Tomorrow I am presenting with my deputy on what personalized learning our school does. We are only presenting to a small group to enable discussion. But after Julie asked me to assist her it started to make me think. I mean what personalized learning are we doing? What could we do better? Personalized learning seems to be one of the buzz words in education. My understanding of personalized learning is learning that is empowers students, giving them agency, choice and a voice. ICT helps to do personalized learning, however personalized learning in the just technology. It is about creating a culture of learning, allowing students to work at their own pace and looking at their own interests and needs. I use the learning by design process to design my curriculum so I had to think about how does personalized learning fit into this curriculum design. And then I remembered this image I’d seen. (Apologies to the person who created it I’m not sure who it is, I have referenced Kalantzis and Cope.)
Learning by design is the perfect platform for personalized learning. It is about scaffolding students learning to create agency. As the image shows it is important to give students the base knowledge to then allow them to explore themselves.
Ordinary people, extraordinary lives is the current learning element my year 8 class is working on. I’ve mentioned before that we are tracking our lessons on our class blog 76 lessons. I also briefly discussed the LbD in this post Ordinary people, extraordinary lives . I believe this learning element is a good example of how you can begin with personalized learning. The LbD is based on a CGScholar unit, however it really allows the students to explore a variety of text, as well as giving them choice to explore themselves. I think there is still more room for movement in the learning element but believe it has a nice balance in the classroom.
How are you using personalised learning in your classroom?
New Learning and New Literacies 