Over the past few months my own understanding of what “personalized learning” means has been evolving and coming into focus. At this point I see three main ways that personalized learning is coming to be realized in my school based on my own learning, our staff’s collaborative learning, and best practices that have been identified as priorities for our district. Here they are:
1. Personalized discipline – It’s been clear to me for a while that simplistic consequences (punishment) and rewards for behaviour that are applied across the board in the same way to all students, are not effective. I’ve been using the Collaborative Problem Solving approach for several years and recently read an Edutopia article entitled “Fair Isn’t Always Equal” by Dr. Richard Curwin that gave me the “aha” moment that this is a form of personalized learning. By using this approach to listen to children about their own understanding of what is causing their challenging behaviour, and by pinpointing and prioritizing the lagging skills and unsolved problems, we can customize the learning process and provide supports to help students overcome them.
2. Personalized support – This year our staff at school has been digging more deeply into the concept of universal design for learning. This idea, born out of designing adaptations in our environment for people with disabilities, looks at ways to ensure access to learning for students with all kinds of learning differences. This also includes tiers of intervention where supports are provided to scaffold learning for all students, to intervene in a targeted way for students with greater needs, and intensive support for students with significant challenges. Again, we are moving away from an exclusionary model where students leave the classroom to get support and are essentially labelled as an “LST student” for their school career, to using specific pre and post-assessments along with short-term, intensive interventions to bring students’ skills to a level where they can fully participate in the regular classroom.
3. Personalized learning – I keep coming back to Jordan Tinney’s description, in one of our administrators’ meetings, of personalized learning as learning that we take personally – essentially, that students have some emotional connection to. In order for that to happen, teachers must use the best practices in backwards design, pre-assessment, student choice and differentiation. These practices are tied in with universal design where learning plans are created with student needs in mind from the outset.
None of these ideas are “new” or “something extra” for teachers to implement. They stem from a mindset of teachers and school staff that each student is unique and individual and deserves to have their interests and needs respected. I feel it is actually unethical to know what a student requires to learn, and not to provide it. By personalizing the experience of school we are not saying that teachers must plan 30 different programs for 30 students, but rather to recognize and act on what individual students need to access and be successfully engaged in the educational program designed by the teacher.
Learning for life 