Education Week - October 22, 2014 - Special Report - S4

S4 |
EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 22, 2014
n
Taking Stock of Personalized Learning > www.edweek.org/go/personalized
CONTINUED FROM PAGE S2
for struggling students, and for new
teachers.
One session said that personalized
learning is tied to a "culture shift"
within schools, while another described
the "perfect storm of personalized
learning."
But the prevailing enthusiasm for
personalized learning has obscured
a fundamental question: How should
it be defined?
Personalizing learning, in some
respects, is an age-old concept. For
generations, teachers have sought to
craft instruction to meet individual
student needs-a manageable challenge
when working with a relatively
small group, but much more difficult
for a class of 20 to 30 students.
Personalized learning in today's
schools essentially amounts to the
"differentiation" of lessons for students
of different skill levels, or efforts
to help students move at their
own pace, said Susan D. Patrick, the
executive director of the International
Association for K-12 Online
Learning, or inacol, a nonprofit advocacy
group based in Vienna, Va.
But she added that personalized
learning must also promote "student
agency"-basically, giving students
more power through either digital
tools or other means, accounting for
how they learn best, what motivates
them, and their academic goals. The
most effective digital
tools support that purpose,
she said.
"Technology can help
provide students with
more choices on how
they're going to learn
a lesson," Ms. Patrick
said. "[It] empowers
teachers in personalizing
learning" and
"empowers students
through their own exercise
of choice."
Essential Elements
"
Nothing
replaces the
teacher, and [a] teacher's
ability to know a student
and what they need. You can't
get that from a piece of
software."
Four years ago, a trio of
organizations-the Software
& Information Industry Association,
a Washington based trade organization;
the ascd, a nonprofit focused
on curriculum development; and the
Council of Chief State School Officers-came
together for a symposium
and produced 10 "essential elements"
and "policy enablers" for personalized
learning.
Their definition emphasizes projectbased
learning, and more flexibility for
students to set their learning paths,
among other goals. An overwhelming
majority of the symposium's attendees
said technology played a key role
in personalized learning; the essential
elements also emphasized the importance
of providing equal access to
technology.
Too Many Systems?
Bring it all together with Engrade.
PLAN
TEACH
ASSESS
ANALYZE CONNECT
This year, in an
effort to provide
clearer direction
for K-12 officials
and others, inacol,
along with a group of
philanthropies, nonprofits, and
technology advocacy organizations,
created a "working definition of personalized
learning."
That definition, crafted by organizaUse
Engrade® to unify the curriculum content,
assessments, data, and classroom tools you already have.
Connect teachers, administrators, students, and parents
to help improve student outcomes.
And simplify your life.
tions that included the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, the Michael and
Susan Dell Foundation, and EDUCAUSE,
rests on four pillars. (Education
Week receives support from the
Gates Foundation for its coverage of
college- and career-ready standards.)
Each student should have a "learner
profile," or a record documenting
his or her academic strengths and
weaknesses, motivations, and goals;
students should have personal learning
paths that encourage them to set
and manage their individual academic
goals; students should follow
a "competency-based progression"
through topics; and their learning environments-in
most cases, schools-
should be flexible and structured
in a way to support their goals. (See
graphic, Page S3.)
Those pillars have been integrated
into the request for proposals crafted
by the Next Generation Learning
Challenges, a grant program created
in 2010 that pays for technologybased
efforts in schools that promote
preparation for, and completion of,
postsecondary education.
Building Student Ownership
True personalized learning calls for
a "rethinking and redesign" of schools,
which could require them to overhaul
classroom structures and schedules,
curricula, and the instructional approaches
of teachers, Mr. Calkins of
educause argued. For instance, in an
effective personalized learning model,
teachers' roles are more like those of
coaches or facilitators than "content
providers," he said.
Learn more at
Engrade.com/EW
Copyright © 2014 by CTB/McGraw-Hill LLC. All right reserved.
Engrade is a registered trademark of McGraw-Hill School Education Holdings, LLC.
Many of the projects financed
through the learning-challenges
grants aspire to that goal, though
there's certainly room for schools to
integrate personalized approaches
more slowly, he said.
In Wisconsin, the Kettle Moraine
school system's foray into personalized
learning has been ambitious,
but also deliberate.
The 4,000-student district,
located in the suburbs west of
Milwaukee, has been a highperforming
system for years.
But district leaders became
concerned that students
were more focused on completing
academic tasks than
on setting their own learning
goals, recalled Theresa Ewald,
the assistant superintendent for
THERESA EWALD
Assistant Superintendent
for Teaching and Learning
Kettle Moraine, Wis.,
School District
teaching and learning.
"We were looking at ways
of transferring the ownership
of learning from
teachers to students,"
Ms. Ewald said.
In 2005, the school
board challenged the
district's administration
to "transform the educational
delivery system" to
better meet students' needs.
The district eventually put personalized
learning at the heart of that
change.
Today, personalized learning comes
in many forms in Kettle Moraine.
The district has created interdisciplinary
pathways for students, in
areas such as advanced manufacturing,
and it has given individual
teachers greater flexibility to use
lessons and digital tools as they see
fit to promote student learning.
Yet, unlike many districts that
have put personalized learning programs
in place, Kettle Moraine decided
not to invest heavily in digital
devices to build a 1-to-1 computing
environment. Instead, it relies on a
bring-your-own-device program, and
it has used Google systems for distributing
assignments, scheduling,
and communication between staff
and students. In most cases, technology
is used to support personalized
learning, though it is not always the
essential piece, district officials emphasized.
As
its academic strategies have
drawn attention, Kettle Moraine
has been flooded with inquiries from
vendors touting their own brands
of personalized learning. Many of
them fall short, either because they
try to do too much or cost too much,
Ms. Ewald said. Others focus primarily
on customizing lessons to
students' ability levels-which Ms.
Ewald agrees is a part of personalized
learning-but they don't offer
a diversity of approaches for how a
student experiences a topic, such as
by engaging with it visually versus
reading about it.
Ultimately, those tools have to
mesh with the work of classroom
teachers, who are making their own
judgments about what's working in
their classes, Ms. Ewald said.
"Nothing replaces the teacher, and
[a] teacher's ability to know a student
and what they need," she said.
"You can't get that from a piece of
software." l
http://www.edweek.org/go/personalized http://www.Engrade.com/EW http://www.Engrade.com/EW http://www.Engrade.com/EW
Education Week - October 22, 2014 - Special Report

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - October 22, 2014 - Special Report
