We know what you’re thinking—you don’t need to hear about another EdTech-related trend for a while. Personalized education has become more than just a trend in our education systems, however. When teachers provide students with content and approaches that suit them best, students often find success more easy to attain and the process of attaining it to be more enjoyable.
Transforming Education through Personalized Learning
Most school districts across the country are made up of thousands and thousands of students. Even with the technology tools available, you might be wondering how on Earth teachers would be able to provide each and every one of them with a meaningful personalized learning experience. Obviously, there is no way they would be able to sit down with every child every day and give them a specially created lesson. Not to mention, no teacher would have nearly enough time to create all of those lesson plans. Personalized learning is extremely effective, however, so long as teachers go about it the right way. It’s important for them to know which students would benefit from personalization, which ones need it and which can learn effectively without any additional attention.
Once they have identified the students who would benefit from personalized learning, teachers can begin developing a plan to deliver it. They’ll be relieved to realize that they’re not creating plans for 100 different students—it might be around eight or 10. These plans should involve attainable goals that detail how the teacher intends to push unique materials to these selected student groups, how they will provide them with usable feedback on assignments and how they will monitor the needs of these students for the remainder of the school year. One thing about personalized learning is that it’s almost a requirement that teachers make real-time adjustments in order to use it effectively. Curriculum is often available on an interactive Web platform these days, so teachers can create their custom plans for their students and make adjustments when the intensity of these plans needs to be increased or decreased.
Technology also offers teachers a better way to measure the effectiveness of their personalized learning initiatives, but, more importantly, it helps them increase their own effectiveness. Personalizing learning helps reduce the amount of time teachers spend simply reciting and presenting information. When learning is more personal, teachers shift from information distributor to learning facilitator and do so effectively. Through personalized learning, student discussion and engagement also increase rather significantly as does participation and contributions in small group work. When they personalize learning, teachers can even help reduce behavior issues among students and create authentic, real-world context for the content being discussed. It might differ depending on the group of students you have, but personalized learning certainly has a very significant upside in today’s education world.
Tips from Personalized Learning Innovators Leading Change
By now, many teachers, schools and districts have launched personalized learning pilots in their classrooms. There are lots of different approaches to getting this off the ground, but one thing that it always comes back to is managing change. Without effective change management and an open mind, even the most committed educators will come up short in achieving their goals more often than not. Using technology to accomplish personalized learning goals can help, but this too is only effective if managed properly. To change traditional learning models into a personalized system that’s student-centered and preparatory, teachers can follow these simplistic suggestions to get started.
There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to implementing any new education tactic, especially personalized learning. One thing that educators can do to alleviate this burden is to embrace the unknown rather than seeing it as a threat. It’s okay not to know—believe us, most of the time, you won’t and there’s nothing wring with that. In terms of designing the learning, this part of the process is often done away from the teachers who will be using this teaching method. What if they were involved in the process as co-designers, however? It’s known to be true that the more teachers are involved in the design process of personalized learning, the more likely they will be to buy in and adapt to the changes and challenges.
To make personalized learning flow smoothly, teachers should also learn from those who have gone before them so to speak, mimicking those educators who have tried and been successful at personalized learning in the past. Teachers should also avoid isolation and, in personalized learning implementation, it’s actually best to have open communication with colleagues whenever possible. Collaborative learning is just as valuable to teachers as it is to students. Some of the most valuable tools that teachers have are each other. The chance to observe each other’s classrooms can expose all the great work that is happening and leave teachers with new and innovative ideas to try in their own classrooms!
Education is Shifting from Group to Personalized Learning
Personalized learning—once a trend—is gaining widespread support from education professionals, including some from Harvard University. It seems like there are constant developments when it comes to the best ways of educating students with the goals of shrinking the size of the classroom and expanding its reach at the center. The concept of personalized learning actually dates back to the days of the one-room schoolhouse when teachers were able to focus more on each individual student since the class sizes were so small (about three in a room). While this is pretty much impossible in modern times, technology has provided teachers with another opportunity to reach students more effectively. Personalized learning, which demands a greater focus on one teacher-one student is certainly finding its place in 21st century education.
There are a few reasons that this trend is cropping back up, but a lot of its momentum has to do with the technology that’s available to teachers. Overcrowded schools have led to teachers designing replacement strategies for making sure they are able to reach each one of their students. Parent complaints have also played a role in its emergence. They want their children to be given more choice throughout the school day and year. When teachers are required to teach the same thing in the same way to everyone, students miss out on the opportunity to learn on a deeper level. In one way or another, personalized learning is designed to combat this uniform approach to teaching and encourage teachers to reach their students in the ways that best help them learn rather than what state or national government dictates.
Educational preferences have trended away from the mass public system we are accustomed to and many families now prefer schools that offer smaller groups, alternate learning philosophies, and individualized and blended approaches to learning. This classroom transformation is being done to support the validity of individualized learning, essentially creating personal classrooms and learning spaces for each student. A good amount of schools in the United States now offer personalized learning to at least some of their students, creating classrooms with one teacher and no more than three or four students present. This ratio provides kids with a much more personalized way of learning and many educators even believe that it’s the best way to teach students because it allows them to work at their own pace rather than struggle to try to keep up with a group curriculum. Personalizing education certainly does have its share of benefits—starting in the early grades.
Combining Personalized and Project-based Learning
Personalized learning has certainly gained steam in the last three or four years and become one of the more popular education movements in the process. There’s game-based learning, experiential learning and, perhaps the most well-known, in project-based learning. Project-based learning is often used in both practice and pedagogy, creating a bit of confusion when it comes to how exactly it should be defined. One of the goals of project-based learning is to get students to learn how to work in the gig economy since jobs are constantly evolving. Rather than seeing personalized and project-based learning two separate things, it’s possible—with proper planning—to combine them with a PBL-centered school model.
To initiate or improve personalized learning, a lot of the steps educators can take are similar to those they would take when implementing project-based learning. The technology that is available to teachers helps improve personalized learning as well. Using data, for example, helps teachers better diagnose the problems that students are having in the classroom and lets them establish a plan for combating these issues. Personalized learning is often seen as an extra and unnecessary burden on teachers, however. After all, in order to personalize instruction, they have to spend tons of extra time creating custom lessons and assessments for each student who’s a part of the program. They often do not have the necessary time for planning, the resources to do it effectively or the professional development to know where to start.
Despite the challenges, many teachers have embraced personalized learning and many students are enjoying the benefits. Personalizing learning helps teachers truly reach those students who struggle, but, when coupled with PBL, the enrichment of the learning process for these children is amplified even more and teachers gain valuable insights in the process. In the classroom and with teacher buy-in, personalized PBL can provide students with authentic tasks that help them create meaning and context for their projects. It helps them recognize and improve upon the skills they need the most in order to become college- and career-ready. It also offers differentiation opportunities, student choice, detailed progress tracking and a connection between student passions and intellectual development, helping to make personalized learning become and remain a key component of 21st century learning.
Personalized Learning with a Plan of Action
Classrooms usually come packed full of students with different strengths, different weaknesses and different likes. Trying to create learning that caters to each of them can be a daunting task. The availability of technology, however, has helped combat this problem and allowed educators to truly personalize learning. One way to start personalizing education is by providing students with technology of their own, usually meaning a 1:1 initiative and a laptop for them to keep for the year. The technology allows teachers to manage the large levels of diversity among students and makes it much easier to create learning plans that both cater to and exploit their individual strengths.
Finding a way to teach the whole student and incorporate technology tends to yield positive results in the classroom. Personalizing instruction also allows educators to strategically meet students’ individual needs, especially by encouraging them to work in small groups. Personalization is an effective way for teachers to gauge how well students are retaining the material they’re being taught every week as it works well in any subject and in any grade. In personalized learning classrooms, it’s important that teachers make use of the data they have on students, which, in this case, is as simple as their quiz scores. Since quizzes should be broken down by topic, providing students with the results in an easy-to-read spreadsheet will help them visually recognize which skills they are proficient at and exactly where they need to improve.
Personalizing learning also helps teachers quickly see which students need some extra help and what exactly they might need to spend some extra time on. This helps cut down on the one-size-fits-all approach to classroom instruction. Teachers should, of course, focus on the skills and concepts that students are weak in and the personalization comes into play since these will not be the same for all students. Once the needs for improvement are identified, it’s time to put a clearly developed plan into action. One effective way to help students improve in these specific areas is to re-teach the skills and concepts they are coming up short on in a couple of different ways. Using video and online tutorials allows teachers to cover multiple bases and re-assess the skills after engaging students in new ways. It may not always work, but these approaches to personalized learning have proven to be very effective for certain types of learners.
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