What is Personalized Learning?

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“Personalized learning” has, unfortunately, become a confused buzz phrase thrown around educational circles. While used as a label for something done in an attempt to help students learn, the resulting practices observed from one school site to another vary greatly. For example, I have seen various sites set up the following disparate situations … all called personalized learning:

• Providing a menu of options for assignments in each course that students can perform at their own pace.
• Providing a set time period during the school day in which students choose what assigned work or project to focus their efforts on.
• Providing a list of courses for students to enroll to develop a learning pathway.
• Providing students an opportunity to access and potentially learn from digital media (such as Kahn Academy).
• Providing students a list of options of how they could demonstrate their learning.

To help us develop a common understanding of what Personalized Learning is, Allison Zmuda, Greg Curtis, and Diane Ullman (2015) have proposed the following definition:

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

Based on this definition, none of the initial descriptors above should be labeled as “Personalized Learning” as there is no opportunity for students to become the co-creators or drivers of their learning.

Additionally, Zmuda, Curtis, and Ullman point out the difference between Differentiation, Individualization, and Personalized Learning. When teachers differentiate or individualize the class, teachers remain the driving force for all instructional and experiential choices that students may be allowed to make. The teacher is “doing to” the learner while asking the student to participate in the teacher focused process. At this point, students play a more compliant role in their learning experience.

This may look like:

• Students choosing activities from a teacher generated menu in order to build an understanding of content.
• Students performing a “cook-book lab” in order to develop technical skills and/or background content knowledge.
• Students using digital tools (such as Khan Academy) to focus on building fluency.
• Students reading different books from a designated list in order to promote the discussion of a similar theme within the texts.

It must be clearly stated that these are not improper or “bad” practices. In fact, each may have its necessary place to help students build an understanding of content knowledge, build skill capacity, and/or apply their learning through authentic and relevant experiences. However, if our true goal is to also develop “personalized” learning, then the curricular experience must shift in order to engage the student in co-creating and eventually, driving and designing, their own learning experiences.

As we invite students to personalize their learning, we need to help students understand what it means to be a learner. By teaching them appropriate skills and habits of mind, we can shift the control of more and more elements of learning to the student so that they may begin to influence and drive their learning experience and environment. Students and teachers may build a learning partnership “where both play an active role in the design and development of the experience”¹ (p 20). Students will now have more freedom to delve deeply into meaningful and authentic challenges.

What might personalized learning look like in a classroom?

I have spent this past year trying to figure this out myself. Below is what I have tried:

• Helping students become familiar with authentic real-world issues in which students research and find related problems that capture their attention in order to focus their learning. While I identify the disciplinary outcomes (AP and IB identified standards), the students are responsible for defining:
  • the challenge (problem, task, and investigation).
  • the audience they will work with and present to.
  • the process based on their need.
  • the appropriate method and format to demonstrate their learning.
• Within the class, a student must propose their ideas throughout their process so that student and teacher expectations can be achieved.
• While students are researching, students post links to their resources with a brief description of what they learned in a google doc to create a library for all students to access. Students benefit as they select and curate the resources they need to collect information directly related to solving their problem.
• Since I teach science, students also design an experiment to generate data directly related to the problem they are researching. By generating, analyzing, and inferring the meaning of the data, students are adding to the knowledge base rather than being passive receptacles of information.

Hopefully it becomes apparent in the above example that the student and teacher are collaborating to build learning experiences in which the student’s interests and fascinations are important and necessary to the learning process. In addition to focusing students on issues or problems, Heidi Hayes Jacobs and Marie Alcock also recommend using the following genres to increase the richness of student engagement:

• Themes which transcend all content areas that will help students build important interdisciplinary connections.
• Case Studies that may offer insight into a more general truth within a content area.

Returning to the definition of personalized learning as a “progressively student-driven model,” there must come a point in which the student drives the learning. Once students understand how to engage in the learning process, they can drive all elements of the learning experience, including the task, audience, method of demonstrating mastery, the expectations that will focus his or her effort, and the type of feedback they will seek. Learning becomes more important than compliantly meeting the rules or expectations of a class.

As soon as the teacher adds input into any element of the learning, we return to the “learner centered” level.

While education cannot live solely in this realm, we must ask ourselves what our true goal is when we use those phrases commonly found in vision and mission statements such as, “lifelong learners,” “students prepared for the rigors of the 21st century,” “problem solvers,” or “independent thinkers?” Students must be provided the space and time to define all aspects of the learning process around authentic and fascinating challenges in order to achieve these lofty ambitions.

What does “learner centered” look like?

• 20% time in which students develop their own project focused on an issue, problem, theme, or case studies specifically revolving around something they want to learn more about.
• An end of the semester, term, or year project in which students build upon some aspect of the content and skills learned throughout the course of study.
• An interdisciplinary project in which students define the connections they will make between courses and expound upon.
• A junior or senior year project in which students demonstrate how to transfer the content knowledge and skills learned throughout their learning career.

In all of these cases, students would independently define important elements:

• the disciplinary and cross-disciplinary outcomes they wish to learn.
• the required mindsets required to persevere and succeed in their efforts.
• the challenge that articulates their focus and actions.
• the authentic audience with whom they will focus and present.
• the feedback from teacher, peers, and audience that they will request in order to guide performance.
• the evidence required to collect to demonstrate achievement in relation to goals and outcomes.
• the learning sequence and pace based on need throughout the project.
• the method of presentation most fitting for the chosen audience.

What I like most about this definition of Personalized Learning is that it builds upon the effective teaching strategies to help students build an understanding of content knowledge, thinking skills, habits of mind, and the components of learning. The teacher’s role shifts to become a facilitator helping students understand how to take charge of their learning. Students will learn to be active producers of knowledge and skill, something required in their awaiting futures.

Citations:
1. From “Learning personalized” by A. Zmuda, G. Curtis, and D. Ullman, 2015, p 20.

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