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.
Curriculum Strategy & Adoption | Personalized Learning
When I was a teacher in Washington, D.C. I taught a class on local history. Students got to learn about places they had visited and people they had heard about. I’ve never taught a class where students were more deeply engaged in the actual content of the class.
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Instructional Coaching | Personalized Learning | Professional Development
To many in the gardening and plant world, bonsais are among the most impressive trees. Bonsai is seen as a blend of gardening and art – a way to create living sculptures. A gardener might spend decades pruning the tree, little by little, year over year, so that it grows to the gardener’s exact vision. For instance, a Coast Redwood tree that, in the wild might grow to 100’-200’, may only grow to 1’ under the curated, decades-long care of the gardener. Recently I was listening to a podcast, where Julie Lythcott-Haims – author of best selling books on helping young people become healthy and happy adults, and former Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising at Stanford University – applied the concept of growing bonsai trees to the way parents raise their children. She shared:
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Personalized Learning | School Leadership | Teachers
In 2014 Education Elements first introduced the Core Four, later publishing the “Core Four of Personalized Learning: The Elements You Need to Succeed” in 2016. Since its publication, this white paper has been downloaded over 3,000 times by educators across the world. The Core Four is our team’s most widely-recognized collateral. It is often the first resource we share with educators, it has been cited in research and position papers, and it has been adopted and customized by school districts.
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Think back to when you had a deep sense of ownership in your learning; a time when you went above and beyond the expectations because of your own curiosity or passion. For me, this was in seventh grade during a career exploration project. I wanted to be an architect, and I not only wrote a report about the profession, but I created an entire imagined autobiography of myself as an accomplished architect, complete with sketches of a model home. The flexibility of the project made it meaningful in a way worksheets and textbooks never could. I was able to explore a passion and, in the process, better understand myself.
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Personalized Learning | School Districts | School Leadership
In our earlier versions of our Core Four of Personalized Learning, targeted instruction was primarily a teacher action separated from another Core Four element, data driven decision making. We recognize that this limited the potential impact that targeted instruction could have to personalize learning for students. As an exclusively teacher action, it missed the opportunity to empower students to advocate for themselves. And separated from data driven decisions, there was a disconnect between two components that go hand-in-hand to help teachers and students design learning experiences tailored for individuals and groups of students.
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Two common misconceptions about personalized learning are that it requires technology and that it must involve significantly more independent work. We know instinctively that a room full of students working silently on computers is not necessarily personalized, even though there are powerful digital tools and programs that can make personalized learning simpler. And yet, an adaptive program still requires a teacher to facilitate learning that empowers students and builds their ownership of learning.
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