TACON 2014

Learners are coming to expect ever more ‘personalised’ learning, whether through teachers’ differentiation of activity within the classroom or through the use of technology to provide more flexible and blended approaches. In this presentation, we will address personalisation from a different angle, focussing, instead, on ways of assisting learners to take an active role in personalising their own learning. This will include some consideration of ‘learning styles’ as a relatively familiar starting point for many students and teachers. However, we will be looking more broadly at ways of encouraging and supporting students to stand back from subject content and take stock of how they engage with the process of learning. We will examine methods that can assist such activity and which enable learners to tailor their learning to suit their own circumstances and preferences. Such personalisation can help learners to increase their sense of purpose and motivation. It also builds skills in reflection and agency which are of benefit to them when they progress to higher levels of study.