Last week I was delighted to join my administrator, Mike Sellers, at a district inservice focused on creating a school action plan to align to the district's Personalized Learning (PL) goals. KPBSD is working with EdElements, a national consulting firm, to improve PL in district schools.
Nikolaevsk has always excelled at providing an individualized education for its students. For larger schools, however, it can be difficult for teachers to reconcile the needs of individual students with the greater good of the student body. EdElements provides the cognitive framework and resource library to better enable all schools to meet the needs of all students.
Although I always look askance at for-profit corporations mucking about in public education, I am happy with what I have researched and experienced with EdElements. They base their approach in science and best practice, and work to meet the needs of school districts and communities rather than, as was my initial reaction, trying to standardize personalized learning.
At the inservice we discussed the use of technology in what has been dubbed Blended Learning (BL), and its advantages in individualizing education. People who have unpleasant memories of textbooks and worksheets will agree that access to computer games and YouTube videos that deliver the same content more quickly and efficiently is a blessing to modern students. From an educator's perspective, setting up a lesson available to a traveling sports team, to every learner at any time, frees us up to spend face-to-face class time helping individual learners rather than lecturing at them, with 10-20% of THAT time dealing with problematic behavioral issues from predictably bored learners.
This Flipped Classroom model works very well at the middle and high school level. In the elementary end, a Class Rotation model has been employed by Nikolaevsk teachers for years. Small groups of young learners cycle through stations which include high tech, low tech, and teacher time experiences. Youngsters are learning through play, moving around the classroom, and engaging their bodies and minds in differing tactile experiences throughout the day which is essential for everyone but particularly for young children.
Some parents and teachers are nervous about an over-reliance on technology in the classroom. Many families do not place a high premium on technology at home. Our rural and semi-rural communities often experience instability in power and connectivity. Technology can be prohibitively expensive for some schools and families. All of these issues are legitimate concerns when it comes to Blended Learning. However, it is important to remember that Socrates hated books and libraries because he felt that it interfered with "real" learning. And, at one point in our history, the textbook was new and controversial technology. We should not let our trepidation and personal lack of understanding or familiarity prevent our children from joining the world that their peers are actively creating. Drawing back from the world is the fastest way to lose your place in it.
At this phase of the roll-out, schools at the inservice were asked to choose one of EdElements Core4, and develop a plan to improve the school's facility in that category for next year.
Mr. Seller's and I felt that, while all four were important, the MOST important aspect of the Core4 for increasing student learning, which is always the goal for educators, is "Student Reflection and Ownership." This means working to give students the metacognitive skills to reflect on what they learn, how they learn, and give them control over improving their learning. By actively teaching these habits of mind, students are empowered by school to take charge of their own learning for the rest of their lives, rather than being passive recipients of content programming who bide their time until graduation then spend the rest of their lives complaining about how they didn't learn anything useful at school. (Snark Alert)
In my classroom, students will be explicitly taught habits of mind and will reflect on what they're learning through journaling and blogging. Students will keep an electronic portfolio of their projects and start tracking their own data so that they can see their growth over time and figure out what style of learning and engagement best works for them. It will be a constantly evolving experiment in teaching and learning with student ownership at the center of all that we do.
As a parent and an educator I am delighted by the EdElements program and look forward to watching how it plays out in the schools and classrooms of our school district. I am confident that my own children and the learners I work with, all the beloved children of others, will benefit from this approach