Practical challenges

Tracking what children were doing was a challenge for the teachers in School A. They needed to make sure they were not just focusing on the students who were loudest, or not on task, but also those who were capable and got on with their work. Leader A explains, “Whereas you've got to train yourself that every child, deserves some part of your time. No matter how motivated, or highly skilled they are, they still need you and so that's a challenge” (Leader A, 2016). Teacher A agreed with Leader A and found tracking students programme participation difficult, especially those children who weren’t self-motivated, or found the environment and learning challenging. Teacher A explains:

For children that find learning difficult and find noise difficult and getting themselves organised difficult, you really have to still have them on your radar all the time, because in this big open space they just go, they're hiding. Which makes it a bit tricky. I actually have to mentally tell myself that I've got to check on these kids and find where they’re at, what they're doing each day. Otherwise they would just fall through the system. I find that these children the most difficult to keep track of because we move from group to group, and things are changing. And it's pretty dynamic. And these kids will then just I don't know. They just hide. They stay under your radar. (Teacher A, 2016)

Teacher A explained that to help track these students they implemented accountability systems where particular students had to show the teacher their work and had learning buddies, however there were not checklists to record when they attended workshops.

Working out how to track their students programme participation and progress was a challenge School C educators said they worked through and were always refining. As a result of working through these challenges School C was the only school who had tracked their students’ progress since before moving in to their new surroundings and

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implementing personalised learning. They were the only school who could show that the change to personalised learning made a significant positive difference to students’ achievement.

Teacher A shared concern about whether students with learning difficulties progressed in their innovative learning environment. Teacher A also found standardised testing a challenge, because standardised testing conflicted with their personalised learning focus which centred on goal setting and stated:

O for the assessment. I find that quite tricky sometimes because we're sort of all over the place and probably because I have been so used to doing the standardised type testing and now it's not really relevant and so it's hard for me to get my head around, well besides the whole school does standardised testing so we have too, but really I should be looking at the students’ goals. We should see whether students are moving on with their goals which is really more relevant to them with their personalised learning. (Teacher A, 2016)

Teacher A preferred to reflect on each students personal learning goals and assess how they were progressing with those, over standardised testing.

The challenges Teacher B experienced was around reporting to the National Standards. Teacher B shared how some students might not have been at the academic National Standard in a curriculum area, but had fantastic self-managing and relationship skills, which School B valued:

And that's the sad thing in a way, because a child could be really struggling in reading and hasn't met the national standard for maths. And yet gosh they can manage their time so well, and are beautifully collaborative and have got all those skills. So it's really difficult because our parents find it hard because we really try pushing the value in that, because they're the skills that make the whole person and help you to be successful. (Teacher B, 2016)

Part of the challenge for Teacher B was keeping parents informed about all aspects of personalised learning and aspects such as self-management which help contribute to student success.

School B had been operating for three years, the leader said that with a growing cohort, it had been difficult to determine what effect personalised learning had on

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student progress and achievement within their innovative learning environment, but did know that all students were making progress; some students thrived and some students found learning challenging; but all students liked going to school each day to learn. School B teacher explained how sometimes they could be quite disappointed in the students’ progress and sometimes expected more progress than occurred. Other times the students made “huge progress shifts”.

Timetabling was a challenge for all schools. School C educators found that extra activities which took away a class at a time and teacher release time (CRT) was a challenge fitting in to their timetable. Leader C explains:

You get school assembly, swimming and then Millennium wants to do swimming lessons with each class group which takes them out for a half hour over a day. And then you've got this collaborative learning practice and then you've got people who want to do CRT and it doesn't work. That timetabling has definitely been a challenge, still is. (Leader C, 2016)

The reason that timetabling was a challenge was because “traditional systems aren’t supporting what we’re doing now” (Leader C, 2016). Examples Leader C gave were, reporting to parents and the use of teacher release time.

Teacher B expressed a couple of teaching challenges. The first was how it was a challenge to find the balance between explicit teaching and responsive teaching:

I do feel like you have to get the balance right. So yes you can be responsive and yes you can follow children’s ideas and passions and yes, you know things might come up here and everywhere, but at the end of the day I've got to balance that with my explicit target teaching. (Teacher B, 2016)

The second teaching challenge Teacher B raised was in regards to there being at times a high demand on teachers. For example, Teacher B explained that the students made the biggest progress in reading when instead of sending printed books home, the teachers made personalised reading books for each child. This example brings to light Leader B’s concern about whether personalised learning can be sustained.

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Category three: Key findings

The key findings for the challenges that the educators faced within their Innovative Learning Environments related to coping with change and a practical challenge of timetabling.

The challenge talked about by all leaders was teacher resistance to a change in teaching pedagogy to personalised learning within an ILE. Teachers working with combined classes needed to collaborate to successfully work, which was a challenge because it required positive teacher relationships with a lot of communication via meetings, being organised, and compromise. Taking the leap to teach collaboratively was described as scary and one of the biggest initial challenges.

Practical challenges faced by schools was timetabling, whether this was balancing explicit and responsive teaching; working out how to fit outside programmes into their personalised programme; or class activities conflicting with other classes in regards to noise.