“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.
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| Learner volunteering to read his poem |
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