This qualitative study addresses an initiative of personalized learning among gifted students in Kazakhstan. With the diverse conceptions to identifying the gifted and catering for their needs globally and across Europe, it is important to investigate new school practices and pedagogies, and the possible impacts they have on student learning and school communities.

Educating the gifted has been given proper support in many European countries at the end of the twentieth century; still, many countries differ in their approaches to gifted education on legislative and practical levels (Mönks & Pflüger, 2005). The European context is not extensively covered in the specialised journals of the field. According to the bibliometric study of gifted education journals on the state and development of research in gifted education over 60 years, Europe is presented in the list of countries producing the publications on giftedness with only Germany and the United Kingdom, together accounting for 9% of the publications in the specialised English-language journals (Hernández-Torrano & Kuzhabekova, 2019).

Kazakhstan, the largest economy of the Central Asian region, has recently placed gifted education as a vehicle for improving the competitiveness of education, developing national human capital, and reforming society (Yakavets, 2014). According to teachers’ beliefs, one of the main objectives of gifted education in Kazakhstan remains the capitalization of the superior abilities of gifted students for the good of the whole society and increased progress, as it was traditionally in the Soviet education system (Grigorenko, 2000). Also, the institutional tradition of segregated special provision for exceptional children and adolescents is inherited from the Soviet education system (Rouse, Yakavets, & Kulakhmetova, 2014). However, considerably more attention is being paid to students’ personal development and growth in the context of modern Kazakhstan (Hernández-Torrano, Tursunbayeva, & Almukhambetova, 2019). Lately, there is a tendency in the Kazakhstani society to view gifted education as a means of providing the conducive environment to academically under-challenged students address their special educational needs and realise their full potential.

Personalised learning is an approach to education that seeks to allow what and how a student learns on a daily basis to be less constrained by the needs of other students or by external grade-level requirements. Instruction is driven largely by the individual student’s needs, interests, and context, and is informed by ongoing conversations with the student and the adults in his or her life (Childress & Benson, 2014; Pane et al., 2017), which empowers students as ‘co-producers of education’ (Miliband, 2006). It is especially relevant for gifted students who need an enriched environment and inquiry-based curriculum to keep develop their capacities and promote learning in multiple modalities (VanTassel-Baska & Brown, 2007). Crucially, teachers can motivate children and create the conditions for collaborative learning (Järvelä, 2006; Tomlinson & Allan, 2000; Weidmann & Deming, 2020)

In 2019-2020 academic year, Nazarbayev Intellectual schools (NIS), a countrywide network of schools for gifted children, launched the practice of personalised learning along with its traditional curriculum. This was the schools’ response to the changing agenda in education, the need for curriculum evolvement, and customizing to the needs of students.

The purpose of this paper is to study different stakeholders’ perspectives and experiences pertaining to personalised learning. To achieve this, the paper asks the following questions:

1)    What are teachers and students’ experiences and parents’ beliefs about personalised learning?

2)    What are the benefits and challenges of implementing personalised instruction at school?

3)    What recommendations can be drawn to make personalised learning a successful experience for all stakeholders at school?

The study can contribute to the research of gifted education and innovative curriculum in Post-Soviet and European countries, or elsewhere. 

To answer the research questions, qualitative research has been carried out. There were several perspectives under investigation: teachers, students and parents’ views at personalised learning. In February 2020, qualitative data were collected in 10 Intellectual schools. Purposeful convenience sampling was implemented to recruit the participants (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2011). Overall, 62 teachers of different subjects, 61 students of Grades 8-10 and 26 parents participated in individual interviews and focus groups. The semi-structured interviews and focus groups were used to explore stakeholders’ experience in terms of how they understood personalised learning and how learning and teaching changed within it. Thus, teachers were asked about the challenges they faced with each of two models of personalised learning, how they coped with lesson planning and tailoring their instruction according to the needs of an individual student. Also, teachers commented on the curriculum strong and weak points, assessment processes, teaching methods, and support provided to them. Students shared their understanding of how successful learning should be organized and what did not work for them as it was expected. Students who dropped out of the personalised learning programme and returned to the regular NIS-Programme were interviewed individually to scrutinize each case in detail. Additionally, students’ parents were addressed upon their availability to talk about their children’s off-school life, their physical and mental health, motivation and other issues. All groups of participants were asked about their views regarding the benefits and potential risks of the experimental programme. All interviews and focus groups were conducted in the Kazakh and Russian languages and tape-recorded upon participants’ consent. Totally, the recorded qualitative material was 13 hours 40 minutes long. Further, audio files were transcribed, Kazakh interviews translated into Russian to facilitate data analysis. The data was processed using thematic analysis techniques (Braun & Clarke, 2006) through NVivo 12 Plus software. The inductive analysis produced 19 sub-themes that were grouped around six major themes: conceptualization and implementation of personalised learning; benefits, challenges, and risks of the programme; and recommendations for improvement.

This qualitative research was conducted to explore the perspectives of NIS teachers, students, and their parents regarding their first-year experience of personalised learning. Based on the study of the implementation process of personalised learning at NIS, the decision was made to extend the number of students enrolling into this programme and to expand the number of subjects that students can take for personalised learning. This will facilitate more flexible pacing to a bigger number of children and make the learning environment more vibrant, competitive, engaging, and thus, motivating. Increasing the number of students in the programme will also contribute to promoting communication and facilitate cooperation and teamwork (Weidmann and Deming, 2020), which will mitigate the risk of raising individualists unable to share responsibility, collaborate and hear other people. Based on the analysis, the advantages and challenges of the personalised learning programme were explored and recommendations for improvement provided. The research findings are expected to contribute to the development of the personalised learning framework in Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools which practice can be further disseminated. More research is needed on how personalised learning is implemented within the Covid-19 conditions.

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