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Access, Relevance, and Ownership of Personalized Learning
Access, Relevance, and Ownership of Personalized Learning
"By contrast, an approach that is not responsive to individual student needs might assume all students should work through the same activities as they build towards authentic products."
As an individual, you have a set of skills and schema that make sense because you have been using it to learn for years. Let the children in your class use their skills and schema to learn for themselves while pursuing their own interests. Coaching them to understand a few basic principles of their individuality combined with rudimentary skills of success and learning, you can lead them to the road of personalized learning. While on that path, they will hone their skills and become free thinking individuals. A few questions come to mind when considering personalized learning. Where do I start?, Who needs it? Why is it important?, and Who is in charge in a personalized class?
Where do I start?
The first place you start is not with the standards. You need to start focusing on getting to know your students, not their data points. Find out what their strengths and weakness are by playing games and having discussions. Encourage them to interact with their classmates in a set of early recesses and through Kagan structures throughout the first few weeks (and especially as the year progresses). As the learning becomes the next logical step in the relationship development, introduce them to the first unit of inquiry. This is when you begin to let them discover what they are interested in that fits under the wide umbrella of your inquiry topic. In the process, you will begin to make a meeting and check in schedule. This is where you will help them set goals and deadlines for their learning process and ultimately their unit production piece. While coaching, reflection is key (beginning, middle, and end), my co-teacher and I have found a few free lists of questions to help with the wording of metacognitive questions and this one is my favorite.
Who needs Personalized Learning?
Every person who is alive needs personalized learning. It is the way each of us learns new material daily. As a coach, you should be concerned about the way your learners learn best. This is something that each class needs to spend quality time exploring and discovering at the beginning of the year and continue to reflect upon as your learners grow and progress.
This approach will assist you in understanding the individuals in your learning environment and their needs. Accomplishing this means that you will have to take time helping your students get to know their strengths and weaknesses through discussions, group and/or individual meetings, as well as coaching them on the skill of reflection.
The next time you are wondering about something and you reach for your phone, whether you find a video, an article, the news, an old fact you have forgotten, you are learning or relearning in a way that you feel is best. Yu have personalized your own education using the skills you are most comfortable with using. Why not do this in your class with the children? Help them learn successful skills early, rather than later.
Why is it important?
Why Personalized Learning is important seems more metaphysical than psychological, but PL is important because we are all important. PL is a learning though living. Using the schema you have built to solve your problems and achieve your goals in real life will help you continue to build and remodel your schema for learning. There is no curriculum or teacher manual that will provide anything better than differentiation, which is just the established system beating you down. I feel its best to help our students become learners and class coaches and forget about the system of standards.
Who is in charge of personalized learning?
Simply put, the coaches and learners share a responsibility in the process. As the coach, you are responsible for taking the first step in facilitating the relationship and culture building, taking the time to model skills as they are needed, and guiding the children to understanding and developing their own styles. My class is 1:1 so I have what seems like an unlimited source of tools to assist in this, but Kagan structures, goal setting, and positivity are my most valuable tools. As a learner, they are responsible for trying their hardest, failing, analyzing, and trying again. If they respond to coaching, that is even better.
If all goes well, you will have failed many times as a coach. This means you are learning still and more importantly you are still alive. Just don't give up.
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