What is personalisation in education and why do we need it? by Sylvia Guinan

What is personalisation in education and why do we need it?

Creating personalized environments

Mass production in education is very inspiring indeed. In fact, it inspired Pink Floyd’s masterpiece; “We don’t need no education” from their album “The Wall’.

‘The Wall’ was a reaction against factory style education and struck a chord with people everywhere. Now in 2013, we have the means and the hindsight to take education to new frontiers in personalization.

Approaching this concept from the ‘inside out ’ point of view, it would be fair to say that all learning is personalized by the students themselves. No matter how much you may apply a blanket approach to teaching, each student will filter the content in unique ways. No matter how factual, basic or simple the lesson is, it will be processed differently by each student. The brain filters incoming information on subconscious levels, so whatever a student may glean from a lesson will depend on childhood experiences, socialization, levels of emotional intelligence, dominant learning styles, personality, temperament, value systems…and the list goes on.

This has been the bane of many teachers, especially in schools with deprived or emotionally disturbed students, or those with learning disabilities. However, all of these students have something unique to offer. We must learn to speak the language of their minds.

If our real task is to tap into the minds of our students, we may wish to ask ourselves ‘How can we exploit the personalized diversity of this class to encourage self-expression and build confidence in learning?’

In order to offer practical solutions or entertain innovative ideas regarding this challenge, we must first look at two distinct learning environments, which influence what we can do and how we can do it.

The most common environment is still one with large classes, few resources and little technology. This environment is the most challenging for teachers and students, and personalization may seem impossible within the framework of a whole class approach.

 The other environment we need to look at is the technologically-enhanced school, where resources are plentiful, but teachers either struggle to implement the technology into existing frameworks, or bureaucracy seems to push against innovation.
                                           

I found interesting solutions for both types of environment, many of which are based on simple best practice in education, along with the psychology of learning, building rapport and eliciting engagement in the classroom.

The most important resource for both environments

The mind of your student is the most important, inspiring and delightful resource you will ever find. It may also be the most frustrating one. If you cannot reach the mind and heart of a student, no amount of ‘outside-in’ personalization theory will work.

The student as a resource

The simplest and most effective way to elicit deep personalization in learning is to introduce creativity into the classroom environment. You cannot control your most important resource ( the student’s mind), but you can engage, motivate it and help it to grow and develop itself.

All students respond to story-telling, games, role-play and puzzles. They also respond to music, drama, art and all creative outlets, no matter what subject you are teaching. That’s why I think that CLIL can help to enable personalized learning across all subject areas.

Creative project work puts the onus on students to react, think, behave, create, and present themselves or their creations to the world. When a teacher organizes creative learning activities, he/she is expressing profound respect for students and their ability to guide their own minds towards achievement. Project-based learning means that students can take on different roles in a collaborative creative process.

How can we be creative with large classes and no technology?

Psychology and games go a long way with a large class. Certain types of interaction help to create rapport and engage students. If we match this with activities conducive to self-expression, then we have synergy, momentum, co-operation and enthusiasm.

Pacing and Leading

If the aim is to get students thinking and learning independently, it follows that the teacher must facilitate communication with a Socratic flair for questioning.  Leading questions and rapport building are all that is needed to have students ready to work at peak performance.

The art of questioning

This is a skill which is very important. Different kinds of questions yield different results. For personalized learning the right question is more important than the right answer. Our questions should follow the way the mind works naturally, and help us to access the inner resources of our students. Our questions should help learners to reach inside, think critically and come up with unique answers, which reveal much about their level of learning.

Vague questions are better than deliberate, focused ones, if students are to self-discover. This is probably one of the most important ways to break free of teacher-centric habits. When you ask an ambiguous , multi-faceted question, the students have to search their minds to fill in details and create meaning from what they hear. A vague question is like a blank canvas. You give them the canvas and let them paint their own personal meanings.

From atmosphere to activity

Assuming that the teacher is completely in tune with the class and that students are fully primed for the learning experience, what can we use and classify as ‘personalized’ content? To my point of view, anything brain-friendly is usually conducive to personalization. I will list here some activities that promote independence and creativity with few, if any, resources, other than the beautiful minds of your students.

1. Without technology

1) 50 tasks for teaching with only a blank piece of paper from www.EFLclassroom2.0.com 

http://community.eflclassroom.com/profiles/blogs/50-task-to-teach-with-only-a-blank-piece-of-paper-1?xg_source=shorten_twitter&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=b58f0

This monster collection of resources is the brainchild of David ddeubel; the famous creator of English Central ( more on that issue will be given later)

If you read his introduction to the tasks, you will see that his educational philosophy matches what I was describing above, and most definitely fits into the category of personalized learning. EFL classroom 2.0 is an amazing EFL library with a huge community of expert teachers on board to help any establishment wishing to implement personalized learning methodologies.

2) Teachers can get more from Alex Case’s www.TEFLTASTIC.com  blog (http://tefltastic.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/tef-worksheets-july09-part1/)
 Ideas such as ‘mini brain-storming activities’ turn the brainstorming into the topic of the lesson. How student centric is that? This reminds me of the power of mind-mapping for true personalized thinking and expression. Mind-mapping is something that I will write about in future, which should play a central role in personalization of methodology.

3) Getting back to the ‘The Wall’ analogy, Jason West and EnglishOutThere.com is the ultimate in personalization that perfectly suits all curricula. It needs little training, and would not disturb whole-school traditional-style functioning. It leads students to speak outside in the real world beyond classroom walls. Each lesson plan has a speaking task for homework. Teachers and schools can create English speaking clubs with members of the local English speaking expat community, and have meet-ups where students get to communicate naturally. (http://englishoutthere.com/)

These are just three major resources, methods and ideas that can be integrated into all formal curricula. All of them contain potent degrees of personalization.

With technology

As an online teacher I have been fully immersed in this for the last three years. Blended learning is PERFECT for integrating personalized , student-centered learning into schools and is a blessing to teachers and students alike.

1) I will start with ClubEFL, an online edutainment platform for children, which is now well-known in Greece. It is wonderful that we have our own edutainment platform in Thessaloniki created by Dimitris Aivazoglou

ClubEFL has all kinds of interactive technology that allows students to blog, communicate, chat, and create their own multi-media content online. It’s a perfect reflection of what I consider as important – it emphasizes story-telling, music, poetry , quizzes and everything fun to engage individual learne
rs working independently or collaboratively. Classes across Greece can collaborate together or  even better, internationally – a virtual hologram of the old-fashioned pen pal days.

www.ClubEFL.com  is THE engine for self-styled learning, self-paced learning, student created content – whatever personalized learning may be across the spectrum of educational theory, ClubEFL fits the bill on all counts.

2) To introduce a user-friendly, fun, colourful, multi-media creativity tool  to students, my number one choice has to be Eduglogster.  Eduglogster is an interactive poster application that is free for individual students, and which can complement any work you do as part of the normal curricula. It encourages whole-brain functioning (logic and creativity flowing together) and amazing personalization, as students create their own content.  You can also get school accounts which are brilliant, because teachers track student via the Eduglogster learning management system. Here is an article I wrote about Eduglogster: http://fairlanguages.com/10-fun-and-effective-ideas-for-teaching-languages-with-eduglogster/

One way I would use Eduglogster is to combine it with English Addicts from www.Edulang.com

3) English Addicts is an interactive news website for schools with podcasting in many international accents, vocabulary, reading and everything a student needs. I would ask students to prepare a news topic from there, and then to create a visual billboard/summary of the news article using video, images, stickers, headlines etc. making a beautiful poster that can also be printed, displayed or used for presentations on parent open days.

4) If schools have language labs or plenty of computers, they can also get their schools onto comic making sites. This is great for writing, grammar and vocabulary practice, as students write their own comics, according to topic or language function. I would recommend www.bitstrips.com,  www.pixton.com, or www.comiclife.com.

5) I mentioned English Out There above in the non-technology section. It can also be used with social networking online. A good idea would be via ClubEFL or other safe online environments such as Edmodo. When networks are built up with native speakers abroad, teachers can have their students chatting naturally online, having personalized fun and being spontaneous. 
If you live in a remote place with no native speakers you can use social media online to build up networking clubs. 

6) Last but not least, www.englishcentral.com is a movie dream in ELT. Schools can apply for class accounts and have their students speaking like the movie stars and also having their pronunciation tested. This is one type of homework that students would love to do.

The above listed are my favorite tools and environments for enabling personalized learning. As an online teacher, I work on skype and via www.WiZiQ.com, an educational platform, where I have experimented with international online students with edutainment, and where I have successfully helped students to pass exams. This is also a nice blended learning solution for creative schools.

I will finish by saying that we do not need to break away from standard curricula to introduce personalization.  If we think of the standard curricula as an educational quilt, the learning activities are the patches sewn on by the students. The patches are multi-colored, individualistic, and separate – yet they are part of the whole, and sewn up together more beautiful and greater than the whole. It’s a patchwork quilt of creativity, the paint on the canvas, splashes of inspiration – so easy to implement in 2013.

I am an Irish woman living on a beautiful Greek island with my Greek husband and four children, including twins, aged between nine and four. I have been teaching ESL/English for fifteen years, with experience in primary , secondary schools, language, and literacy institutes in Ireland, though the majority of my experience has been in Greece.

I studied English literature and History in University before going on to take the Higher Diploma in Education, which is the teaching qualification in Ireland. After moving abroad, circumstances led me into the ESL field, which has entailed continuous professional development and opened up new interests and opportunities.

The last three years has been devoted to teaching online. I have been researching virtual classrooms, environments, web 2.0 technology, social media, and creating multi-media content. I have also experimented with different brain-friendly methodologies, have conducted many public classes online using games, music and story-telling techniques, and am currently writing two educational course books. One is vocabulary for proficency using creative learning techniques, and the other is an grammar story book for ESL students and bilinguals.

My predominant teaching interests include:

• motivational techniques,
• creative curriculum development,
• use of games, music and multimedia in esl
• emotional intelligence,
• multiple intelligences
• neuro-linguistic programming
• different learning styles,
• dyslexia,
• learner autonomy,
• technology in education

As a mother of four bilingual children, I have also developed a keen interest in bilingual literacy and I am passionate about raising my children to develop the linguistic competence of a well-educated native English speaker.”