Personalizing Student Learning
Giving Students Voice and Choice in Their Learning
Students march into the classroom, one by one. They take their seats one by one. They get out their paper, pens and pencils, computers and whatever else they believe the teacher wants them to get out and then stare aimlessly at the front of the room, awaiting the directions for the day. But what if that wasn’t how the classroom ran? What if the classroom gave the students voice and choice in their learning? What if the students were the ones that decided the direction of their work? This is called personalized learning. This is where the teacher gives the students direction with content targets and then allows the students the chance to decide on how they are going to learn it and show their mastery of the content.
Personalized Learning has been all the rage, and with this new rage, I was on board with trying it out in my classroom. I read James Rickabaugh’s Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning and became ecstatic in handing over the learning to my students. The only problem I had was how to sell this idea to my students. Would they be open to the idea? How much work is it going to be for me with assessing everyone’s individual goals? Would they be able to come up with their own goals and execute them? Would they make serious goal choices? The only way that I was going to find out the answers to these questions was to try it out by throwing myself to the wolves.
Day one of implementation, I started off with the students listening to a financial analyst from the 50’s who talked about personal goals. The analyst, Earl Nightengale, geared his advice in the broadcast with how to become financially secure, but the content he spoke about was still relevant to the students on understanding how important goal setting is to be successful. After this listening activity, the students wanted to know where this listening assignment would take them on their educational journey. The next day I told them that I was going to be their coach with their goal making and that the goal setting was up to them. After I told the students this, I had about seventy-five percent of them scratching their heads, saying ‘huh’. This didn’t deter me, much. I was adamant about making sure I implemented this style of teaching for the sake of my research project and answering the questions I had about this teaching practice.
So the twenty-five percent that took to this new curriculum style was off and running, making their goals. The other seventy-five percent had either their hands up or were checked out, confused about what to do. Day after day, I would go from student to student to see what goal or goals they were working on. The students that were confused needed some ideas to get them started and the other students needed some marketing ploys to sell them on the idea. Then it was off to the races, trying to check in with every student every day: bending over to read something, sitting while listening to a presentation, acting out a scene from a story, watching a video to help comprehend a topic, and many, many more.
Teaching this way made me feel like I had absolutely no control of my classes. I felt like the volume was too loud, the content students’ chose to be a little under their potential, the quality of the work to be underwhelming, and the directions I gave confusing. But I didn’t give up. I continued the locomotive down the tracks, and it soon started to come together and pick up speed.
The students were catching on as was I. What I thought wasn’t a conducive learning environment wasn’t the case at all because the students were producing work. What I thought was content below students’ learning levels became their baseline on which to work off of. What I thought was underwhelming content became their first drafts and a discussion on what the students could do to improve upon their project by self-reflecting on what they did well and what they could do better. What I thought was confusing directions became a conversation piece with the students to discuss how I could improve my directions to make what they are doing more understandable — a wonderful learning experience for me.
Personalized learning isn’t for the faint of heart. It made me second guess myself and lose a lot of sleep, but it was worth it to see how the students grew and learned from their own set goals. Next semester I want to do the same thing with my kids, but I will use what I have learned this past quarter to help make next semester’s implementation of content an easier transition for the students. This type of teaching is a learning experience for both students and teachers. As a teacher, you need to realize what works best for you and your strengths as a teacher that will help student learning. If teachers listen to their students with what the students want to learn, it makes the students more engaged in their learning because they are the ones driving the train, creating and executing their own goals.
