Why do teachers implement personalized learning? At a glance, personalized learning sounds like an obviously great idea. Parents want their children to receive personalized instruction throughout the school day. Teachers want to be able to respond effectively to individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. Students want their learning to be relevant to their lives. However, the reality of implementation poses a seemingly insurmountable challenge given schools’ limited time and resources. During our research for The Shifting Paradigm of Teaching: Personalized Learning According to Teachers, we spoke with teachers leading personalized learning transitions in their schools and districts. Here are some of the reasons that teachers committed to the challenge of personalized learning: Personalized learning is simply what is best for kids. For those reasons, and many more, teachers put themselves back in the shoes of a first year teacher as they re-learned how to best meet students’ needs. Written by: Sarah Jenkins
Personalizing the Learning Experience: New Insights from Future Ready Schools – Medium When done well, personalized learning has the potential to radically transform how we teach and learn and how we create more equitable opportunities for students. In the 2016 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), our flagship policy document for educational technology, the U.S. Department Education defines personalized learning: Personalized learning refers to instruction in which the pace of learning and the instructional approach are optimized for the needs of each learner. On Monday, September 12, we are supporting the White House Next Generation High Schools Summit in bringing together six states and more than 20 school districts to commit to redesigning their high schools. Also, as part of the Education Secretary’s 2016 Opportunity Across America Bus tour, on Tuesday, September 13, we are hosting ConnectED Day to celebrate the three-year anniversary of President Obama’s ConnectED initiative and the two-year anniversary of Future Ready.
Four Reasons to Worry About "Personalized Learning" Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”[1] A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.” A suffix can change everything.
Updated Personalization vs. Differentiation vs. Individualization Chart Version 3 Personalization v Differentiation v Individualization (PDI) Chart (Version 3) The PDI chart was created for a reason: to clarify the differences in these terms. In 2010, the National Ed Tech Plan defined all three of these terms as they are related to instruction. We needed to emphasize the differences: Personalization is learner-centered. It has been some time since we initially published the PDI Chart in January 2012. We updated the chart again to version 3 from your feedback. Individualization involves assessment OF learning.
Personalized Data Units or Personal Learning? – Education Reform – Medium “The assumption here is that curriculum can be broken into little pieces, that skills are acquired sequentially and can be assessed with discrete, contrived tests and reductive rubrics. Tracking kids’ “progress” with digital profiles and predictive algorithms paints a 21st-century gloss on a very-early-20th-century theory of learning.” – Alfie Kohn The semantics of school reform are sometimes deceptive. This is apparent when educators talk about “personalized learning”. Personalized Learning is an attractive proposition that is, in an increasingly number of instances, ironically characterized by an absence of the “personal”. “I’m taken aback by some of the highly packaged ‘’personalized’’ learning systems now being developed …. There’s an oft-quoted, dismissive description of what social scientists do that goes along the mocking lines of, “if it moves, measure it”. We have noted in these first months of the program that there are several spin-off benefits of this work. Like this:
Ten Tips for Engaging the Millennial Learner and Moving an Emergency Medicine Residency Curriculum into the 21st Century What personalized learning in the classrooms look like with creative teaching methods? They need a different perspective on education, with an instructional support providing subject matter mastery. The ultimate solution to this is “personalized learning in the classrooms”. We all might have heard the term “personalized learning”. But little we know about the benefits and implementation. So, let’s have a tour of the personalized learning enabled classroom. What are the best attributes of every personalized learning classroom? Personalized learning has several models and each model has its own set of characteristics. Student-centered learning In a personalized learning classroom, students are the sole owner of their way of learning. Competency-based progression Personalized learning focuses on understanding the concepts rather than the test scores. Students set the pace The flexibility of personalized learning allows students to decide their own momentum. Anytime, anywhere learning Students can learn inside and outside the classrooms and schools. Personalized learning models:
3 Areas Where Having “The Innovator’s Mindset” is Crucial – The Principal of Change As I have contended for years, “Innovation” is about mindset, not skill set. How we look at the world, is how we move forward, learn, and create. In my book, “The Innovator’s Mindset“, I defined it as the following: “Belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents are developed so that they lead to the creation of new and better ideas.” Yet the term “innovation”, has often been equated with either technology or directly with business. Although this image is no longer being used, I still see it as very relevant graphic to many things we are trying to do to school today. I wanted to talk about each “E” individually and what their connections are to the characteristics of “The Innovator’s Mindset”, and how this is crucial to our thinking in education today. (The definitions of each of the three “Es” in italics under each area are from the Peace Wapiti Public School Division website.) Entrepreneurial Spirit Yet our notion of “creation” is changing. Critical Questions Moving Forward
Stop Trying to Define Personalized Learning No. No we don’t. While personalized learning (PL) may be a “thing,” it is not a thing. As of today, PL is a set of loosely-related (sometimes completely unrelated) hypotheses. Educators, families and funders are testing to see if we can do better than the traditional classroom model of putting 20-30 similarly-aged students in a room with one adult for about an hour. Defining personalized learning gives the illusion that we know what works. Defining personalize learning can also harm creativity. If you hear a school say, “Just tell me what to do,” run for the hills. Instead of parsing definitions, I find it useful to think about personalized learning in terms of the big problems schools are trying to solve. For example... Hypothesis: Adults can provide more individualized attention to students. Let’s assume a class has 1 teacher, 24 students and 60 minutes before the bell rings. A teacher can spend all 60 minutes talking to the whole group of 24 students.
The Next Generation of (Personalized) Learning We all want our children to receive the best education possible. One of the key questions we’re interested in answering, as a foundation, is “what does high-quality instruction look like in U.S. schools?” And one way we’re looking at answering that question is by looking at the potential of what the foundation calls personalized learning for students. Before we delve into what this looks like for our students, we’ve got to provide some basis for why it’s so critical. Did you know that less than half of the 2012 graduating class that took the ACT college entrance exam scored at the level that predicts earning a “C” or better in math as freshman in college? Sixty years is too long. For more than 150 years, the system has been organized around the idea that students of similar ages should move along together, through the same material, at roughly the same pace. We can all agree that students are individuals with different interests and learning needs.
Special Report: Personalized Learning: The Next Generation The push to design teaching and learning around students’ distinctive academic needs, and even their personal interests, is no longer only happening in pockets of experimentation around the country. This trend has now entered the K-12 mainstream and its expansion is quickening. But the challenges ahead for the next generation of personalized learning initiatives are significant. The evolution of personalized learning in recent years has led to a growing body of data from school systems that have had initiatives in place for at least a few years. October 19, 2016 – Education Week Personalized learning is not sweeping through schools, as some would have you believe. The Henry County, Ga., school system refashioned its personalized learning strategy after determining the original plan was overly fixated on the use of technology. The U.S. The deputy director of the NGLC talks about how personalized learning has evolved and what looms ahead for districts pursuing this approach.