What does "personalized learning" mean, and what
can it look like in the classroom?
Learning is an accomplishment of attention and
effort that can take place in an auditorium filled with 2,000 people, or at a
corner table in a library. It takes place with a teacher, or a coach, or with
peers, or when you are alone. Learning is always a personal experience for the
learner.
Our factory model of schooling obscures the fact
that all learning is personal. We've been forcing too many children at the same
time to be presented with the same stimulation in hopes they develop the same
understanding. Because we are all evolutionary cousins, with similar brains
that are wired from birth to find patterns in the environment, the factory
approach sort of works-- if you like mediocrity, and if you think it is
inevitable that only a few students reach mastery in classes.
Enough of us did pass the tests through the years
for our schools to consider themselves hotbeds of learning. Schools have gotten
away with this mediocre assembly-line delivery of lessons for so long that we
find the notion of personalized learning to be innovative. But all each of us
ever did, even in the stultifying rigidity of our most boring class, was to
personally make sense of what was going on. Or we didn't learn. No one could do
it for us.
Personalized learning as an educational imperative
has at its root a very radical notion: almost all students can reach mastery in
almost every subject. If you don't believe that, you will have no drive to
change our factory system of education, which is as much about sorting students
into successes and failures as it is about educating them. If you do believe
that each student truly has the capacity for mastery in all subjects--in your
subject! in your school!-- personalized learning asks two fundamental
questions:
·
What
is this child ready to learn?
·
How
do I best help this child learn?
Throw out your pacing guides. Do not chain yourself
to the end-of-the-chapter tests. Fill your classrooms--and I mean you in
secondary school--with stuff to build and model and draw and craft. Listen to
the students. Be a guide, a coach, a teacher, an inspirer, a challenger, a
fellow explorer. This is not an easy path, but it will be your special path
into the most interesting part of your career. Personalize your learning; no
one else can do it for you.
