Personalizing learning* will not truly take place in our schools unless we understand and act on three key things. Until then we will continue to tinker, adjust, and tweak a fundamentally non-personalized system to suit each person. We will continue to mean well but ultimately underserve most of our students.
1. It's About Equity
Personalizing learning is about equity. It's about providing the best, most functional learning process to all as opposed to the few. Howard Gardner outlined this point in 2009 in The "Next Big Thing: Personalized Learning":
Throughout most of history, only the wealthy have been able to afford an education geared to the individual learner. For the rest of us, education has remained a mass affair, with standard curricula, pedagogy, and assessments.
A "monoticized" (new word: monotonous + standardized) widget-driven system will ultimately produce monoticized, widget-driven learning. It will produce students who have been taught to think a certain way—that there are right answers and wrong answers; that learning means memorizing what I tell you; and that what is important has already been discovered.
Doesn't this fly in the face of what we are trying to do?
Yvette Jackson, CEO of the nonprofit National Urban Alliance for Effective Education has long exalted the
1-24-14 The Whole Child Blog - Free Webinar; Hanging In: Working with Challenging Students — Whole Child Education
Free Webinar—Hanging In: Working with Challenging Students — Whole Child Education: THE WHOLE CHILD BLOGFree Webinar—Hanging In: Working with Challenging StudentsJanuary 24, 2014 by ASCD Whole Child BloggersJoin Jeffrey Benson, author of the ASCD book Hanging In: Strategies for Teaching the Students Who Challenge Us Most, for an exciting, free webinar on what you can do now for a challen