Personalized learning should be sustainable. Here’ s how to do it.
Sometimes, the moment I even utter the words personalized learning, teachers are already turned off. Their first thought? I can’t do that. It’s too much work. It’s unsustainable.
And to an extent, they’re right, assuming they have a flawed definition of personalized learning. The reality is that personalized learning can be sustainable if we change the way we think about, prepare for, and implement personalized learning in our classrooms.
Thinking Differently About Personalized Learning
In Reclaiming Personalized Learning: A Pedagogy for Restoring Equity and Humanity in Our Classrooms, I define personalization differently than most would. Instead of referring to personalized learning and individualized learning synonymously, I remind teachers that personalization is not the same as individualization. Teacher-driven individualization requires creating as many activities in the classroom as there are learners, while personalization requires partnering with learners to make learning meaningful and relevant to each individual child.
This reframing of personalization creates a path to sustainability. It frees us of the burden of creating as many activities as there are learners in the classroom, and instead challenges us to design engaging curriculum that has access points for all learners. It also reminds us that teachers’ workloads matter: if teachers are depleting their energy reserves trying to create as many activities as there are learners, then they won’t have the energy to actually implement instruction. Trust me, I’ve experienced this firsthand.
This new way of thinking also changes our relationship with digital technology. Personalized learning is commonly implemented using web-based digital programs. While these may seem like a sustainable way to teach, their costs outweigh the benefits. Students who typically perform well will likely accelerate through curriculum, feeling successful and motivated to learn at higher grade levels. For our most marginalized students, however, these tools only exacerbate opportunity gaps, limiting their access to grade-level content. What’s more, many of these students struggle to work on their own, and when they come to a challenge, they often disengage. Let’s be honest, in these settings, the kids also know who is working on advanced content, as well as who is working below grade-level. This leads to competitive classroom cultures, accompanied by feelings of superiority or inferiority, respectively.
Most importantly, though, is that we need learners to be partners in the process of personalized learning. This means that we, teachers, must be vulnerable and give learners agency in the classroom. In fact, when we partner with learners to build their agency, we see that individualization and personalization can actually work together.
Planning for Sustainable Personalized Learning
In Make Teaching Sustainable: Six Shifts that Teachers Want and Students Need, I share that #SustainableTeaching is good for both teachers and students: it allows teachers to be intentional with their workloads, meanwhile maximizing practices that are best for kids. We can apply this idea to sustainable personalized learning to unpack a few instructional recommendations for personalized learning: (1) open-ended tasks; (2) journaling; (3) self-reflection; and (4) learning menus.
Open-Ended Tasks
For personalized learning to be sustainable, we have to move away from the notion that we need to plan as many activities as there are in the classroom. Instead, we should leverage principles of universal design, leveraging open-ended tasks through which learners can use various strategies to access grade-level content.
Here is an example of an open-ended task.
In this open-ended task, learners are asked to find the number of squares present using a method of their choice. Can you figure out how many squares?
As you might imagine, there are many different ways to approach this task. Some might use color coding, while others will find patterns related to differently-sized squares. As the teacher, I could choose to focus my instruction on a few different learning objectives: identifying squares using attributes (i.e., four equal sides with all right angles) or identifying square numbers (i.e., 1, 4, 9, 16, and 25).
Sometimes, I use this task without a specific math standard simply to teach students how to journal by documenting their ideas and explaining their thinking. What matters most is that you know what your objective is with the task, so you can guide conversations as you circulate, question, and provide feedback.
You might be wondering where students house these open-ended tasks. I prefer to use blank journals.
Journaling
Journaling represents a pretty cosmic shift in the way we view “work” in the classroom. Instead of learners filling in endless worksheets with predetermined answers, journals become quite literally the story of a child’s learning over the course of a school year. In an ideal situation, learners would receive a new open-ended task every day, using a routine journaling structure to document their ideas, articulate their thinking in words, and reflect on their learning. Here’s another example from social studies:
In this example, learners use Project Zero’s See-Think-Wonder to analyze a primary source.
While certainly challenging to implement at first, once you have built strong routines and structures, journaling provides a path to sustainable personalized learning. No longer are teachers having to make packets of worksheets, collect them, and grade them. Instead, journaling serves as container for all of the open-ended tasks learners have explored over the course of the school year.
When journaling with kids, I make sure to model extensively how to use the journal, from writing the date to writing on the lines. I also model the thinking structures and/or routines repeatedly before releasing them to learners. Finally, I provide them with sentence starters and scaffolded language so they have the proper tools to express themselves.
Self-Reflection
Sustainable teaching relies on partnership with learners. It goes beyond the fact that it’s best for kids to reflect on their learning: it’s that we need learners to be reflecting, identifying action steps, and initiating improvements to their work with some independence in order for teaching to be sustainable. We need them to share in the energy demands of learning, which means we need them to make some decisions without us.
I usually start with verbal reflections at the end of a learning block. There are a number of thinking structures you can use to support reflection. I usually start with the following:
What went well today?
What challenged you today?
What will you do differently tomorrow?
Eventually, I incorporate these reflections into journals, so that they, too, become a part of the learner’s story over the course of the year.
Learning Menus
You might feel a bit underplanned at first, using only one open-ended task. which might lead you to wonder: what do kids do when they’re “done?” I suggest preparing learning menus for productive afterwork choices, like this one intended for a second grade classroom.
When students complete open-ended tasks and the accompanying journal, they can choose from learning menu tasks. It’s important that each of these tasks are modeled prior to implementing the learning menu. If you’re looking to elevate the learning menu, offer learners opportunities to reflect on past assessments and make choices based on areas of need.
This quartet of open-ended tasks, journaling, self-reflection, and learning menus starts us on a path to sustainable personalized learning: open-ended tasks allow teachers to plan only one universally-designed task; journaling allows students to demonstrate understanding in ways that are highly personalized to them; self-reflection provides fuel for future learning; and learning menus anticipate varied pathways for learners after they’ve completed the core task.
Implementing Sustainable Personalization
Implementation might be an adjustment, considering the fact that these changes in pedagogy will require weaning yourself off of industrialized pedagogies like worksheets and workbooks. There may also be some discomfort: these strategies require giving students a lot of freedom. Kids will wander off-task, and you will have to plan for redirection.
Try these strategies for implementation: (1) catch-and-release; (2) structured discourse; and (3) bounded choice.
Catch and Release
The Workshop Model provides a reliable structure for learner-driven lessons. In a traditional workshop model, the whole class converges for a mini-lesson, then diverges for small-group and independent work, and concluding with a reflection at the end of the workshop.
Catch-and-release works similarly, adding mid-workshop check-ins or minilessons. These mid-workshop check-ins allow teachers to be responsive, addressing misconceptions, questions, or moments of success that benefit the entire class. In some cases, it might make sense to do a mid-workshop minilesson for only the students who need it. To really bolster learner agency, you might make mid-workshop minilessons elective, allowing students to choose whether they need support or not.
Catch-and-release also requires a reflection at the end of the workshop. This is critical and should not be skipped. Remember: self-reflection fuels learner-driven personalization. They must do this every day.
Structured Discourse
The mid-workshop minilesson should not be purely teacher-driven. In fact, the mid-workshop minilesson is often a great time to look at student work samples, having kids reflect on how their peers’ journals differ from theirs. This can and should create fruitful discussions about varying methods, approaches, or answers to open-ended tasks.
In order for discourse to be effective, it must be governed by strong routines and scaffolded with the proper language. Like anything else, this must be explicitly modeled, providing students feedback on their ability to engage in discourse. I suggest giving learners sentence stems, such as:
I agree because…
I disagree because…
I wonder…
Next time, you might try…
Bounded Choice
One of the biggest mistakes teachers make when first exploring learner agency is providing too much choice. The intentions are good, of course: we want students to have as much control over their learning as possible. But let’s take a moment to consider the impact of too much choice: it can be confusing and disorienting, leading to unexpected behaviors or chaos in the classroom.
Structure is healing and clear. That’s why when first starting learning menus, or opening up choices in other ways, we must establish boundaries. This includes using learning menus, but also modeling how to make choices—and redirecting students when they aren’t executing the routines as taught.
Make Incremental Shifts
Don’t try to do everything at once. It’s not sustainable.
Instead, make incremental shifts in practice towards sustainable personalized learning. These incremental shifts will eventually amount to large shifts in teaching that not only make you more efficient and effective, it will shift some of the onus onto learners, building their agency in tandem.
