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The Personalized Learning Mindset

By: Anthony Kim on April 5th, 2016

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The Personalized Learning Mindset

Personalized Learning  |  Innovative Leadership

The Personalized Learning Mindset

I recently attended Carolina Blends, an event which brings together educators from the region to tour schools and learn from each other. After touring three schools with about 50 educators, I came to believe that before you go on a school tour, you need the “PL Mindset”.

On the tours, I noticed a difference in the educators who already had a the PL Mindset. They understood that we were seeing one short snapshot of a classroom with the good, the bad and the ugly. They asked questions which helped them understand what happens in the classroom week after week. They asked how decisions about what happens in the classroom are made. They asked about how the school was different than before, and what changes they made year-over-year.

The educators without the PL Mindset often asked about which digital content was being used and if the content worked. They often criticized what was happening in the classrooms and said they were doing it better at their own schools. They said they couldn’t do this work because of bell schedules, resources, lack of infrastructure, etc.

Judy Beard, the principal at Whittemore Park MS in Horry County Schools, has what I call the PL Mindset. The school building is old and not ideal for innovative school models. It has had weird additions added to the building over time making the spaces and layout strange. Yet over the past four years, every time I have visited the school I can see that the school model is evolving and that they continue to get extraordinary results. So Judy Beard gets my first award for the PL Mindset Education Leader Award.

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What is the PL Mindset?

  1. First, it is the belief that every child deserves a personalized learning experience. You have to believe that personalized learning as a strategy for instruction will provide the best opportunities for each student to meet their fullest potential. All other decisions, then, revolve around this belief..
  2. Second, it is the understanding that personalized learning is a continuously evolving process.  As you get new information about the student, teachers, available technologies, and developments in the world around us, what personalized learning looks like for you will change. As I discuss in my Personalized Learning Playbook, personalized learning is a journey, not a destination. If you do it right, you will make frequent and purposeful decisions to iterate your school model and instructional strategies.
  3. Third, it is knowing that this work is creative and often answers are unknown until you try. You have to be ready to fail fast, fail small and try again. When you succeed you try to scale and replicate. In order to do this, we have to create a culture and work environments where we can be creative, collaborate, and learn. Educators spend a lot of hours in schools every day and they have to be places that are awesome for this way of working.

The Christensen Institute published the blended learning school model taxonomy, which is really helpful for educators to get a sense of what is possible. But at the same time it shouldn’t be taken to represent the end state. The taxonomy is a reference guide and a static framework. Without a focus on developing PL Mindset, I believe that execution of personalized learning will not be effective and efficacious. Instead, it will result in another form of a prescriptive learning experience and you’d just be using a different shaped cookie-cutter.

Educators with the PL Mindset are excited to start personalized learning and to keep working at it to make it better.  That’s one of the things I love about our clients: they get it.  And at our upcoming Personalized Learning Summit, we will celebrate all of them and help them spread the PL Mindset to others.

 

Download the Personalized Learning Playbook 

 

About Anthony Kim

Anthony Kim is a Corwin Press bestselling author, with publications including The New Team Habits, The New School Rules, and The Personalized Learning Playbook. His writing ranges the topics of the future of work, leadership and team motivation, improving the way we work, and innovation in systems-based approaches to organizations and school design. Anthony believes that how we work is the key determinant to the success of any organization. He is a nationally recognized speaker on learning and his work has been referenced by the Christensen Institute, iNACOL, EdSurge, CompetencyWorks, Education Week, District Administration, and numerous research reports. In addition to his writing, Anthony is the founder and Chief Learning Officer of Education Elements, a trusted partner and consultant to over 1,000 schools nationwide. Anthony has been the founder of several companies across multiple industries, including online education, ecommerce, and concerts and events.

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