Aiming for knowledge facilitation as per the learner’s need? Personalised learning is one of the proven techniques that can help you to achieve it.
In today’s era, learning facilitation is being provided through various forms, including:
Classroom teaching
Online teaching
One-to-one online/offline tuition
Corporate training
Digital learning or M-learning
Irrespective of the different delivery styles of teaching methods, the common thing is starting with ‘What do students already know?’ and ‘What do they need to learn new?’.
This post serves as a guide to understand personalised learning and how the learners get benefitted from this learning approach.
So, let’s get started:
Personalised Learning: A Quick Introduction
Every student is different as per their learning needs. Personalised learning defines the methods and set of instructions specifically designed to facilitate education to each student present in a class.
E.g. Some students may have an interest in cricket whereas some may like to play football. Thus, the teacher who is explaining a concept in math can include examples from both games to make teaching fun and students can get engaged better.
This applies to every subject. A personalised learning approach requires teachers’ efforts to plan a lesson in a way that can meet students’ expectations and their level of learning.
Strategist That Leads to Personalised Learning
Over time, experienced educationists, and researchers have come up with strategies that leave positive impacts on students while learning a lesson.
Some of those strategies include:
Know your student:
Whether it’s one-to-one teaching or classroom teaching, knowing the student is crucial.
Well, on one-to-one tuition, knowing the student and helping accordingly is quite easy as enough time is given and the teacher is required to focus on one student at a time.
Whereas, in the classroom, personalised teaching is a challenge. In spite of the number of students creating a personalised bond with every student make the classroom environment positive to allow the students to come forward and bring their doubts on board.
Personalization with students makes the class engage and helps the teacher to guide the student rightly.
Go slow:
Don’t rush to finish your lesson. It’s far better to finish one topic with an assessment than finishing up the lesson without any assessment for learning.
Only the right set of questions can tell you the students’ understanding of the lesson.
Thus prepare one topic at a time keeping all the important elements like examples, questioning, references, media, etc. in place and then begin next after seeing the students showing confidence with the present topic.
Perform group learning/Cooperative learning:
Cooperative learning works wonders for those learners who are hesitant to share their learning in class. Such students show progress in interacting with their peers.
Yes, forming groups within the class, allow students to interact with each other, share their thoughts, and work positively to solve a problem.
Better questioning:
Questioning is of different kinds including open/closed-ended, objective, fill-in-the-blanks, true/false, etc. to assess students’ understanding.
However, the use of the right kind of questioning makes a lesson effective and helps to personalise with the students.
Example: At the beginning of the lesson, the teacher should ask a few questions related to the previously learnt lessons to assess their understanding.
As the lesson-teaching progresses, the teacher may not just ask the class closed-ended questions like, do you understand? Also, ask for a quick explanation.
As the topic finishes, the teacher may perform a quiz between groups in the class and see the students’ participation and understanding.
Lastly, the teacher may ask higher-order thinking questions to check the students’ depth of understanding.
Asking a variety of questions increases class engagement by increasing the students’ participation. Improvement in teacher-student interaction leads to better personalisation.
List of Benefits After Using Personalised Learning Approach
The personalised learning approach provides immense benefits on practising it continuously in the class.
Saying continuous practice implies not giving up on students if some or most of them aren’t responding well to your (The teacher's) efforts.
Improve Interest:
When learning is fun, things get a lot easier for the teacher and student. Practically, it’s difficult to grasp interest in lesson teaching which is monotonous and lacks creativity.
It’s essential for a teacher to plan a lesson by keeping students’ learning needs in mind, and adding necessary breaks that are filled with some fun elements.
Crafting a lesson plan with all the essential elements makes the execution effective or in students’ favour which led to improving students’ interest in the class.
Fulfilment of learning needs:
Personalisation helps the teacher to know their students which includes students’ learning needs as well.
Some students like algebra and some may feel interested towards solving geometry questions. For some math is too tough, but enjoy history.
Understanding this pattern of students’ interest and using it in teaching draw students’ interest and fulfils their learning needs.
Raise student’s confidence:
Well, confidence is directly proportional to a student’s success in solving problems. Putting it simply, if students solve more questions independently they’ll feel happier and more confident.
Personalisation leads to better communication with the students or knowing their weaknesses, this guide the teacher to bring up an appropriate learning style, and eventually helps the students get confident in the particular subject.
Classroom environment gets happier:
When students look forward to their teacher’s class means they’re happy inside and wait for their teacher’s arrival, so they can learn something new.
And, as they say, ‘When students are happy teacher appears’, implying students’ willingness to learn and grow.
This mindset and energy make the work of teachers a lot easier, as students start to give their 100%.
Result enhancement:
All of the above benefits of using personalisation in the class lead to better engagement and students’ willingness to learn and improve.
Continuous efforts lead to better results, which makes teachers satisfied and work even more enthusiastically with their students.
The Conclusion
Overall, it would be right to call personalization the key to impactful learning. As the popular educationist, Rita Pearson said, ‘Students don’t learn from the people, they don’t like’.
This phrase explains the importance of making connections with the students. It doesn’t apply to the teachers who are going to take their first class, it is required to be practised on an everyday basis.
If a teacher knows their students well or students are open towards their fear and weaknesses to their teachers, then teachers can find appropriate solutions and use them in the class.
Personalisation is a need in the classroom, and it starts showing positive changes the day you begin to use it in your teaching.
So, start practising it from now on if you haven’t so far!
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