The way it should be
by Duncan O'Leary
The topic up for discussion in our seminar was Personalised Learning and the presenters, from an LEA, took us through the work that they have been engaged in over the few months.
The exercise that they have been through has been to adopt David Miliband's five gateways to personalisation as a framework for understanding and directing all of the work they do.
Starting with key issues in local schools (such as behaviour and attendance) they have mapped out drivers of these issues (such as lack of parental support, or lack of clear objectives and outcomes in the classroom) and used the framework to think through a response to the problems at hand. The result is a disparate set of problems on one side of the page and a coherent set of responses on the other.
This may not sound particularly radical (the comment was made again today that personalised learning has been going on for years in some schools) but surely this is the real power of personalisation ' it's not a job title but a way of working.
Update: I could't find a link to this yesterday, but here's the triangle that they've been using to help organise/understand their work around the five gateways.