Learning Personalized

The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom

Allison Zmuda, Greg Curtis, Diane Ullman

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118904831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes pédagogiques

A real-world action plan for educators to create personalized learning experiences

Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom provides teachers, administrators, and educational leaders with a clear and practical guide to personalized learning. Written by respected teachers and leading educational consultants Allison Zmuda, Greg Curtis, and Diane Ullman, this comprehensive resource explores what personalized learning looks like, how it changes the roles and responsibilities of every stakeholder, and why it inspires innovation. The authors explain that, in order to create highly effective personalized learning experiences, a new instructional design is required that is based loosely on the traditional model of apprenticeship: learning by doing.

Learning Personalized challenges educators to rethink the fundamental principles of schooling that honors students' natural willingness to play, problem solve, fail, re-imagine, and share. This groundbreaking resource:

• Explores the elements of personalized learning and offers a framework to achieve it
• Provides a roadmap for enrolling relevant stakeholders to create a personalized learning vision and reimagine new roles and responsibilities
• Addresses needs and provides guidance specific to the job descriptions of various types of educators, administrators, and other staff

This invaluable educational resource explores a simple framework for personalized learning: co-creation, feedback, sharing, and learning that is as powerful for a teacher to re-examine classroom practice as it is for a curriculum director to reexamine the structure of courses.

Chapter 1
Making the Case for Personalized Learning

I’m constantly going through the motions down a path that has been chosen for me by others. When is it going to be my turn?

—Grade 7 student

From a typical student’s point of view, schooling is a series of required experiences. Students move from one topic to another, one classroom to another, one grade to another as part of a larger design to accomplish…what, exactly? As educators, we typically spend most of our time focusing on what is covered and how it is delivered. We, and the systems that guide us, tend to reduce and compartmentalize learning into a linear, step-by-step process. We break standards or topics down into small parts and hope that if we simply move through the components of our design, students will master the material. The result? Students experience sanitized assignments designed more for efficiency than for deep learning. Students move through the pacing guide we establish for them, despite the reality that different people learn at different rates and in different ways. They grow accustomed to their role as compliant, “direction-following” learners who arrive at a predictable response rather than confront messy problems fraught with ambiguity, complexity, and unknown answers. Rather than simply moving through school as consumers of a lockstep system of lessons, units, courses, and grades, every student needs to be invested in his learning—to see school and learning as a way of acting on his interests and passions.

Disconnect between Traditional School and Preparation for a Postsecondary World

There is a disconnect between the traditional school model and the challenges and opportunities of today’s world. How do we reconceptualize learning to move beyond passive student roles of recording and recalling, because the world beyond the school walls demands adaptive, creative problem solvers? How do we reconceptualize teaching to move beyond a “sage on the stage” mentality, because knowledge is no longer scarce? Heidi Hayes Jacobs frames the problem this way in her book, Leading the New Literacies: “Breaking through the barriers of a 19th century schedule with a 20th century curriculum designed for 21st century learners will be inherently uncomfortable. Just because we are used to something does not mean we should be comfortable with it. Education is disruptive” (5). We can reconceptualize learning if we move from a compliance-oriented structure to a passion-filled learning structure; if learners are intrinsically committed to a given topic, problem, or profession, they will learn. Many educators talk about the bigger picture, but they do it in the language of “someday” rather than “right now.” Students deserve clarity on the long-term aims of school—Why do I have to do this?—and how those aims are connected to challenges in the world. When we defer their dreams to a couple of years down the road, most students (and adults) struggle to stay engaged. We have a structural design problem that can be ameliorated by empowering ourselves and our students to navigate problems, discern truth, create texts, contribute knowledge, and become invested in community and global problems. We can do this by

• Designing customized learning experiences around what learner(s) are fascinated by, rather than marching through predetermined topics and texts
• Creating a collaborative classroom and school culture where students own the learning process because they set a goal, do the work, seek out feedback, improve their performance, and document their accomplishments
• Breaking down traditional classroom walls to connect learners to experts and audiences far beyond the schoolhouse door
• Increasing our focus on contemporary literacies (digital, media, and global) and ways to work (social production, social networks, media grids, semantic web, nonlinear learning), integrating them into our design and instructional practices
• Persisting when obstacles interfere with progress and providing additional time to produce quality work

The Power of a Student-Driven Model

We propose the following as a definition of personalized learning:

Personalized learning is a progressively student-driven model in which students deeply engage in meaningful, authentic, and rigorous challenges to demonstrate desired outcomes.

Our major premise is twofold, and it guides the structure of this book: personalized learning is a better way to attain current learning outcomes, and personalized learning is a better way to grow children.

1. Personalized learning is a better way to attain current learning outcomes. We’re well aware that teachers and schools are surrounded by a host of expectations focused on attaining content. This is reality; we can’t wish it away. We simply start with the premise that personalized learning is a sound and effective way to learn. Compared to the outdated approaches of transmission, retention, and recall, personalized learning allows for deeper, more lasting learning in an engaging and relevant environment. But personalization is not just a better mousetrap to achieve the same goals as past models of teaching and learning, nor is it simply a new delivery vehicle that achieves the same goals.
2. Personalized learning is a better way to grow children. We believe that education must strive to achieve more transformational outcomes alongside the achievement of existing or more traditional ones. We don’t teach subjects—we teach children and young adults. Personalized learning is the best way we know to grow these people into the best versions of themselves, with all of the skills and mindsets needed to succeed and contribute to our shared future.

Personalized learning has deep roots in education. Susan Yonezawa, Larry McClure, and Makeba Jones trace the concept back to the 1700s, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated for schools that “built on individual capacities and choices to capitalize on inherent motivations” (4). In the early 1900s, John Dewey “promoted the idea of building on students’ interests and incorporating outside experiences to meet students’ individual needs” (Yonezawa et al. 4). In 1919, inspired by the progressive ideology of John Dewey and Maria Montessori, Helen Parkhurst developed the Dalton Plan, a new model of schooling designed to tailor each student’s program to her needs, interests, and abilities; to promote both independence and dependability; and to enhance the student’s social skills and sense of responsibility toward others. She published Education on the Dalton Plan to describe her idea to address significant structural and policy school challenges: “Not until school machinery is reorganized and the energies of the pupils released from the time-table and the class-tent will they begin to develop that initiative, resourcefulness, and concentration which are the indispensable preliminaries to the process of learning.” This model became the basis of the Dalton School and was embraced by many Montessori schools around the world. In the 1980s, Theodore Sizer launched the Coalition of Essential Schools predicated on nine common principles: learn to use one’s mind well; less is more, depth over coverage; goals apply to all students through personalization (creating smaller classrooms); student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach; demonstration of mastery through performance on real tasks; a tone of decency and trust; commitment to the entire school; resources dedicated to teaching and learning; and democracy and equity. In an issue of Education Leadership devoted to the theme of personalized learning, Sizer promotes his vision of a very...