Promoting pupil voice and personalised learning: i nsights and evidence from TLRP

Teaching and Learning Research Programme

Promoting pupil voice and personalised learning:

insights and evidence from TLRP

Professor Mary James,

TLRP, Institute of Education London&

University of Cambridge Faculty of Education

[email protected]

[email protected]


Personalisation in Government pronouncements

David Miliband, January 2004: ‘high expectation of every child, given practical form by high quality teaching based on a sound knowledge and understanding of each child’s needs’.

Ed Balls, September 2008: We are looking currently at a way in which we can assess progress child by child with an individual level test where the test would be, would be chosen in a way which is right for the child rather than just everybody doing the same test on the same day.


2004 TLRP Commentary

TLRP welcomed the initiative but noted four challenges in relation to:

1. Conceptualisation2. Authenticity3. Realism4. Risks


Four continung challenges

Conceptualisation: Is the concept of Personalised Learning clear, coherent and empirically supported and sufficient?

Authenticity: Is it really about learning? Or is it still primarily about teaching and curriculum delivery?

Realism: Are the ambition and rhetoric over-reaching themselves?

Risks: What are the major difficulties likely to be and how can they be managed?


TLRP’S overarching aim:

‘to lead to significant improvements in outcomes for learners at all ages and stages in all sectors and contexts of education and training, including informal learning settings, throughout the United Kingdom’.

What insights might TLRP offer?


• Large (c£40m, c100 investments, 700+ researchers projects up to £1.5m each, often with large teams)

• All sectors of education (pre-school to older learners)

• UK-wide (England, Wales, Scotland, N. Ireland)

• 2000 to 2008/9 (generic phase), and then to 2011/12 (TEL)

• Directors’ Team of five (Andrew Pollard (FT), Mary James, Alan Brown, Miriam David, Richard Noss, PT)

• Capacity building (in partnership with BERA, SRHE, ESRC, UCET, etc)

Key features of TLRP in 2008


Schools projects: projects and syntheses

• 22 projects, all now complete• Across project thematic work• Special issues of journals (e.g. teacher learning; learning

outcomes)• Commentaries on current policies (e.g. personalised

learning; improving teaching and learning in schools; science education; neuroscience and education)

• Contributions to public debates (e.g. Primary Review, National Curriculum Inquiry)

• Teachers’ guide (i.e. principles into practice)


Examples of projects with special relevance to PV and PL

• Consulting pupils about teaching and learning (Rudduck)• Consulting pupils on the assessment of their learning

(Leitch)• ACTS II: Sustainable thinking classrooms (McGuinness)• Learning how to learn in classrooms, schools and

networks (James)• Improving effectiveness of pupil groups in classrooms

(Blatchford)• Identity and learning (Pollard)


Consulting pupils about teaching and learning (Rudduck): key findings

For pupils: a stronger sense of engagement with learning, an enhanced sense of agency and of self as learner.

For teachers: deeper insights into children’s abilities and learning preferences, leading to more responsive teaching and giving greater responsibility to pupils individually and as a group.

For schools: strengthening school policy and priority development by including pupils in substantive rather than marginal or tokenistic ways.

For national policy: new insights and practical tools for school self- evaluation, strategic planning and improvement.


Consulting pupils on the assessment of their learning (Leitch): key findings

Children can be consulted directly by policy- makers on matters of educational significance such as assessment policy and practice.

Pupils derive educational benefits through developing increased understanding of their assessment in classrooms where there is congruence between a teacher’s beliefs and practices of Assessment for Learning (AfL).

Teachers and parents are generally supportive of children’s rights and increasing participation in learning and assessment.


ACTS II: Sustainable thinking classrooms (McGuinness): key findings

Using the infusion method, teachers were able to design and to teach lessons where a curriculum topic and a specific pattern of thinking were taught together.

Teachers involved in a CPD programme reported changes in their classroom practices, in their perceptions of children’s thinking, and in their images of themselves as teachers.

ACTS resulted in positive changes in children’s learning, particularly in their use of metacognitive strategies, which were related to effort. These changes took time to build and were not even across all learners.


Learning how to learn in classrooms, schools and networks (James); key findings

AfL helps teachers promote learning how to learn (LHTL) and, thereby, learner autonomy in ways which are in line with their own values. But it is difficult to shift from reliance on specific techniques to practices based on deep principles.

Classroom-focused inquiry by teachers is a key condition for promoting learner autonomy. Schools that embed LHTL make support for professional learning a priority.

Educational networks are much talked about but little understood. They are subjective phenomena that need to be investigated and used by school leaders in order to spread good practice.


Improving effectiveness of pupil groups in Classrooms (Blatchford): key findings

Teachers successfully implemented effective group work in primary and secondary classrooms and across the curriculum.

Positive effects were recorded on pupils’ academic progress and higher conceptual learning.

Involvement in the SPRinG project also had positive effects on pupil behaviour through increases in active on-task interactions, more equal participation in learning, sustained interactions and higher level discussions.

Personal relationships between teachers and the class and between pupils within the class improve, provided teachers take time to train pupils in the skills of group working.


Identity and learning (Pollard): key findings

Relationships between teachers and pupils remain the basis of the moral order of the classroom – and thus underpin discipline and behaviour.

Children develop their identities as learners through successive experiences and contexts as they move through schooling.

Pupils actively negotiate their way through schooling. When reviewed over several years, this can be seen as a ‘pupil career’.

The match to school provision of learner identity, social relationships and cultural resources strongly influence the overall outcomes of education.


Pollard’s conclusions

The most fundamental form of education, the process of becoming a person, requires careful consideration as well as the acquisition of knowledge and skills.

Understanding these strategic biographies is an important contribution to meaningful personalisation of provision.

Personalised provision in schools should respond to the social, cultural and material experiences of different groups of learners and to the struggles for meaning and opportunity in their lives. Inequalities between schools make this extremely challenging.


What all this implies:

Personalisation is not the same as individualisation. It is not just a matter of finding the strengths and

weaknesses (by attainment testing) of individual students and then providing them with individualised targets and individualised programmes (delivered online?)

It involves thinking about what ‘becoming a person’ involves – in groups, communities and institutions.

TLRP projects provide evidence that pupils learn better if they are committed to their own learning and they know how to go about it. This has affective, cognitive, behavioural, social and moral dimensions.


TLRP’s ten evidence-informed principles to guide policy and practice


•engages with evidence whilst calling for the necessary application of contextualised judgement by practitioners, and policy-makers.

•enables the accumulation and organisation of knowledge in resilient, realistic and practically useful ways.

•has the potential to progressively generate

understanding and language for use within public debates.

Why use the concept of ‘evidence-informed principles’?


1. Equip learners for life in its broadest sense

TLRP PRINCIPLES: educational values and purposes

Effective teaching and learning:


2. Engage with valued forms of knowledge

3. Recognise the importance of prior experience and learning

4 Scaffold learning

5. Need assessment to be congruent with learning

TLRP PRINCIPLES: curriculum, pedagogy & assessment



6. Promote the active engagement of the learner

7. Foster both individual and social processes and outcomes

8. Recognise the significance of informal learning

TLRP PRINCIPLES: personal & social processes



9. Place great emphasis on teachers’ own learning

10. Demand consistent policy frameworks with support for teaching and learning as their primary focus

TLRP PRINCIPLES: teachers and policies



Back to Miliband

David Miliband, January 2004:

‘high expectation of every child, given practical form by high quality teaching based on a sound knowledge and understanding of each child’s needs’.


Who’s talking? Who’s listening?

Promoting pupil voice and personalised learning: i nsights and evidence from TLRP

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