How Do You Personalize Learning At Your School?
Personalized learning has perhaps been one of the hottest trends
in education, especially in the past two to three years. In an article earlier
this school year, Education Week developed a good working
definition for personalized learning. In it, they
talked about the need for a system with a competency-based progression, one
where each student’s progress toward clearly-defined learning targets is
assessed on a regular basis. The system must include flexible learning
environments that allow the system to adapt to the individual needs of each
learner on an ongoing basis, one with personalized learning paths. It also
talked about the need for such a system to maintain accurate individual learner
profiles, ones for which students can view their strengths, needs, motivations,
and goals.
On New Year’s Day, the blog Personalize
Learning: Transform Learning for All Learners
challenged educators to make 2015 the year of the learner by posting an infographic
on the 10 Trends to Personalize Learning in 2015.
It challenged schools to develop systems that have shared beliefs, and are both
competency-based and self-sustainable. Such systems, it suggested, should
foster flexible learning spaces, multi-age co-teaching, inquire-based
project-based learning, play-based learning, assessment as learning, better
teacher and learner partnerships, and advisories.
According to Daniel Greenstein and Vicki Phillips, in a recent
Bill and Melina Gates Foundation article entitled 5
Things You Should Know About Personalized Learning
for the blog Impatient
Optimists,
“Learning becomes even more
powerful when it’s personalized to each student’s needs, interests, and
circumstances.” Greenstein and Phillips reminded educators not to forget that
in an effective personalized learning system, students are always at the
center, and this is true of students all the way from Kindergarten through
college. They stressed that personalized learning it is not a new concept, but
that increasingly powerful technology tools can help teachers teach to the
strengths and interests of each student in ways that they have never been able
to do before.
Writer Jordan Shapiro, in an
opinion article entitled Remember, Ed-tech is Really a Tool for Teachers, stressed that technology will never play the
role of a robotic teacher, replacing the teaching role that humans have served
for countless generations. The technology tools of today have been built to
help teachers be adaptive to meet the needs of all learners. He writes, “Consider how technology might minimize the difficulty
involved in juggling specific and personalized contextual preferences in a
classroom of 25 kids by identifying individualized learning objectives on a
daily basis, imagining useful measurements of incremental achievement,
continuously monitoring for mastery, and constantly undertaking ongoing
formative and substantive assessments. In the traditional classroom, all of
this is happening on-the-fly while five-year-olds dance around the room
building with blocks and singing at the top of their lungs. It is not easy.”
Grace Rubenstein of Edutopia offers ten tips for personalized learning via technology. Included in her list are some great strategies such
as delivering instruction through multiple forms of media, giving students
options, pretesting students’ knowledge before each unit, let students drive,
and share the work of creating differentiating lessons.
Personalized learning has the power to revolutionize
how we approach learning in the coming years. What is your school doing to
personalize learning today?
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