Personalized Learning | Education Elements
Last year I wrote a blog post about what I wanted for the holidays too (seems I get assigned this one every year!) and came up with the one big thing I wanted - for every student, every day, to feel like the people who educate them, get them. It was a big wish and one for all students, everywhere. But this year my wish is much more narrowly focused. In fact, rather than being about every kid, it’s about one...in fact, it’s about mine.
As I write this Ella is sleeping in bed upstairs, dreaming the dreams of a four and three-quarter year old which I think are a mix of unicorns, soccer, fairies, and ice cream. She is still in preschool now and loves going to school. She spends a lot of her day coloring and doing projects. She also practices letters (still writes many of them backwards) and numbers. But in less than a year her whole little world will get rocked when she goes from being a big kid in her small preschool to a little kid in her big(ger) elementary school. So my holiday wish is for her to start “real” school and to keep loving learning not just next year, but every year that follows.
My hope is next year Ella has an amazing teacher. So, if by chance Ella’s future teacher is reading this post, I will tell you what I am looking for so you can fulfill my holiday wish.
I hope you will take the time to get to know Ella. I want you to know what makes her laugh and what makes her sad. I want you to know that family is the most important thing to her followed by chocolate, Pirate’s Booty and My Little Pony, in no particular order. I hope when I ask you how she is doing you can tell me things like who she is playing with and if she is still mixing up her bs and ds.
I hope you will lead her, but also let her have some control. I do not want her education to be something she just takes in, I want her to have to give some too. I want her to develop a thirst for learning and get excited about discovery. I want her to learn what she needs to learn (and you know more than I what a kindergartner should be able to do) but also have some voice in what she learns. I want her to understand why she is learning it, and get to make some choices about what she is learning or how she is learning it.
And speaking of how she learns, I want her to get to learn at her own pace, not the pace of her neighbors. When Ella runs she runs fast -- I see her winning races on the playground all the time. But when she learns? I don’t know. Maybe some ideas will take her longer than others, while other ideas she will learn quicker than her peers. I don’t want her to be rushed or held back. I want Ella to know its ok to not learn the same way, or at the same time, as everyone else. I want her to love learning and not look at it like she does races - where when she is not ahead she is so sad to be behind.
I want Ella to be excited to see you and her classmates every day. I want her to look forward to reading as much as she does to science or math. I want school to be just as good as stay-at-home days (what she calls weekends). I want day one to set her up for 2339 more amazing days of her K-12 education. And so much of that depends on you, her kindergarten teacher.
So yes, I want for Ella next year what I want for every students all the time. Teachers who care about each and every student, learning that is personalized, a school experience that sets them up for a lifetime of loving to learn. And even though this is the opposite of instant gratification, I am willing to have this be the one big thing on my holiday list this December, if it means Ella’s first August in school will be all that I hope it can be.
