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AuthorDr Nina HoodCategoriesTeaching
Personal development: Not just for tutorials and student services
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Date5th Dec 2022AuthorSteven TuckerCategoriesTeaching
‘Personal development’ is not usually foremost in teachers’ minds when planning a ‘subject curriculum.’ (I’m going to use this phrase as shorthand for curriculum that delivers the knowledge for a specific vocational or academic discipline). In curriculum terms, it is instead often the responsibility of a tutorial team to plan a programme that broadly covers personal development. This frequently consists of Prevent, British values, preparation for next steps, and health and well-being. The transformative possibilities of including aspects of personal development within subject curricula are too often overlooked.
I would argue that a whole-college approach that integrates the knowledge components of personal development into subject curricula can be instrumental in the academic and personal progress students make.
What do we mean by ‘personal development’? Broadly, it covers four areas of knowledge:
- Citizenship: the active role young people can play in society, the values of our society, and the judicial and democratic structures that sustain these.
- Character: positive personal traits and qualities that allow a young person to flourish.
- Well-being: looking after yourself, physically and mentally.
- Careers education and preparation for next steps.
Any curriculum starts with a decision about what knowledge and skills a student needs to learn. And a tutorial programme IS a curriculum. An ambitious curriculum builds on prior learning, provides new, valuable knowledge, is taught using methods that embed that knowledge in students’ long-term memories, and is linked to other learning. Unfortunately, too many tutorial programmes do not follow these principles. Daniel Willingham refers to memory as ‘the residue of thought’ in his influential book Why Don’t Students Like School?. If tutorial topics do not make students think, it is not surprising that they often may remember ‘doing’ a topic, but cannot remember much about it. Can you imagine that being acceptable in a subject curriculum?
A way of raising the value of topics taught in the tutorial curriculum is to use it as a foundation to be expanded on, where relevant, in subject curricula. Each of the four categories of personal development outlined above includes knowledge components that can also be found in subject curricula. Of course, the importance and interpretation of this knowledge varies in different subjects. For example, a teacher of A-level history and another who teaches level 3 uniform public services could readily explain how they teach ‘democracy’, even though the content each describes will differ considerably.
So I am not arguing for colleges to abandon group tutorials. It is unlikely that every knowledge component of an ambitious personal development curriculum can be taught thoroughly through subject curricula. Some aspects of personal development cut across subjects. They lie at the heart of helping students to be effective learners and guiding them on their journey to adulthood. They need a holistic approach. This means that a cross-college curriculum should develop the minimum level of knowledge for each component of personal development. The added value of subject curricula is in the opportunities they provide for students to revisit what they have learnt in tutorials, and to extend their knowledge through subject-based discourse.
A powerful example of this is the college’s provision for teaching students how to be successful, independent learners - often by developing students’ cognition and metacognition. Brief definitions are always tricky, but let’s take cognition to ‘encompass the mental functions by which knowledge is acquired, retained, and used’ (Kihlstrom, 2018) and metacognition to refer to how an individual understands and controls their cognition. Most teachers teach these to some extent: for example, through techniques for revision, studying and carrying out research. But this teaching is often highly subject-specific and detached from how the same skills are taught in other subjects, so students may be exposed to a range of techniques from different teachers without also receiving explicit guidance on applying these across a range of subjects.
Ambitious college leaders can set high expectations by establishing, across subject and tutorial curricula, a coherent approach to cognitive and metacognitive development. With this holistic approach the chances of students learning, practising, and becoming fluent in these skills increases. There is not a single model for every student, since any cross-college approach needs to recognise the disciplinary variations dictated by their subject choices, the varying needs of students at different levels and qualification types, and the wide range of students’ prior experiences (amplified, of course, by their disrupted education over the pandemic).
Developing a whole-college approach to personal development has to involve a hard look at the aspirations a college has for its students and how these are expressed through the values and culture of the college. As colleges move on from the crises of the pandemic, maybe now would be a good time to start a whole-college discussion about how the personal development of students is represented in the aspirations the college has for them, and whether there are further opportunities for subject curricula to play a full part in helping students achieve these.
Steven Tucker is a consultant in the further education and skill sector, with a background as a teacher and leader in an FE college. You can find him on LinkedIn here.
References
Kilhstrom, J. F., 2008. Unconscious Cognition, Elsevier Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology [online]. Available from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128093245218609[Accessed 5 December 2022].