Kids don’t need trophies, just challenges

Changing the blueprint for elementary education

In my two years in education, I have worked with dozens of volunteers. Just a few weeks after I started training and coaching volunteers, I could already sort them into batches. There were kind-eyed altruists whose selflessness bloomed. They took on extra tasks and sought advice like a treasure. There were quiet observers who focused on the mission and imagined what they might contribute. There were independent people, some of them former educators, who sped through training. They didn’t wait for answers from a person as new as myself.

But as a newcomer to education as a profession, I understood this: The old foundations of education are not working for children, just as the old foundations of family, culture, and career are not working for adults. The basics will always be important, sure. All kids need reading, writing, arithmetic, and fresh air, right? But the world and the workforce have shifted, and our approach to education has to shift as well. The monoliths of academic tradition and practice are crumbling, but we’re still standing around the building catching falling rocks. We can hold on to some pieces, but the shape of it has to change.

So how can we make learning meaningful for children in the thick of the twenty-first century?

Here’s one idea: Personalized learning. On face, it sounds like another word for individualized attention—which is a piece of the old monolith we should, of course, maintain. But personalized learning means more than just low student-teacher ratios. Personalized learning is the practice of creating a flexible learning environment where students use a variety of tools—online curricula, independent work, whole group lessons, and small group exploration or remediation—to master objectives at a pace suited to, but always challenging to, them. This doesn’t mean that every kid gets a trophy just for showing up and knowing what they know. It means that, besides mastering important standards, students also find personal reward in challenging, self-directed learning. Many schools are doing personalized learning right. And from my corner of the education landscape, in the elementary school where I work, we are studying and taking notes. Here’s what we know:

In an ideal personalized learning environment, teachers support students as individuals. Students, in turn, gain a dramatic sense of agency. For teachers, this means having the space, materials, and resources to coach and challenge all learners, all days. From the first day of school until the last, teachers create meaningful relationships with their students to intensify learning. Recess is an opportunity to draw out interactions with students and inject new, “tier two” vocabulary into conversations. English Language Learners and native speakers alike learn to self-advocate and develop oral language skills. We model for students how to connect with adults and peers. We imbue them with a sense of social understanding and responsibility. When learning is personal, students know they have a place here—that all kinds of backgrounds and voices matter. Our kindergarteners have written poetry to tell their peers who they are: “I am from Mexico and the smell of apples.”

Personalization is also threaded into lesson plans and teaching structures. Students all along the mastery bell curve should have their needs met. For students who struggle with core skills, special education staff can push into classrooms or pull students out for small group parallel teaching, skill practice, or remediation. Gifted and talented students can take part in similar parallel groups or move on to independent challenges. First graders who finish online ST Math curricula move on to coding games.

For students, personalization means never feeling overwhelmed, but never feeling bored either. They should get a phenomenal set of core skills, and those skills should set them free to explore. They can crack open the piggy bank and let the coins spill out. A blended learning rotation model gives students small group time with teachers (and ideally there are multiple teaachers), as well as independent time to apply and stretch learning. In Cognitively Guided Instruction (math), students are not told how to solve a type of problem. We challenge them to find strategies effective for them as individuals, as long as they can explain exactly what they did and why.

Our students know that the best learning is meaningful on both an individual and a collaborative level. To learn about 3D shapes, they didn’t just look at pictures of cubes and cones (or watch Avatar). They drew up blueprints as independent work, then partnered with classmates to architect a city out of index cards. The rules: As long as the foundation is strong and won’t crumble, the shapes and structures are up to you.