Personalised Learning Reflection

Introduction and rational

I have been concerned with inclusive education and special educational needs (SEN) since childhood. Being taught in a world where nobody understood how my brain worked, where my differing developmental patterns were explained by labelling me as first ‘stupid’ and later ‘lazy’ made it difficult for me to view myself in any other way. I felt that as a child I was expected to somehow justify my difficulties, my behaviours, my brain, myself in a world of Adults who felt they knew better. It was in acquiring a new label that I found my freedom: Dyslexia, the solution to all these pressures, unfair expectation and beliefs in my abilities and motivations. Being diagnosed with dyslexia entitled me to support; it pointed …show more content…
I was determined to help students find their own strategies, personalised to their own individual brain function, to help them achieve their full potential. However whilst education policy, pedagogical literature and the general language of secondary mainstream education is full of phrases like ‘differentiation’ () and ‘personalised learning’ () I became concerned that the ability of teachers to deliver lessons that could be adapted to the individual needs of each student were greatly hindered by the workload and time constraints they currently face, with personalisation often equated to providing tasks that suit different learning styles such as auditory, kinaesthetic and visual () and differentiation reduced to setting different levels of achievements for some, most and all students to achieve (). The use of SEN registers, Statements of SEN and Education and Health Care Plans gave some information about students’ individual needs but where teachers had time to use this information the strategies offered where often generic and based on the student’s diagnostic label rather than any detailed study of how they learn best. …show more content…
While this will affect interpretations of social and educational concepts, I believe my suggested outcomes, as a facilitator of social praxis, will be useful without recourse to any particular ontology. I believe a historical analysis of the influence of psychological thinking in educational policy relating to Special Educational Needs will demonstrate an underlying belief in the medical model of disability (?) and the centrality of psychology and diagnostic labels to current SEN policy and the school economy (/). However studies of policy, whilst demonstrating the political climate (), may not accurately reflect what is happening within schools as it cannot explore how successful implementation of these policies has been or the extent of resistance demonstrated (). The main focus of my essay will be a theoretical discussion of the effects of diagnostic labels on identity and inclusion. This discussion will draw from conceptual arguments formed from observations and anecdotal evidence to explore how labels impact at school level. This type of data can in some cases be unrepresentative, where only data that fits the argument has been included (), or subject to cognitive bias (). Therefore I will draw from a wide range of researchers to limit these effects