to include both collective induction and customising of inquiry to suit student interests and capabilities. Teachers need to negotiate between students’ incoming interests and perceptions, and those represented by disciplinary perspectives, with scope for new and revisited inquiries into what counts, or should count, as current knowledge, procedures and purposes of these disciplines. To enact a PL approach, as noted in the case studies, teachers need to regard the prescribed curriculum as a flexible guide for diverse approaches and multiple pathways. Teachers need to develop a strong knowledge of the developmental nature of the prescribed curriculum, and identify and enable creative, flexible lines of inquiry to support PL within and beyond this curriculum.
Concluding remarks
In this article our intention has been to theorise and justify a framework for teacher support for PL that: (a) acknowledges and addresses its developmental nature; (b) clarifies its relation and necessary synergies with prescribed curricula; and (c) identifies key foundational conditions and resources for effective teacher support for PL. Our literature review and three case studies are intended to show workable possibilities. We have not enumerated all the specific and creative ways that teachers can organise and enact support for PL in general, or in and across specific subjects. As noted elsewhere (Prain et al., 2015), we recognise that subject logics and prescription vary, with implications for varying degrees of flexibility in how teachers can tailor support for individual learners in different subjects. We also recognise that catering for student differences is a very significant challenge for many teachers, particularly with low SES cohorts, often resulting in the lament of insufficient time or funds for PL practices. For some, our framework may seem to underestimate the power imbalance between governments which prescribe curricula and set standards, and teachers who implement curricula. We understand these concerns, as ultimately teachers are responsible for meeting community expectations by ensuring that students meet prescribed outcomes. However, we claim there is not only scope but also a necessity within the prescribed curriculum for teachers to personalise the learning experience for their students, and our case studies provide examples of ways in which this can be achieved in supportive school communities. In putting our case, we have sought to clarify where we agree or diverge from other researchers in this field, and why. Our framework is intended as a contribution to a dialogue about how teacher expertise can engage all students in a curriculum they experience as meaningful and rewarding.
