Leveraging Customization to “Do More”
Educators adapt. Whether that is by choice in adjusting how they teach a particular topic from one class to another, or forced change as a pandemic disrupts their routine, they modify how they teach and what they teach to better serve their students. CK-12, through the customization tools integral to the platform, empowers teachers and districts to adapt curriculum easily to meet a variety of strategic goals and to personalize learning for students.
With the above in mind, we sat down with Bridget Mariano from Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) to learn more about the drive behind the district’s decision to adapt and create their own resources, specifically those they have created as FlexBooks® on www.ck12.org.
Bridget began with the district’s strategic framework and graduate profile, which center learning on the student, aiming to truly prepare them for their future. Instead of only addressing specific requirements or preparing for assessment, customization has allowed her to focus on more than just a single skill or individual content piece and use the common threads across the district’s framework, their profile, and educational standards to “do more.”
Go Beyond Content Standards and Assessment
One major piece of this “doing more” relates to the district’s second goal of their strategic framework, “Student Well-Being,” which includes the ideas of creating an inclusive environment and strengthening social-emotional skills. One particularly relevant strategy within this is to “more deeply integrate social-emotional learning (SEL) into the PreK-12 curriculum.” This inclusion of SEL is part of that “more” that Bridget noted they can do:
“We can have the same content standards, the same ‘what do they need to know’ or ‘what should they be able to do’ delivered and have the students experience it in multiple different ways that might support other things like their social emotional learning capacities.”
Make Learning Authentic for Students Now …
The third goal in their strategic framework, “Student Ownership of Learning,” covers strategies that incorporate real-world connections and authentic learning experiences. Providing opportunities where students can see themselves represented in the curriculum can assist in engagement and supports inclusivity, a component of the “culturally responsive practices” noted in the district’s “Student Well-Being” goal. Similarly, CK-12’s mission focuses on truly addressing the uniqueness of students and their personal learning journeys. With technology where it is today and the ability to customize the content on CK-12, we’ve seen a district add in video of a Mars landing, noting that the testing for the parachute was done just down the road, while another shared with us a story of students collecting data from the local lake and incorporating that into the curriculum. Instead of only learning about other communities from someone else’s perspective, students were able both to contribute to the resources of their district and have their curriculum reflect their own experience. Bridget commented on this authenticity as well, stating “I think the ability to swap out the images and/or scenarios in the text resources with local context and pictures of things that the students see in their lives every day is powerful.”
… and in the Future
She further expanded this idea of authenticity to talk about how customized curriculum can benefit students as they gain a better understanding of what they want to do after high school. She used to teach Chemistry, and used that as an example, noting that if a teacher had a large number of students who planned to go into medicine, their extension activities might deal with organic chemistry and biochemistry. Alternatively, if they had a class where many wanted to go into mechanical engineering, they might spend more time on plastics and material science. These extensions aren’t part of the core curriculum, but help link academics and potential careers, and they tie back into the district’s push for “Student Ownership of Learning,” specifically related to planning for postsecondary goals. Bridget summed up this vision of hers well, saying:
“Once we know what kids want to be when they grow up, let’s get the textbook to get them there.”
Allow Students to Access Learning Opportunities
Helping students get to where they want to be may benefit from one more piece of customization, that of being able to support more rigorous coursework through the integration of prerequisite skills and adjusted lexile levels. VBCPS’ first strategic goal, “Educational Excellence,” focuses on both challenging and supporting students so that they can excel academically. By starting with curriculum or resources, like the FlexBooks® provided by CK-12, and adapting them further to incorporate underlying ideas and spiraling back to them as needed, students who might have switched schools or districts, or simply been unaware of an opportunity to take a prerequisite course, aren’t limited from deciding to take a more advanced course. Similarly, Bridget discussed AP courses, where the lexile level of the curriculum is generally higher. Adapting phrasing and the complexity of sentences can allow for equally rigorous content learning, but make it accessible to students with varied reading levels. Both of these examples help address equity and access for all students, encouraging them to excel and to work toward their postsecondary goals.
Create Opportunities for Lifelong Learning
The final point that Bridget brought up was the fact that these resources created by the district aren’t like a physical textbook that students have to turn in when the class ends. This allows for self-driven review by students even after they have taken a course. Noting that students tend to “pay more attention to the classes that are closely associated with their career goals,” she discussed the benefit of being able to go back and review an introductory Biology course, for example, if a student later discovered they wanted to sign up for Anatomy and Physiology. Whether to prepare for another course in high school or college, or simply to review ideas in the course of a career, this continuation of access allows students to take advantage of these resources throughout their lives.
The hope is that the above ideas will engage, challenge, and support all students in their learning journey and prepare them for the future. Incorporating these varied goals into a class may seem daunting, but through the ability to customize, such as that provided by CK-12, we believe it can happen.
Written by Katie Hamon, Senior Program Manager, CK-12 Foundation.
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Note: The strategic framework and graduate profile referenced in this article are products of VBCPS and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the CK-12 Foundation.
