Resources

Merlin John

Ranvilles Infant School in Fareham, Hampshire, gained regional and national prominence for its pioneering work in using a learning platform with young children, and involving their parents, many of them serving in the Royal Navy, in their children’s school work. It was rewarded with an ICT Excellence Award for Extending Learning Opportunities from Becta in 2007.

The work was groundbreaking. Serving officers aboard ship could view their children’s work and activities via the internet, as well as directly support the curriculum – one geography project tracked parents’ ships. The technology that made it possible was a learning platform which Ranvilles was testing for Hampshire local authority.

Forums, quizzes and a wide range of online collaborative activities helped support children as self-directed learners. But the key lessons from Ranvilles transcend ICT and the infant age group too, and lie at the heart of learning - because Ranvilles’ quest had been to re-energise the curriculum, with the children at the centre. And it could not have achieved that without the children, rather than teachers, being responsible for personalising the learning. And the re-organisation would simply not have worked without the learning platform technology glue for the personalisation and the communications being in place. The two aspects were mutually dependent.

While the Ranvilles project was a whole-school enterprise under the leadership of headteacher Wendy Collins, classroom teacher Fiona Aubrey-Smith was at the heart of the project and made it the subject of her MA, entitled ‘How the implementation of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) can affect the strategic development of a whole school’. Now Fiona is Head of Education Vision with leading international learning platform company, UniServity, and she believes that the lessons from Ranvilles are both replicable and scalable.

Why learning platforms are essential for personalisation

Fiona’s learning journey with learning platforms started when she attended a briefing on personalised learning spaces hosted by the then Department for Education and Skills, Becta and the South East Grid for Learning. She says, “I thought, this sounds brilliant but what on earth has it to do with the 4 year-old children in my class, and how is it going to benefit their learning? Because if it’s not going to do that I am not going to engage with it.”

At that early stage not many people had answers to her questions, but they needed to find out too. She quickly started making enquiries with learning platform companies and observes: “It became apparent to me that all this great software was out there but none of it was in any way promoting the process of learning so much as replicating the process of delivering teaching, or ‘doing unto’ other people.”

“The solution pivots on the term ‘personalising’,” says Fiona. “If learning is going to be personalised it has to be personalised by the person doing the learning, rather than the person delivering the teaching.”

The school “took the bull by the horns” and decided to run a pilot for Hampshire using Fronter as its learning platform (the county now uses Studywiz for its primaries). “It didn’t matter which one,” says Fiona, “because none of them were good enough for the needs of our children. We were going to have a go and feed out what we learned. That was where the learning platform exploration started.”

Learners take the decisions and boost engagement

The next stage was to find out from the children what they wanted to learn and how. “For example, at the beginning of a half term we would start off with a key question, something broad like, ‘How do relationships with the people in our lives affect us?’ We would put these sorts of questions to the children in reception and Years 1 and 2 in ‘childspeak’ and help them to use the answers to plan the kind of activities and processes that would be needed to explore their questions.”

If teachers prompt children’s thinking carefully with open and searching questions, explains Fiona, the children themselves think with much greater depth about the topic in hand. “We all know that learning is far more effective when there is ownership over the content, yet we so easily get bogged down in superficial knowledge replication, rather than meaningful co-construction between learners.

“So often - and it infuriates me - people assume that children of this age are not able to address these sorts of things, but actually they get it spot on because they are not worried about the social parameters around which we are ‘supposed to’ answer questions and they, instead, answer the questions we are focused on.”

So, across Ranvilles Infant School, staff worked together to support children’s learning through half-termly learning journeys which were directly driven by the interests, needs and enquiries of the learners themselves. By careful ‘behind the scenes’ mapping of this coverage upon the National Curriculum, staff could ensure that children still benefitted from the statutory requirements.

Now the curriculum work could take off. Fiona gives the example of a project on the concept of fame. What makes people famous? How do they emerge as famous? The children defined the questions and the challenge was how to allow the different lines of enquiry that personalisation required. This is where the learning platform kicked in. “It also became apparent that the children needed a place to celebrate themselves,” says Fiona, “and to link into whatever they were doing collectively as a group, a class or a school. And that’s the point where the concept of an online personalised learning place came into its own.

“So the children were able to celebrate and showcase their achievements to people they wanted to show them to and get the feedback they were seeking. And they were able to link with other people, initially in their own class and in their own school, in order to help their own learning.”

This social nature of learning is at the core of all these solutions to everyday classroom challenges. “Learning is not something that happens in isolation,” adds Fiona. “It is not something which can be done without other people in some way being part of it. Therefore, we should embrace this and provide learners with safe environments within which to connect to other learners and other learning communities in order to exchange meaningful learning dialogue, to challenge each other, to celebrate with each other, but above all to learn from each other’s lives and experiences.”

The ‘virtual holiday’ children created for a staff member

Another example Fiona gives is of a constructed ‘problem’ of a staff member unable to go on a holiday to Kenya. As this staff member was known to the children, they wanted to provide her with the next best thing, and decided to create a ‘virtual holiday’ for her. The children carefully planned what kind of content this virtual holiday film would have, and what they needed to find out, learn and present in order to achieve this. Fiona explains: “The motivation and engagement with learning being driven this way far exceeds any traditionally organised project, simply because of who ‘owns’ the learning, and the purpose and social parameters of the learning.”

Now the learning platform could be used to track and organise their enquiries through forums; bringing the teacher back into a role of facilitating and extending learning rather than controlling content delivery. The ability to use audio for children who could not yet read and write was also key. One child would use Audacity software on the SMARTboard to capture questions, while another child would be the sound engineer who would drop them into the forums for further sharing. Teachers would also place learning resources in the system to support the learning, specifically to support children’s recorded enquiries.

“Because the teacher is not setting the agenda, the teacher can feed into what’s going on and aid the children to extract what they are searching for,” says Fiona. “They tease out what the children are looking for and facilitate learning rather than set an agenda – ie what they are going to teach that day. The children were so much more engaged in what they were doing. They took so much more ownership of what they were learning, and bear in mind that these examples were replicated across every subject area and age group.”

In addition, as a direct result of children’s increased engagement, parents, wider family and community became increasingly involved because children wanted to continue their investigations and explorations beyond the confines of the school walls and timetable. Through the learning platform, those supporting children out of school were able to keep up to date with exactly what they were learning, and facilitate further learning which naturally builds relationships and has a huge impact - a point which is amplified in the online video made by Becta to support the awards (see ‘useful links’).

The impact on standards was recorded “across the board”, and in their SATs too. “Everybody shifted up a level,” says Fiona, “and their achievements were higher. When we saw this impact that was the time I thought, ‘Yes, this really is beneficial.’”

Transformation extended beyond the classroom

It wasn’t just the curriculum that was transformed at Ranvilles, and Fiona had plenty of material for her MA. Relationships within school and between school and home were transformed too. “You are all learning together in a lifelong learning environment instead of just paying lip service to it,” she explains.

“We are all lifelong learners – every single day you will learn something from someone, somewhere, but we are often reluctant to acknowledge the challenges that learning causes us, and instead think of learning, particularly in the workplace, as ‘change’. However, step back for a moment, and consider how can you best support those learners that you are working with. Understand the process of learning by continuing to engage with learning yourself.”

In her new role, the strategic impact of using learning platforms, and the development of visions of learning, are Fiona’s everyday bread and butter. “It’s a much bigger thing than ICT,” she adds. “It’s about thinking about your vision for learning. That is a collective thing, with head, staff, parents and the community. So much of what we are trying to achieve for the next generation of learning will require a learning platform, VLE or whatever you want to call it, for facilitation. If you really seek a vision for Next Generation Learning, then I don’t think one – a vision for learning or a learning platform - is possible without the other.”

It was a natural move for Fiona to take her experience and insights on to a wider stage to help extend models of learning that she finds really exciting. She is also perfectly placed to help developers create products that are more appropriate for learning.

“The funny thing is that I have never had a clear idea of what I want to do eventually in life,” she says, “and I still don’t and I am glad of it. If you are doing something exciting, and can see the potential for something else exciting, then go with it because that is what I would want to promote for any learners I have the privilege to work with.

“Every learner (whether that be a child or adult) has the right to enjoy the best possible learning experiences, and should be supported to achieve their highest potential.”

Lifelong learning is the key for supporting all learners

Now Fiona works with schools, local authorities and ‘thought leaders’ to remodel what she terms “the next generation of learning” through the use of technology. She sees the benefits for learners – visual learners for example, who might have trouble with the written word – extending way beyond what was achieved at Ranvilles. And she is happiest working with local authority teams who are not ICT confident to discover new possibilities.

“We need to get beyond the learner in the classroom to teachers learning with each other, to management and leaders learning with each other, so the idea of a learner is no longer age-dependent. And people who are teachers and leaders have to remember they are learners and they have to learn too – if they are not learning they are not in tune with the changes and their practice is not changing either.

“The idea of moving things forward for the next generation of learning is not just at school level or at DCSF level, or government level, it’s personal to every single individual in terms of owning what they are doing. And it starts getting political with a little ‘p’ because you are empowering people.

“It all comes back to same point – put the learner first. And putting the learner first doesn’t mean disregarding control and teaching, and the ‘power struggle’ that people worry about. By asking learners what they want and giving them that – with safe parameters – the learners will engage and that makes teachers’ jobs a heck of a lot easier. And it works at every level. If you do that with your management approach, then you are going to have a happier workforce. If you do that in a community approach then you are going to have a happier community. It’s a much bigger thing than just a classroom. And it’s not as daunting as people think.”

So what would be her advice to those working towards transformation in education? “The overarching theme is who is the person who matters most? That’s simple - it’s the learner (of whatever age). Teachers have to ask the learners what they think and deliver that – the process will engage them more to achieve better outcomes. Listen to what learners say and act on it.” And teachers should also be regarded as learners, and their learning needs supported and provided for.

What would Fiona suggest as sources of inspiration for anyone wanting to bring about change with technology? She recommends tuning into some of the most insightful practitioners, like Tim Rylands and Alan November – “straightforward learning brought to life and extended by the ability to think forwards”.

However, her classroom experience has branded Fiona with an unshakable confidence in learners: “Inspiration comes from the children themselves. If every teacher went into their classroom tomorrow, picked any child, sat them down and asked them what they wanted to learn by the time they grew up, what they wanted to know, know how to do, how they wanted to learn, who they wanted to learn it with and really listened to what the children were saying, I would say that is the biggest inspiration. Because they really are the experts.”

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