Getting personal

In adult learning, good practice is learner-centred and personalised. When it comes to planning learning and reviewing progress, learner-centred means opening up the process so that learners play an active role in shaping what they learn and how they are assessed.

What's in it for you?

Personalised planning and reviewing provides you with an effective way of managing and facilitating the learning process so that it meets learners' needs and leads to high levels of learner satisfaction. But do be realistic. Bear in mind your own skills and the resources available to you.

What's in it for learners?

For many adult learners, a personalised approach is motivating because it places them centre stage in their own learning. They can:

  • say what their priorities are
  • take some responsibility for their own rate of progress
  • understand how they learn best and what works for them
  • make best use of the time they have available for study
  • see the distance travelled over a given period of time, and what their achievements are; and
  • be alerted to possible next steps.

Personalised planning and review reduces the likelihood of learners:

  • repeating things they can do already
  • feeling that their most pressing concerns are not being met
  • feeling dissatisfied with their rate of progress
  • having a sense of falling behind others in their group, and not knowing what to do about it; and
  • not realising how well they're doing and missing opportunities to move on.

Bear in mind, though, that some learners may initially feel more comfortable being told what is available to them.

Some examples of what can happen when tutors and learners don't discuss personal learning plans.

If you are a Subject Learning Coach you may like to use these examples to help your colleagues think about planning programmes to meet individual needs interests.

We kept doing stuff about wine and tapas: whereas, personally, I wanted to get on and learn about Spain's interaction with the Islamic world.

Tasleem, learner, Spanish.

We moved house a few times because of my work, but I was still keen to learn IT and kept enrolling at my local centre. The three tutors I had in different parts of town all had very different approaches, but none of them ever asked me what I could do already. I felt I wasn't getting on quickly enough and in the end I gave up.

Dennis, learner, IT.

I'm a furniture-maker by trade. Carpentry's my thing. I wanted to develop some ideas from the Arts and Crafts movement and give them a contemporary spin. I wanted to learn how you could design and make ceramic tiles that you could insert into timber surfaces. But the tutor had other ideas. Obviously she had other people to deal with and she had to teach us some basic techniques to start with. But by the time it got to the third term and I was making a lasagne dish my patience was starting to wear thin.

Bernie, learner, Pottery.