INFLUENCES ON TEACHING AND LEARNING

Influences on Teaching and Learning

Influences on Teaching and Learning

This paper aims at providing the beliefs that I have inside in terms of making people learn and they came out of my experiences of learning in life as a student. I remember my learning experience as if it were yesterday. No matter how we are taught by our teachers, each of us have our own way of learning styles, our own way of processing information and acquire a unique style to gain knowledge. I think personalised leaning and thinking skills are those which have been very prominent in my life as a student and I will tend to focus over them through out my life as teacher. I would also focus over identifying different issues of students as participants, personalised learning, and thinking skills, specifically regarding teamwork and the curriculum within pedagogical activities as this is my genre.

Personalised learning was always there in my life and I considered it as a 'package'. A pertinent question is: when presented with this language, which implies that the policy is already 'wrapped-up', do educationalists feel they have any discretion in the matter? This question leads to further questioning of the ability of schools to implement government directives such as personalised learning.

The need to create constructive dialogue about the framework is essential for teachers being able to use the framework to review their teaching practices. However 'right' an educational initiative might appear, there still needs to be consideration for the attitudinal factors in having teachers adopt the initiative.

Contextually, Curriculums might be regarded as a challenge to personalised learning as a 'package'. However, this refinement is problematic because I suggest that various skills (team work and problem-solving) are boxed together and presented to students as a single unit. As I noted this as a student, the image is one in which no interaction or creativity within learning exists. A possible cause of this ambivalence toward the student as learner is that, traditionally, personalised learning did not prioritise curriculum coverage. In this era, when schools are judged on achievements and are expected to produce quantitative evidence, this accountability constitutes a source of tension. By placing the learner at the centre of pedagogical practices, and emphasising the curriculum's collaborative nature rather than its outcome, the tension between personalised learning and achievement could be challenged. The emphasis is on what happens in lessons, especially the interaction between the individuals involved, and with regard to planning and assessment. “A key part of initial assessment is to involve your learners in assessing their own skills and knowledge.” (Gravells and Simpson, 2008, pg 13)

This literature shows clearly that personalised learning is open to being perceived as a remedy for large-scale educational challenges such as student underachievement. A few of my teachers suggested that it was symbolic politics driven by a desire to be elected; personalisation airbrushed underachievement in schools, failing to address the real underlying causes. The pertinent question I raise asks whether the consistency of political strategies ...