Personalizing Schools

Derek Wise uses Personalizing Learning to offer schools a unique approach for schools who wish to make their students truly independent learners. Personalized Learning and Personalization are not the same. There is increasing evidence that disaffected students are not disaffected from learning but are disaffected from school with its rules, codes and systems. Currently many students see schooling as something done to them, to be got through and endured. Schooling is by definition an accommodation of the individual to the demands of the community and learners find they often have no say over its goals and values and means of delivery. This contrasts sharply with the personal choices and freedoms they enjoy outside school. Technology has opened their eyes to an exciting new world in which they can participate and exercise a degree of control. This book addresses these problems and shows how schools can move to a situation where their students are active participants rather than passive consumers, able to learn, unlearn and relearn so that they are independent learners. In essence, they become capable of designing, producing and creating their own learning.
"The Future Schools" series explores the ways in which schools' needs for the future are differing from the traditional, largely Victorian approach still adopted by the majority of British schools today. The series focuses on innovation in schools, both in terms of the school environment and pedagogical approach. A major factor in this is the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, which is the biggest single UK government investment in improving school buildings for over 50 years. The aim is to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England over a 10-15 year period. This includes significant investment in ICT to support the government's educational reform agenda. As well as improving school buildings, the aim of the agenda is to promote a step-change in the quality of provision. Schools are starting to follow a range of innovative practice in terms of their links with communities around them, as part of the Every Child Matters and extended schools agenda, their structure and organisation and, not least, the organisation and approach of the leadership and senior management team.
Books in this series will provide either an overview of transformation with specific case studies from around the UK and worldwide, or focus more specifically on one or a small collection of schools to show examples of good practice at a local community level.