Success with Personalized Learning

“If we hope to help all learners find success, we need a new approach--one that taps the potential of the most underutilized resource in most traditional classrooms: the learners themselves.” (Rickabaugh)

Those words out of James Rickabaugh’s, Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning:  A Roadmap for School Leaders stopped us in our tracks.  Further reading out of Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey’s, Make Learning Personal:  The What, Who, WOW, Where, and Why, helped us spring into action.  We hold ourselves accountable to “best practice” as educators.  Our passion to instill personalization throughout our work has grown immensely.

We dove into personalized learning with our first unit of study.  Over the summer our learners were asked to read one of three given titles.  Traditionally we start off the year with everyone writing a thesis driven essay based on the book they chose to read over the summer.  Most of these essays need to be revised, as it is difficult to jump into this type of writing right off the bat.  This school year we decided to offer more voice and choice for the assignment and let learners choose how they would demonstrate their growth.  The results exceeded our expectations and validated everything we've read thus far in our quest to personalize learning.   

We begin every unit with the standards.  The Minnesota State Standards we address with the summer reading novels are:

9.4.10.10 By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend literature and other texts...

a. Self-select texts for personal enjoyment, interest, and academic tasks. b. Read widely to understand multiple perspectives and pluralistic viewpoints.

9.9.6.6 Adapt speech to a variety of contexts, audiences, tasks, and feedback from self and others, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.

In our class we guide learners through formative (practice) work that prepares them for a summative (final assessment), where they demonstrate their mastery of a standard.  We intentionally plan formative work that generates different ways to access, engage, and express information.  For our first unit we carefully planned formative work where learners could experience working independently, in collaborative groups and engage in a teacher seminar (direct instruction from a teacher).  We asked individuals to be thinking about which experience they preferred as a learner while they focused on their work.  By the end of the formative work learners had done some, question storming, research, written analysis (defend/refute/or qualify), discussion of information, all solidified in some form with self-reflection.  Our goal was to help learners have a recent experience around different learning situations they could reference, in order to craft a personal learner profile.

The summative asked them to address the following essential question, “How does reading create an experience that allows one to grow?”  Students were instructed to answer this question figuratively or literally for their final assessment.  As learners began to demonstrate their growth, Rickabaugh’s words rang true.   Our learners became the most valuable sources of new learning for themselves and each other.    

Learners wrote essays, reviews, journals, interviews, letters, poems, children’s books and fictional stories.  They made many different types of connections, applied concepts from Government Class, created storyboards, drew and painted illustrations, produced book trailers, invented slogans, and flip books and dug deeper into characterization through analysis.  One individual took her pencil drawing storyboard, downloaded an app that allowed her to upload her images, add color and make them digital (Click here to see her project, it blew us away).  She became an immediate resource by showing another learner, who was looking to enhance his drawing around symbolism, how to use the app she found.  Another individual learned how to voice record for his book trailer and became the class expert for anyone else that wanted to do some voice recording. We had the pleasure to see what one young man learned when he created a RAP BATTLE and we eagerly await the finished product of a learner who chose to design and make her own shirt where the colors used will be symbolic and speak to how she grew.  Almost EVERY single learner turned in an assignment!  We would argue EVERY learner was engaged, and EVERY one of them learned something.  We have never started the year off with almost 100% participation and completion of the first summative assignment.  

One of our struggles is to find a way to make Personalized Learning work within the grading system. In order to truly capture their learning each person reflected on what they did to express how they met the standards.  In this unit our learners weren’t the only ones inspired.  As the mentors in the room we were quite moved.  We are ecstatic with the results of our first unit and are preparing for quite a ride with these inventive learners.

Learner volunteering to read his poem

Setting the Foundation

“Don’t smile until Christmas” is an outdated phrase I actually heard my first years teaching.  While that would never be our personalities, the sentiment was you had to start your class off with the tone that would establish the type of environment you wanted to have for the year.  Being that many of our learners have not experienced a personalized learning environment, we take the first three full blocks to establish a foundation from which to build on.  Day one is about getting to know our stories, day two is focused on mindset, and day three ideal self and ideal classroom.

Part of moving from a group to a team begins with learning one another’s stories.  This is an ongoing process but one of our goals is to broaden our learners’ perspectives and help establish a deeper empathy for others.  Hearing one another’s story is one way to achieve this goal.  Learners begin the year completing a survey that will later help those individuals develop a learner profile (stayed tuned for a learner profile blog entry).  After introductions, learners quiz each other to demonstrate the value of listening vs hearing.  Finally, we end the first day by sharing our stories (Tricia’s story, Kaela’s story).  We emphasize how our culture has shaped us and our passions have driven us.  Then we talk about how becoming mothers made us better teachers.  We observe how unique each of our own children are and how different they approach life and learning.  We could never parent each of our children the same, so why should we expect all learners to learn in the same way?        

Reading the book Mindset by Carol S. Dweck, changed the language we use not only with our students but also with our children.  Our feedback is always focused on the effort and development vs the end result.  Anytime a student utters a phrase like, “I can’t write thesis statements” or “I am not a good writer” we point out that is an example of a fixed mindset and ask them to rephrase with “I am still working on knowing how to write a good thesis” and “I need to develop my writing skills.”  To lay this foundation in our class we begin by having learners test their mindsets, than discuss the difference between a fixed and growth mindset.  The results reflect messages they have received both explicit and implicit.  For example, “You are not much of an artist...” or not seeing your artwork hung up by the teacher, may result in a fixed mindset for child regarding art. We ask learners to reflect on areas where they have a fixed mindset so they approach it differently, by allowing for more time and referring to resources for extra help when needed. Then we draw our attention to what it means to have a growth mindset and how that creates a love of learning.  You can view Kaela explaining growth mindset to learners by clicking here. 



exit card student responses to essential question

We transition the importance of having a growth mindset to illustrating how standards based instruction lends itself to personalize learning.  To simulate the need for personalized learning we have students view a young boy playing the ukulele and ask them to reflect on whether or not he is below, meets or exceeds the standard of “Be able to play the ukulele while singing a song in tune, using correct words and have a positive stage presence.”   

See the ukulele video here and our conversation that followed:  View Tricia’s class discussion

To the left, is the visual we share with learners to explain how they will all meet the standards, but how they get there may look different.  If they already are meeting the standard they need to be challenged.  Challenge does not mean "more" it means more in depth.  

These pictures summarize our third and final day of setting the foundation where learners create ideal self trees and set class norms. 
Links:  Ideal-Self Tree Template and Learner Example 

ideal-self exercise with students

quotes students choose to represent their idea self

student sign the board after writing class norms

Stay tuned for a blog post on how we are using culturally responsive strategies to engage, motivate, and validate learners as well as how we help each of them create "personal learning profiles".  Please comment to share how you establish a foundation of learning in your work with kids.