When I first started teaching this is something that I was really interested in and I loved the idea of getting to know my students strengths and weaknesses and working on them. It was based on my route into teaching, which started in individual private instrumental lessons. I imagined developing relationships through the subject matter in the same way as I had as a practical musician.
I quickly learned that it didn’t work that: I learned that you can either plan learning around the content, or around the personality, and that in order to accommodate one, you have to bend the other. So in instrumental teaching my content was always the same: to play well, and I could bend the way in which I taught that one thing around a person’s individual nature.
When there is a different lesson objective every single lesson, you can’t possibly change that to match all the personalities in the room in the time you have got. You would need to teach that same lesson over and over again in different ways each time, or to teach that same lesson 30 times to each individual in turn.
Yet current teaching practice pays lip service to this idea, without embracing it fully in the way I could as a music tutor. You have Individual Learning Plans (ILPs), which are supposed to show how you are supporting this student as an individual in lessons.
These include an analysis of the student’s preferences in terms of the current fashion in teaching and learning theories, which you are supposed to accommodate every lesson. Sometimes you are required to derive a ‘class profile’ from this, and document where you are accommodating this in your planning, creating additional paperwork.
They also involve that done to death acronym SMART targets, which for my students, included nothing more than documenting when large pieces of coursework were due and encouraging better study skills. I am dubious as to whether this all personalises learning enough for it to have any effect.
Do you believe personalised learning exists in education today?
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