B.Y.O.T Bring Your Own Thoughts
The latest on all student-centered models, leadership development, strategic planning, teacher retention, and all things innovation in K-12 education. We answer questions before you think to ask them.
Classrooms | Competency-Based Education | Personalized Learning
Time and again we have seen that assumptions or misconceptions can get in the way of progress and success. Personalized learning is no exception; misconceptions about it often lead educators away from strategies and practices that could help students succeed. Sometimes, misconceptions represent more than small gaps in knowledge--they can be ingrained into industry-wide best practices, with disastrous results. For example, for centuries, doctors believed that mothers would die during childbirth due to patient-specific issues such as inflammation, pain, or other factors. However, in 1847, Ignaz Semmelweiz, a Hungarian physician, hypothesized that
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Competency-Based Education | Personalized Learning | School Districts
In our first post of this series, we reviewed the first three risks for districts that move to personalized learning: Risk #1: Lack of Clear Vision, Narrative, and Rationale Risk #2: Curricular and Instructional Misalignment Risk #3: Failure to Build Capacity at District and School Level
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Competency-Based Education | Personalized Learning | School Districts
The Education Elements team has the great privilege of working with districts across the country to plan, design, and implement personalized learning. Without fail, one of the first questions district leadership teams ask us is, “What have other districts done that we should avoid?”
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Blended Learning | Classrooms | Competency-Based Education | Personalized Learning
True personalized learning is really dynamically tailored to the individual, which means that you’d be hard pressed to find two places where personalized learning looks exactly the same. As much as personalized learning is tailored to each student’s needs, personalized learning is also tailored to each classroom, each school and each district. No district has the exact same needs and goals as other districts. The population of students is different from one school to another. Resources, teachers, environments, etc. are all different, and personalized learning needs to meet all these elements together.
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Blended Learning | Competency-Based Education | Personalized Learning
Today nearly any time that you are online you are constantly provided with personalized content: music, shopping, dating services, entertainments, etc. You constantly receive content and information that are relevant to your needs and interests. And this personalization remains true even in your everyday life, away from screens: At the gym, your activities are personalized, through dashboards, data and even trainers. At the mall, if you can afford it, you can get your personal shopper; at work, you may be personalizing strategies and communications to your clients. Education doesn’t have to be an exception.
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Blended Learning | Classrooms | Competency-Based Education | Curriculum Strategy & Adoption | Education Elements | Personalized Learning | Teachers
Last week, Justin DeLeon and I attended the Competency Based Education Convening in Los Angeles, held by CompetencyWorks, an initiative led by iNacol and MetisNet. The goal of the convening was to bring together technical assistance experts in the field around competency-based education and blended learning to better understand how blended, competency-based programs can facilitate personalized learning (which emphasizes student voice and choice). The technical assistance providers in attendance were comprised of competency-based learning organizations, such as Re-Inventing Schools Coalition (RISC), recent authors of papers on pertinent topics including Liz Glowa and Julia Freeland, in addition to practitioners of competency-based programs like Boston Day and Evening Academy. The group visited USC Hybrid High and further developed practices pitches to superintendents on what ideal steps we would take to achieve a blended, competency-based program to achieve personalization across a set of schools. Over two intense days, we determined a current roadblock to understanding how blended learning could better facilitate competency based learning was the glaring need to clarify for the field how digital content providers’ pedagogy is designed to personalize.
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