Customised Learning and Peer-matched Learning Webs
Rationale
In a recent TES article on personalised or customised learning, Roland Meighan was described as “one of Britain’s leading authorities on alternative systems of education.” In his book The Next Learning System, he makes several interesting comments which inspired me to begin work on this topic.
Meighan is a supporter of home-schooling. He suggests that home-schooling offers several advantages over the current system. He argues that home-schoolers are “trail-blazers” who are showing what “the next learning system” will be like. Although it seems unlikely that our society will be de-schooled in the immediate future, Meighan’s radical approach is interesting.
One of the major strands in Meighan’s argument is the nature of modern society:
When schools were set up we lived in an information-poor society. Therefore getting children together in one place to give them access made some kind of sense. Now we live in an information-rich society it makes little or no sense.
Meighan believes that the internet and other media, as well as museums and other educational resources, mean that teachers and schools no longer hold a monopoly of information or skills. Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society had already identified this trend in 1971:
The proud dependence on school is gone. Consumer resistance increases in the knowledge industry. Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and policemen, would prefer not to depend any longer on schools.
Students may feel that the information and skills which we teach can probably be learned elsewhere. They are also aware that there are many other skills and subjects in which they could educate themselves without the reliance on school. The emphasis on certification has led to the undervaluing of the content. It is the grade, not the actual learning that took place, that seems to matter to society. School can easily become a place that students are made to attend in order to be forcibly submitted to an arbitrary curriculum with the sole purpose gaining financial rewards (perhaps deferred until they have accumulated still more certificates).
Meighan’s critique of school as an institution is radical:
School, based on the current model of the compulsory day-detention centre, is itself a bully institution. […] The unwritten, but powerful message of this package, is that the adults get their way by bullying.
At this point most of us would claim that our school and our classrooms do not operate in this coercive manner. However, it is a recurrent theme in Illich’s work that school could not operate “unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory.”
Intrinsically motivated, independent learning happens elsewhere. Perhaps more disturbingly, we may actually be undermining that kind of learning. Meighan comments:
When they started school at five years of age, we know they were asking about thirty knowledge or enquiry questions an hour, but that this soon drops and eventually gets to around zero.
Illich is perhaps even more clear on this point:
All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognised as the institution which specialises in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane and frequently almost impossible task.
Deschoolers argue that schools actually put people off learning. This is a problem if we want to get good learning to happen in schools and to promote life-long learning, rather than just to sell a competitive package of certification.
Meighan’s other important argument deals with learning styles:
Given the fact that we are able to locate over thirty differences in individual learning styles, any uniform approach to the curriculum or to learning is intellectual death to some, and often most of the learners. […] The situation in which one teacher faces thirty children in one room and is required to deliver the same material within a given period of time […] to all of them, means that drastic harm to the quality of learning of many of the class and the resultant loss of a great deal of potential learning is inevitable.
As teachers, we are trying to respond to recent research into learning styles. Meighan’s point is that the institution of school makes it very difficult to be as flexible as a home-school situation.
What is the alternative? Illich’s sees “teachers” or “pedagogues” as people who “help the student to find the path which for him could lead fastest to his goal.” Meighan’s research echoes Illich’s vision. Parents are:
learning site managers who help arrange the learning programme. They may also operate as learning coaches, or as fellow learners researching alongside their children, rather than as instructors.
Perhaps a more powerful model is embodied in Illich’s dictum: “creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems.” One of Illich’s most compelling ideas is the “learning web”. He speaks of “reticular structures” and computerised methods for putting people in touch with others who want to learn about the same area. His work predicts the development of the internet and suggests how it might be used to revolutionalise education and society.
The Task
In a modest way, I have attempted to design something that would help students to get in touch with peers who share their interests. The questionnaire would enable us to match students up. They would then be asked to do an extended research project. This would have a series of definite stages:
Define what their aims are – what do they want to learn?
Plan the approach – what resources to use, the outcome.
Thorough research on the WWW, with books and any other materials.
A detailed record of materials used to be produced.
Mind-maps to be created on key resources / topics.
A detailed review of one or more web-sites.
Presentations to be made – either within the group, to one other group or to a larger audience. This ought to make use of visual aids.
The writing of an informative piece on the topic.
The writing of a journal or log of the whole project.
The writing of a piece of creative writing that draws on the research in the same way that a professional author might (eg a murder story set in a biodome).
The collection of materials into a pack, as a record and monument to the work involved.
Given the nature of school organisation this may have to be done within one class – although it could quite easily be widened to the half-year blocks who are doing English simultaneously. The teacher’s role in the lessons would be that of facilitator, although some “learning skills” (specifically mind-mapping and research skills) might need to be “taught”.
I have deliberately tried to connect the work to the English GCSE syllabus.
The initial planning discussions could be assessed as Speaking and Listening coursework (group work).
Item 6 could form the Media Coursework piece.
Item 7 could be assessed for individual contribution S/L coursework.
Items 9 and 10 could be entered as Original Writing coursework.
Item 8 provides practise for the type of writing task found on English GCSE examination papers.
These eleven elements would require an extended time-scale and access to a range of resources. My hope is that it could combine tasks which will help students to gain useful grades at GCSE English with a style of learning that is highly motivating and pupil-centred.
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