EDU6215 Blog Entry 3 - “Students Pinpoint What They Need” #PersonalizedLearning

Summary

A Georgia school district created a personalized learning plan to apply for the Race to the Top grant.  Unfortunately, they did not receive it, but they kept with their strategy for personalized learning.  Luckily, they were able to still implement their plan and along the way they adjusted to their mistakes.  In the original plan they focused too much on technology for their personalization strategy, and now they use the technology to help individual students make decisions of what they need to work on during their What I Need, WIN, period. 

Students report to their WIN period one day a week after being assigned from teachers and the student’s input.  During WIN students receive customized support, which can be above or below their grade level.  This can be individual assignments or small group work.  Teachers act more as guides and facilitators, rather than lecture to students.  Also, teachers will create or assign each student a “playlist” of activities on the Learning Management System to complete to show mastery. 

In the article, teachers admit this personalized learning strategy can be difficult managing it at first, but eventually students learn how to take ownership over their own learning.  They note it is important for all teachers to have positive thoughts when trying a new program like this.  Lastly, they note that technology should not be at the core of personalized learning.

Reflection

Overall, I am very interested in learning more about this personalized strategy.  To implement something like this it seems like it would take a lot of time and work.  Also, the article was very general when talking about personalized learning activities.  Some questions I have regarding this topic would be: What resources do the teachers use to assign personalized learning assignments during WIN?  What LMS do they use? How much prep time is needed to for teachers to assign these activities to the students?

Reference

CAVANAGH, S. (2016). Student Pinpoint What They Need. Education Week, 36(9), 7-13.