Personalized Learning at ECSD of Middletown

Re-thinking Instructional Models Can Lead to a Strong Increase in Student Achievement

Middletown, NY has worked with Education Elements to change its approach to instruction to be more student-centered and has seen significant increases on NWEA MAP scores

Personalized Learning Services

The Challenge

Middletown was challenged to support its high needs students. Although Middletown is a small city school district, the majority of students come from poverty. Middletown wanted to close the achievement gap between white and minority students, as well as lower their dropout rate.

Middletown leadership knew that their approach had to be systematic, so they stopped social promotion and began implementing two-year kindergarten. They also invested in their facilities in order to erase the look and feel of poverty. Then, they started to look at their instructional models and knew they needed to break the pattern of teaching to the middle.

How We Helped

In 2013, Education Elements and Middletown partnered to begin training elementary school teachers to blend instruction as a way to personalize learning for students. Middletown chose an opt-in model in which teachers would choose when over a period of four years they wanted to shift to blended learning.

Education Elements worked with Middletown to design personalized learning instructional models and provided training to all waves of teachers over the course of four years. By the end of 2015, Middletown elementary and middle schools were fully blended.

Additionally, in 2015, Education Elements began working with Middletown High School classrooms to transition to a flipped/personalized instructional model and the two middle schools in 2016.