How to Teach Now

Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

William Powell, Ochan Kusuma-Powell

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781416613619
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell provide a practical map to navigate some of today's most complicated instructional challenges: How do you help all students succeed when every classroom is, in effect, a global classroom? And what does a successful education look like in a world that is growing smaller and flatter every day?

Drawing on research and years of experience in international schools, the authors identify five critical keys to personalizing learning for students who have wildly different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds:

* Focus on your students as learners through systematic examination of their cultural and linguistic identities, learning styles and preferences, and readiness.
* Focus on yourself as a teacher and investigate your own cultural biases, preferred teaching style and beliefs, and expectations.
* Focus on your curriculum to identify transferable concepts that will be valuable and accessible to all students and further their global competence.
* Focus on your assessments to ensure cultural sensitivity and improve the quality of the formative data you gather.
* Focus on your collegial relationships so that you can effectively enlist the help of fellow educators with different experiences, backgrounds, skills, and perspectives.

The way to teach now is to focus on your students both as individuals and as members of a multifaceted, interdependent community. Here, you'll learn how to design and deliver instruction that prepares students not just to meet standards but to live and work together in our complicated, 21st century world.

Chapter 1
Knowing Our Students as Learners

It is easy to dismiss the importance of “knowing your students” as either a vacuous platitude or a statement of the obvious. However, the process of coming to know students as learners is often difficult and challenging, particularly if the students are struggling with schoolwork. Knowing students means more than merely acquiring social or administrative information—students’ names and ages, something about their friendship circles, a bit about their family backgrounds, a few statistics from their academic record. To maximize learning, we need to dig deeper than this superficial acquaintance.

In the past, most teachers did not pursue student information in either a systematic or particularly rigorous way. Instead of gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of learning about their students, they were content to put together a general picture based on tidbits from essays or student journals, a hint from an example of student artwork, a guess from an overheard conversation in the corridor, a comment from a parent or last year’s teacher and so on. In some cases, teachers did forge personal connections with students, often when the personality of the student and teacher were compatible or when they shared a common interest (more often than not, this was an interest in the subject the teacher was teaching). In other cases, teachers ended the school year knowing little more about their students than they had at the year’s start. Overall, coming to know students was an optional and often arbitrary business.

Today, research and experience in increasingly global classrooms are revealing the complex interplay of factors that influence a student’s learning. Educators understand that the business of coming to know our students as learners is simply too important to leave to chance—and that the peril of not undertaking this inquiry is not reaching a learner at all. The story of our friend Arthur is a reminder of the consequences of ignoring a student’s unique learning circumstances.

Arthur: Dropping in from Another Planet

Arthur was born in the Dutch West Indies, now Indonesia, and had just seen his sixth birthday when the Japanese invaded. For the duration of the war, Arthur, his parents, and his siblings were interred in a Japanese concentration camp in West Java. While Arthur and his family survived the ordeal, life in the camp was hard and brutal. They suffered from chronic hunger, periodic outbreaks of deadly disease, the cruelty of the guards, and an ever-present atmosphere of fear and anxiety.

Four years later, following the fall of Japan and the return of the Dutch to Indonesia, Arthur and his family, together with thousands of other camp survivors, were repatriated to the Netherlands, where Arthur was promptly enrolled in a government school.

Given the amount of schooling that he had missed, Arthur was placed in a class with children three years younger than himself. There was no question that Arthur’s basic skills in writing, reading, and math were considerably behind his peers, but the school made no provision for the intellectual and emotional learning that Arthur had been engaged in during his time in the camps. The school authorities and the teacher perceived Arthur through the lens of his deficits. They focused on the basic academic skills he was lacking—what he couldn’t do. Perhaps Arthur’s experience was so foreign to these teachers that they were incapable of empathizing with Arthur. Or perhaps they believed that any effort to address his past traumas would only make the present situation worse.

Arthur, who retired as the managing director of a major oil company and is now in his early eighties, recalls that he was an alienated and confused adolescent:

Because I was behind in my reading, the teacher treated me as she would a much younger child. She gave me the same books as the other younger students. No one seemed to understand or appreciate my experience. The other children? They were interested in movies and shopping and clothes. All of which I didn’t know anything about. They were kind and friendly. I just couldn’t understand them. There was nothing I could relate to. I felt as though I had been dropped onto another planet.

Unfortunately, Arthur is not a historical anomaly. He has many more recent counterparts in schools around the world: children whose particular personal histories make it difficult for them to thrive within a paradigm of one-size-fits-all schooling. Bill recalls Christine-Apollo, the 13-year-old daughter of a Ugandan diplomat stationed in Tanzania and another war victim.

Christine-Apollo’s New Shoes

The first thing Bill noted during Christine-Apollo’s admissions interview at the international school in Dar es Salaam was that her father did all the talking, and most of it had nothing to do with his daughter. Christine-Apollo presented as extremely shy and withdrawn. Physically, she appeared much younger than 13. Her gaze was downcast and she steadfastly refused to make eye contact. Her facial expression was blank, and her eyes, when she did raise them from the floor, were vacant. Yet she often moved suddenly, casting her gaze around the office like a small animal on the outlook for predators. She was dressed in an ill-fitting, well-worn uniform from a Ugandan government school—clearly a hand-me-down. Her father explained that Christine-Apollo didn’t speak English and that her schooling had been “interrupted.”

As Bill probed deeper, a more complex picture began to emerge. Christine-Apollo did not speak Kiswahili, which is one of the official languages of Uganda, either. She communicated only in her tribal language. She was the daughter of the diplomat’s third wife and had been brought up in a bush village in Northern Uganda. For the past four years, Christine-Apollo had been a nomadic refugee in her own country, moving from village to village, hiding from the horrors and ravages of the civil war that raged during the years following the fall of Idi Amin.

At the end of the interview, as Christine-Apollo rose to leave Bill’s office, she tripped and fell to her knees. Both Bill and her father jumped to help her to her feet. Christine-Apollo was clearly mortified by her tumble. Her father apologized to Bill.

“She is not usually so clumsy,” he said. “It’s just that this is one of the few times she has worn shoes.”

The childhoods of Arthur and Christine-Apollo were obviously traumatic and illustrate how children’s prior experiences can have a profound effect upon their learning. But even children who don’t have such traumas in their past bring to the classroom unique sets of experiences, traits, and learning preferences that deeply influence their learning. When we consider the diversity of the children who fill our classes, it seems foolish to think we could treat them all as a single entity. Every student presents us with a different learning puzzle that we must solve in order to give them the best opportunity. That is the goal of personalized learning—to use what we find out about our students as a key to unlock their learning potential.

The Benefits of Knowing Students as Learners

Later in the chapter, we will discuss what, specifically, teachers ought to learn about their students, but right now we would like to put forward the benefits teachers will reap from this inquiry. Developing an in-depth understanding of each learner enables teachers to

1. Create a psychologically safe environment for every learner.
2. Determine each student’s readiness for learning.
3. Identify multiple access points to the curriculum to increase engagement and success.
4. Develop and demonstrate greater emotional intelligence in the classroom.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these benefits.

Creating a Psychologically Safe Environment

As Maslow proposed in his hierarchy of human needs, basic wants must be met before students can turn their attention to learning (1999). After securing food, water, shelter, and safety from harm, people seek as their next most important needs affection, belonging, and esteem. In the process of coming to know students, a caring and interested teacher can develop rapport and trust not just between teacher and student but among students. This trust and acceptance creates a psychologically safe atmosphere in the classroom, which provides the security students need to experience the intellectual discomfort of new ideas and adjust their pre-existing mental models to accommodate new, deep learning. A sense of belonging and being valued maximizes the chances that students will take such risks.

Recall Matt from the Introduction, the socially isolated American student attending an international school in Brazil. There is little doubt that Matt had learning issues, but these challenges were exacerbated by his sense of cultural and personal alienation. According to Matt’s counselor and learning specialist, what turned things around for Matt was not academic intervention but social connection. He auditioned for the middle school play. Amazingly, on stage, Matt’s thick glasses and awkward gait seemed to disappear. He stepped into character and blew away the director and the rest of the would-be cast: “Holy smokes! Matt’s a natural. Who would have guessed that he had such acting talent! He is a completely different child on stage!”

As word of Matt’s success got around, his teachers began to get a new and expanded vision of his potential, and their expectations for him rose. His peers stopped calling him names, and he began participating more in class discussions. He and his teachers worked out a plan for improvement, with new goals and strategies. And with a new community of cast-mate friends, Matt stopped eating his lunch alone. In short, as Matt’s teacher and classmates discovered and recognized his strengths—his theatrical talents—his isolation decreased, and his sense of belonging increased. Such a psychologically safe environment is critical for meaningful learning.

Determining Each Student’s Readiness

As teachers, we make decisions and judgments daily about the readiness level of our students. Should we teach Julius Caesar to our 8th graders? What understandings need to be in place prior to introducing the concept of division? At what age or grade should we expect students to be able to produce a five- or six-paragraph essay? These are questions of group readiness. If teachers are to meet the learning needs of a global classroom, they will need to personalize learning, to think of readiness in both group and individual terms.

In his classic work Thought and Language (1986), the Russian cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky coined the expression “the zone of proximal development.” The phrase is often used as a synonym for a child’s intellectual readiness for a given task or for the understanding of an abstract concept. The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a way of looking at readiness, but it is a very specific kind of readiness: the discrepancy between what the child can accomplish independently and what the child can achieve with skillful adult intervention.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990) also ties readiness to the demands of the challenge that confronts the learner: “Playing tennis, for instance, is not enjoyable if two opponents are mismatched. The less skilful player will feel anxious and the better player will feel bored. The same is true of every other activity: the piece of music that is too simple relative to one’s listening skills, will be boring, while music that is too complex will be frustrating” (p. 50). According to Csikszentmihalyi, “enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with a person’s capacity to act” (p. 50).

We would suggest that this is the exact location of personalized learning—on the frontier between boredom and anxiety, which, most likely, is not the same for all students in a class. If readiness levels in a class differ, so must the levels of challenge provided (Jensen, 1998; Sousa, 2001; Tomlinson, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986; Wolfe, 2001).

Teachers often think of learning readiness as dependent on the knowledge, understanding, and skills that an individual brings to a new learning situation. However, educators also need to appreciate that readiness is profoundly influenced by an individual’s prior learning success or failure, self-esteem, sense of efficacy, cultural norms, social status within the class or group, life experience, dispositions and attitudes, and habits of mind. When we know our students deeply, we are able to consider all these factors and determine individual readiness with greater accuracy—and then pitch instruction more precisely to a student’s optimal zone for learning.

Because readiness is affected by so many factors, it is not a static condition. Ultimately, student knowledge will let teachers influence readiness, foster and anticipate it, and truly ready students for learning.

Frank, our Tanzanian valedictorian who won a scholarship to Harvard, offers an interesting example of how complex the readiness principle can be. There can be no question that when he first transferred to an international school, Frank had the intellectual wherewithal to understand and learn the content of the curriculum. He was intellectually ready and able. But at that point, Frank was not culturally ready. He still did not understand the expectations of the new school culture. As he grew to understand and embrace those expectations, his intellectual and cultural readiness merged, and his learning flourished.

Identifying Multiple Access Points to the Curriculum

Access points are the connections that make the content and concepts relevant to learners, whether through similar experience, or an interest, or tapping into their way of thinking. As teachers get to know each of their students better, effective access points become more apparent.

Access points are often areas of student strength. In the case of Nicolas, it was his talent in drawing and his “need” to express himself in that way. For Nicolas, combining his preferred method of expression with a story that involved cultural self-discovery proved to be a powerful invitation to learn.

Developing and Demonstrating Greater Emotional Intelligence

The effort to come to know students is often accompanied by increased teacher emotional intelligence. As teachers learn about their students as individuals, they should enjoy greater flexibility of thought, greater empathy, greater patience, and more accurate attribution of responsibility—that critical balance between student responsibility and teacher responsibility, which so often we get wrong because we don’t know or haven’t taken into account all the influences on a student’s learning. When teachers become more emotionally intelligent, they benefit as much as their students do.

When teachers develop emotional intelligence, they are able to frame questions about students and suspend negative judgments. For example, we can put aside the notion that Rupa may be lazy and instead ask how her previous schooling may be affecting her present performance.

Emotional intelligence is particularly valuable in the global classroom, where students’ experiences, expectations, and norms may be very different from the teacher’s.

Learning Profiles

To help you meet the challenge of coming to know your students, we recommend developing student learning profiles to capture five important dimensions of learning identity: biological traits, cultural and societal factors, emotional and social influences, academic performance, and learning preferences. You won’t acquire all of this information at one time, but as you continue to collect and compile student data, a meaningful and useful learning profile should emerge.

Biological Traits

Include child’s gender, age, physical development, physical disabilities, health, motor skills, coordination, and diagnosed learning disabilities.

Biological parameters for learning are defined to some degree; however, they are malleable with appropriate context and support. For example, it is certainly not uncommon now to see teachers wearing wireless clip-on microphones that are connected to a hearing device for a hearing-impaired child. Computer software makes it possible for students with visual impairments to attend and participate in the general education classroom. We also know that children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or autism spectrum disorders are educable, and our knowledge of these biological traits allows us to construct meaningful and worthy learning objectives for these children. As a wise sailor once said, “While we cannot control the wind, we can adjust our sails.”

Several years ago we were privileged to observe a very creative science teacher at Escola Graduada in São Paulo, Brazil, as he “adjusted his sails.” The teacher was concluding a lab with his 10th grade students, who were measuring their lung capacity by blowing into probes and then observing how the strength of each “blow” could be graphed on a computer screen. However, one student—Mauricio—was unable to participate in this engaging activity because, having been born blind, he couldn’t see the graphs. So the teacher had Mauricio blow into a balloon and then measure the circumference of the balloon with a piece of string. From this, Mauricio was able to calculate the volume and infer his lung capacity. The teacher’s final instructions to Mauricio were, “When you are finished, you will have to answer exactly the same questions as the other students.” The methodology was personalized; the learning outcomes were not.

Knowledge of a child’s biological learning traits can also help a teacher more accurately interpret classroom behavior. For example, it is all too easy for us to fall back on the labels of “lazy,” “defiant,” or “willful,” when, i...