3 tools to get you started on personalized learning
“Where do I start?” is one of the most common questions I get when schools want to start personalizing learning. While there isn’t necessarily a “right” place to start--and while it’s definitely not a matter of buying a new textbook or digital curriculum--there are a couple of tools that will help bring learner-driven personalization to life.
But before we get to the tools, let’s take a moment to ground ourselves in what personalization is and why it’s important we humanize it.
Too often, personalization is dehumanized in schools. Teachers and administrators alike resort to what feels like the shortest path to the quickest gains in test scores, leveraging web-based, adaptive technologies that deliver digital content at a child’s “just right” level. More often than not, those technologies track students, isolate them from their peers, and otherwise remove the humanity from teaching and learning.
We have to remember that, above all else, learning is a human experience. Our students deserve to have their humanity centered and enriched through learning experiences. The Humanized Personalization Equity Framework begins with this intention. The four steps, featured in my EdSurge article Four Steps for Humanizing Personalized Learning, are as follows:
Center Humanity
Redefine Success
Prioritize Connection
When we center students’ humanity, we take into account their identities, acknowledging not only group identities like race/ethnicity, sexuality, gender, ability, and the like, but also their interests, strengths, affinities, and challenges. We take into account the whole learner. To redefine success, we must shift our assessment practices away from quantitative metrics and towards qualitative indicators of progress, unique to the child and holistic in nature. Both of these steps are supported by three-dimensional teaching, where we redesign learning blocks to create whole-group, small-group, and individualized experiences that create depth to our personalization practices. And finally, through all of these steps, we make sure that human connection is prioritized and held sacred in our teaching. When we neglect to preserve and enhance connection in our classrooms, we engender social isolation and inequitable practices like tracking and static homogenous groupings.
There are, in fact, some tools that can support this humanizing type of personalization. Today, we’ll explore journals, open-ended tasks, and portfolios. But if you have some other ideas, tweet them out and mention me!
Journals
When most hear journaling, they envision students writing down their personal thoughts or recounting their days. And while journaling can include this sort of introspection or reflection on our students’ personal lives, I’ve expanded my definition of journaling to include a greater variety of topics.
Worksheet-based materials do not support personalization in the same ways that journaling does. When students fill in worksheets, they are essentially trying to match what the adult creator of said worksheet had in mind for their answer. When students journal, however, they are communicating their thought processes and otherwise making visible what sits invisibly inside their minds. This is the type of liberated learning and free-thinking we are going for when talking about humanizing personalization.
Within math workshop, this might look like responding to an open-ended task, like the one below:
After coming to plausible solutions, students then journal about their thinking:
In reading workshop, this could be as simple as responding to a text:
And in writing, this might look like using a revising strategy, like Lift a Line from Aimee Buckner’s Notebook Know-How:
In many cases, journaling entries can come straight from the child’s mind, requiring few to no reproducibles. In some cases, however, an open-ended task or provocation may be necessary for journaling.
Open-Ended Tasks
Similar to journaling, open-ended tasks aid us in deindustrializing our classrooms, moving away from worksheet- and workbook-based learning, and towards humanizing resources that encourage students to notice interesting details, think freely, and ask questions to propel learning forward into a continuous and compounding cycle.
The Stanford’s Complex Instruction Resources, Illustrative Mathematics, or YouCubed might be good places to start when looking for open-ended tasks, but sometimes simple things like maps can be great for open-ended tasks, especially if they’re paired with a thinking routine, like Project Zero’s See-Think-Wonder routine.
I found this map online after speaking with my students about racial segregation in the city of Chicago. One of my students asked in a prior lesson if segregation had anything to do with how much money people made.
“What an interesting question,” I replied. “Let me see if I can find a resource for that.”
Instead of answering the question for them, students were able to see rather clearly in our next lesson that socio-economic status and income inequality operated in direct correlation with racism and racial inequity.
This type of learning simply cannot take place on a worksheet; it has to be supported by dialogue, inquiry, and journaling, so that students can internalize the ideas and reflect on them in a manner that connects to their own curiosity and humanity.
Portfolios
When we redefine success in our classrooms, we humanize assessment. In order to humanize assessment, we must move away from quantitative assessment as much as possible. I understand entirely that not all teachers are given the agency to remove quantitative data from their classrooms, and so I’d like to offer some additional structures that help to humanize assessment practices, meanwhile allowing teachers to adhere to their schools’ policies.
Portfolios humanize learning because they help students tell the story of their learning over the course of the whole school year. When I first began teaching, I found myself drowning in piles of paper, grading unnecessary assignments and sending them home, never to be seen again. It dawned upon me that if the work was important enough to be completed, it should be important enough to hang on to and document as a part of a child’s learning journey. For this reason, I started using portfolios, where students would hang onto assessments and any other artifacts that showed growth over the course of the school year.
These portfolios supported self-reflection, as well. With all of their artifacts kept safely in one place, students could look at old work samples and compare them directly to new ones, not only helping them learn to articulate their progress to themselves--but also giving them tools to explain how they’ve grown when bringing their portfolios home to share with their families.
As you can see in the “Math Reflection,” the student does not reflect on how many problems they “got right” or a grade; instead, they talk about how their thinking and their behaviors had changed over the course of one instructional unit, personalizing their learning by articulating the details of their learning journey.
The Possibilities are Endless
All of these tools have something in common: they support learner-driven personalization. With journals, open-ended tasks, and portfolios, personalization is no longer solely within the teachers’ locus of control. Instead, students share in the responsibility of personalizing learning. These three tools are simply a start: there are many other tools and materials out there that support learner-driven personalization.
Have a few in mind? Shoot me an email, or reach out to me on Twitter. I’d love to hear from you--and what you think makes personalization humanized.