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'Personalised learning' involves customising education to the needs of individual students.
This educational approach is not just about computers or something that can be delivered in a box. It is a bold, new way of thinking about education and requires us to think differently about how we teach our students. Definitely bold, because, this approach to education puts the teacher's role in the progress of students as one of the critical pillars. The teacher’s role is not just to instruct, or intervene, but, also, to focus on creating an environment where students feel empowered, motivated, and engaged with what they are doing.
This can only happen when the teachers know exactly which skills each student has already mastered; so that they do not invest time on things that are already known or understood by them. They need to focus more on an intervention model, rather than an elongated instruction-style model. Even in the case of collaborative projects, or individual endeavours by students under a project- or skill-oriented assignment, having clarity on students’ mastery across skills enables teachers in stepping steadily towards facilitating a personalised learning model. Moreover, here the pace of a student’s learning experience is based on his/ her needs, and not just driven by the flow of the generic curriculum mandated to be followed. So, here the teacher’s role as a critical facilitator and enabler is an important driver for the success of this educational approach.
One of the goals of ‘personalised learning’ is to have a clearer picture of the skills, strengths, and weaknesses of every student.
The effectiveness of this learning model lies in how well we can bridge the gap between conventional grade-oriented educational practices and a competency-based approach.
The major obstacles to the implementation of this model include — bad time management, lack of opportunities (and, a variety of it) for students, intermittent (or almost non-existent) teacher training, and lack of tech support in schools.
The Covid-19 outbreak forced us to make several unexpected changes, one of which was to push students to engage in self-study and take responsibility for their learning. Students, who struggled with this transformation in the educational approach, faced challenges in terms of severe learning loss. But, it also came with a silver lining in terms of several opportunities for students to take control (unlike earlier) of their day-to-day educational journey, with intervention from their teachers. They explored and developed various methods of learning and engaged in forming their own methodologies. This also led the teachers to don the hat of facilitators and assist (and many a time, even enable) students to achieve their learning goals. By passing on considerable control of the content to the students, teachers laid down a foundation for a renewed student-engagement-and-involvement model; all this despite the tremendous challenge of keeping the educational machinery of the world up and running during the lockdown period.
In a few years, the term ‘personalised learning’ will probably become a common feature of schools and classrooms. The idea is to individualise education and make it need-based for students, rather than grouping them all together in one class and broadcasting information based on a fixed calendar.
Personalised learning is an effective way for teachers to help students achieve their full potential, while also freeing up resources for those who require more attention than others.
A student's success also depends on teachers having access to several teaching materials at the right level of difficulty, mapped with appropriate content. Personalised learning enables teachers to plan, evolve, build, and provide just the right mix of such resources.
As an ending note, I would like to draw everyone’s attention to the importance of doing everything possible for our students to ensure success and the right paths for them to pursue. Because, if not for that, all that we have is lost. Those scientists who developed the much-needed vaccines, those heroes of the medical fraternity who served our worldwide community day and night, and those policy-makers who enabled the allocation and movement of resources to slow down the pandemic would have been students sometime in the past. And, imagine what would have happened if these students had not succeeded and become what they are now?
So, let’s do whatever it takes for the students of this world.
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