Individualisation – As a Simple Necessity
As my readers certainly have realised by now, the driving force in my development as a teacher throughout the years has been to transfer the burden of responsibility from the teacher to the individual student.
In some situations, individualisation has been especially beneficial. I first encountered the necessity when tackling so-called “Extra English” classes. These comprised of students who for some reason had opted out from studying another modern language, like French or German, so they would have English during those classes, instead.
This group could be extremely diverse. Some of them struggled with any language, so a new one would have been too much, while others wanted to specialise in English to get a higher grade. To be honest, some were simply too lazy to bother.
These students also came from different classes and could have different teachers in their “normal” English, so there was no common ground to build on.
I started with different stations, where the students could practise one skill at a time, 20 minutes, and then swap stations. For reading and writing this was easy. At the time (the 1990s), there were few computers available, so individual listening was impossible to arrange. So, we would have a specific listening lesson once a week. Speaking was a challenge, too, as this group would be disturbing to the others. Luckily, I later got a classroom with an adjacent group room and the latter problem was solved. Nowadays, listening is no longer a problem, as most students have their laptops and headphones.
This system eliminated much of the disciplinary issue that many other teachers of “Extra English” were having but whether it was time well spent for learning is questionable, to say the least. Also, in today’s world, I cringe at the number of paper copies that were used in the assignments.
Anyway, I soon realised that 20 min for each practice was too arbitrary, the changes took too long and it all felt too industrialised, like moving on a conveyer belt with no other purpose than to work on random language skills.
In the next step, each student could choose which skill they wanted/needed to practise as they stepped into the classroom. I tried to have them choose different ones each time but this turned out to be futile. They preferred to fulfil their individual needs, moods and interests, which I, in the end, could only agree with.
These were the first tentative steps towards Personalisation – Taken to Extremes, which I will discuss in my next week’s blog post.