Learning is most powerful when students feel valued, honored, and empowered. The teachers who leave the greatest lasting impact on their students are the ones who see them for who they are, often before the students even see this themselves. These teachers uplift their students by developing their interests, celebrating their uniqueness, and challenging their assumptions about the world and themselves.
Educators who want to personalize learning should prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. The implementation of personalized learning creates an opportunity for educators to meet the needs of all students, honor their uniqueness, and build ownership of learning. When schools prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion, they create the environment where personalized learning is most likely to be successful.
Our newly released paper, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion + Personalized Learning, explores the unique relationship personalized learning has with diversity, with equity, and with inclusion.
These relationships are each uniquely powerful and create new opportunities for relationships, learning, and self-actualization:
- Diverse educator backgrounds, interests, and identities can help ensure that every student’s personalized needs and interests are met.
- Equity provides a powerful reason to personalize learning for students, and it requires us to reimagine the systems that are not supporting the success of all students.
- Inclusion builds trust and understanding across the stakeholders necessary to successfully personalize learning for every student.
This paper can be read two ways. If you download the paper, you can read through it in its entirety or reference the sections you find most relevant. If you visit the website, you have the option to select whether you are engaging in conversations for diversity, equity, or inclusion as a participant or if you're leading those conversations. Depending on your response, the supporting content will change to meet your needs.
I hope this paper will add to an already robust and critical conversation and honor all the Mrs. Musgraves who have and continue to advocate for our students.
