Why Meaning Matters

When I attended the Cedar Rapids Schools equity meeting in January 2016, the buzz words from the district were personalization and innovation. I was quoted on the news as saying personalized learning is a key component of equity. However, I struggle with words being thrown around without fully understanding the definition of them.

Natalie Abel shares in her blog post for iNACOL that we need to have common definitions so that we have a shared understanding of what words like personalized learning and innovation mean.

If the same words mean different things to different people, confusion and frustration can arise, and this creates a serious problem for schools and leaders. If we don’t use common definitions, communication breaks down and it becomes harder to learn from one another.

Personalized learning is so much more than handing a device to a student and saying here complete this activity online and then we'll prescribe your learning. Personalized learning means that schools teach to each student's needs and offer direct instruction, along with technology that enhances student learning and can identify where there are achievement gaps.

In Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education, iNACOL zeroes in on these terms and describes them in great detail. The definitions according to iNACOL's current description are:

Personalized Learning:

Tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests–including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn–to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible.

Blended Learning:

Any time a student learns, at least in part, at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and, at least in part, through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace. The modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience” (Horn & Staker, 2013).

Competency Education:

In 2011, iNACOL and CompetencyWorks led a summit bringing together 100 innovators in competency education for the first time. At that meeting, participants fine-tuned a working definition of high-quality competency education:

• Students advance upon demonstrated mastery;
• Competencies include explicit, measurable, transferable learning objectives that empower students;
• Assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students;
• Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs; and
• Learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include application and creation of knowledge, along with the development of important skills and dispositions.

As I have described personalized learning to my parents and older friends, they laugh and say, "I see this more like a one-room schoolhouse." I usually laugh along with them, because that's what I thought would make the most sense when tailoring to the needs of each student. Perhaps, though, we don't look at it like a one-room school house, but more like a school without walls defining where a student should be according to his/her chronological age.

As a parent, I made a choice, despite my child being chronologically able to start kindergarten this year, that she would attend the alternative kindergarten program and take another year to mature before starting full-day kindergarten. This has cost me more than an extra $6000 in childcare (about 14% of my salary), but for her to be successful in a traditional school setting, she needed one more year to grow. Alternative Kindergarten in our district focuses a lot on social emotional behaviors, but they also assess math and literacy skills. My daughter is doing amazing and her teacher tells me to keep doing what I am doing at home.

So when we look at traditional schools and classrooms, we group students based on their age and have them progress through each grade level without a lot of concern for how much of the content they know and they automatically advance with their peers. However, personalized learning allows for students to master content before advancing and for teachers to identify where the gaps in their learning may be. It also allows for continuous flexible grouping of students so that they can be taught in their zone of proximal development.

How To Personalize Learning in an Online and Blended Environment

In the previous post, I discussed the overarching concept of personalized learning.  Now, I'd like to delve deeper into the "how" of providing personalized learning.

First and foremost, online and blended learning isn't for every student in every situation.  Therefore, if you throw students into online and blended learning without giving them the tools and support they need, they will not succeed.  However, for those students who are ready for online and blended learning there can be so many ways to help them that didn't exist twenty years ago without a lot of human-intensive labor.

Let's take students who need to review the basic number system.  Twenty years ago in a third grade classroom, the teacher would take one unit to review the basic number system and label the ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on.  He or she would assign a worksheet or problems from a textbook and the student would continue on with his/her peers at a steady pace, allowing for not a lot of flexibility from the really bright students to the struggling students.

Today, those same students can enter into a virtual classroom and take a pretest to see what concepts they're missing.  Teachers can then personalize their learning to reinforce that concept, while giving the more advanced students more advanced learning opportunities, such as applying the place values of numbers to money.  The students who are struggling can then work in a smaller group and work on one-to-one correspondence and grouping objects into groups of ten to give them a more concrete example of place value.  Students from all areas of the spectrum are then able to do activities that meet their needs best.

Competency Based Learning
The goal of each grade level in the US is that students become competent at the skills they need before moving onto the next grade-level.  A school using competency-based learning is one where students aren't bound to their seats for a certain amount of time (Carnegie-unit), but rather learn the skill they need and move on to the next skill.  It's kind of like a 4, 6, and 10 year old who have never taken swimming lessons before.  The four year old has been exposed to the water, but has never formally taken lessons.  The six year old is terrified of the water and the 10 year old is comfortable, but he/she needs some basic skills before he/she can move to the next level.  In this case, the four-year-old is likely to be more competent in the skill of submerging his/her face than the six or ten-year-old.  The four-year-old will likely put his/her face in the water and push off from the wall demonstrating competency in the prone glide, while the level of competency of the six year old may be standing on the bottom step of the pool without crying.  In the case of swimming, they're all getting the same type of instruction, but it's being tailored to individual needs.

Standards Based Learning
To better understand standards-based grading, think about how you are evaluated in a workplace. You have a clear set of expectations that are given to you and you are expected to meet or exceed those expectations.  Standards based grading is giving students clear expectations of what they should be able to do by the time they finish a unit or lesson.  From there, you can assess whether a student is proficient, partially proficient, not proficient, or advanced and adjust your instruction accordingly.

Mastery-Based Learning
Mastery-based learning is a blend of competency-based and standard-based learning.  Mastery-based means that students have to master a skill or concept at a critical level before being allowed to move forward.  With online learning, you can easily adjust the mastery-level of assessments before allowing students to proceed.  So when a student takes a test or quiz and receives less than a 60%, for example, he/she would be required to retake that before the next unit will even open.



Follow Brandi's board Kirkwood High School Distance Learning on Pinterest.