We obviously do the initial assessment - the one I gave them this morning when they first came in - and we look at that and we see what’s needed if they have anything that’s specific, that’s maybe different to what the rest of the group could benefit from. And if it’s something that is only particular to them, then I will do the one-on-one with them to try and get them up to speed. If it’s something that a lot of people have a problem with, then I can introduce it into what we do in our weekly and daily classes, so we put that in. And we interview them once every three weeks and chart their progress and compare it to where they were at last time we interviewed them and what’s been achieved since. That includes things like they will ask specific things, metrics or percentages they may have just come across percentages, so we would do some work on percentages and often it covers not just that student, we can introduce different things to everybody. We ask if there is anything they would like introduced into their programme or other programmes that they would like to learn because there is a lot of people advertising with those skills or whether it’s just that they want to brush up on their skills.
In one session, the teacher and her student agreed that he had now mastered long division and he said (with great satisfaction) “you can say that process is in there now eh?” adding that “I won’t be needing to do that again ‘cause that’s about as far we were going to go eh?“ [referring to his ILP]
One teacher emphasised the importance of convincing her students that the ILP was their document, rather than the teacher’s.
My aim there is to push the students to think about their own learning and to think about owning their own learning. So I always try to get them to think that they’re not doing it for me, that learning is for them and they have to be thinking about what happens outside that room, you know so that when they go home, what are they doing in their own lives to carry on with it.
Several teachers said that their students had ILPs, but that they did not have access to them or use them directly for teaching purposes.
I don’t use them much, I know we have them, I’ve seen them, but I think they’re just more for when ... do you know [name] over at the office? She sort of, comes over, and she comes over and does the interviews, I think she uses them then.
We observed one class teacher incorporating ILPs into her teaching sessions by asking the students to review their goals for the past week and then writing out a new set for the coming week. While they were doing this exercise, the teacher roved the room, checking with individuals and helping them to refine their goals. Learner feedback from this venue indicated that the learners did not believe this process was useful.
Another teacher who used ILPs said that she felt that she needed to be more specific in both her analysis of learning needs and the goals she set with her learner. She felt that this change would help give better focus to her planning and teaching.
There were a number of instances where the interaction in the class generated ‘teaching moments’ where the teacher could utilise the opportunity to focus the teaching on a specific learning need or interest.