What I Want: Truly Personalized Learning

Lately I have been reading a lot of lists.  Everyone is making them, including us - check out our 5 Tips for Infusing Student Reflection, 6 Gifts That Will Make You Tingly, A Top 10 List of Back to School Memories That Was So Good We Made it 20 and the millions of kids across the world who are writing and re-writing their Christmas lists to Santa.  So I quelled the urge to write another list about *all* the things I want this holiday season (my family doesn’t really read my blog posts anyway) and instead decided to talk about the *one* thing that I really want this holiday season.

I want every student, every day, to feel like the people who educate them, get them.  I want learning to be this incredibly engaging, exciting, and relevant experience for all students.  I know that this will happen when we really know our students.  This will really happen when we stop teaching to the class and start teaching each student.

Some people think that teaching to each student can be accomplished by simply adding technology to a classroom. A lot of the discussions around personalized learning focus on technology.  And trust me, as someone who works at an edtech company, I understand why.  In fact, as a former teacher who taught without any technology at all, I understand the compulsion too.  Technology can make a huge difference in catering to your students needs and interests. But the thing about technology is that it is a tool (note: it is a very important tool, or, as my three year old would say “a berry berry BERRY important tool”).  And what matters is how we implement the tool (do we pick digital content that meets the needs of our students?  do we think about when we use what? do students understand why we do what we do?) and how use what we get from the technology (all that data!  are we using it to drive instruction?).  Buy a classroom set of iPads or Chromebooks, purchase a whole set of software licenses, and drop it all into the classroom without making any other changes and you have what one of our Superintendents has referred to as $1000 pencils.  So today’s post is not about technology, it is about knowing your students and personalizing based on what matters to them.

For my holiday wish to come true we need to ask students more questions.  We need to listen not just to their answers, but to everything else they are saying.  As they walk into class are they talking about a game they watched the night before?  A family member?  A movie?  We need to watch what they are doing.  When do they get excited?  Are they slouching when certain topics come up and sitting up straighter for others?  And then we need to do something with that information.  It is not enough to file away that Sara loves soccer.  We need to use the World Cup to get her excited about statistics, or give her an article about an up and coming soccer player from China.   Just knowing that Andre loves music isn’t enough unless we help him understand how to deconstruct a narrative by allowing him to do this with songs.   If we know that Jake is a visual learner or Silvia likes to write things down we need to work with that too.  We shouldn’t tell Silvia to put her notebook away when working on the computer, because pen and paper may help her.  And if Jake is having trouble listening, we shouldn’t be surprised, we may need to include visuals on the board or give him supporting resources to read later.