Richard Culatta identified three major problems with education in his TEDX talk. First, educators tend to treat all learners the same despite their own unique needs and challenges. Second, educators will keep the schedule consistent regardless of the length of time that a class requires to learn. Third, the performance data we gather comes too late to be useful to children. One of the solutions offered to these challenges is to implement personalized learning.

Every student learns differently. This is one of the first principles taught in TE-150. It is foolish to think otherwise. Why is it then that we treat all of our classes the exact same? In the post No Child Left Behind world it is easy for an educator to find themselves too focused on test scores. This is especially prominent in private schools.

At a private school, standardized scores can be the determining factor in whether or not parents trust a school with the education of their children. A private school the writer of this blog previously worked at emphasized test scores above all else. In the months leading up to the IOWA test, educators were supposed to prep for the test while still covering the curriculum. As time was an issue, lessons were moved through very fast. Students were left behind and teachers were too pressed for time to personalize their learning experience. As a rookie teacher, it was very overwhelming. Sam Redding offers a solution to this problem.

In his article Through the Student’s Eyes: A Perspective on Personalized Learning and Practice Guide for Teachers, Sam Redding offers solutions and guides. Redding argues that the personal aspirations and self-efficacy perceptions of a student drive their motivation to learn. The words and actions of a teacher decide how receptive students can and will be. Therefore, it is up to the teacher to use their words and actions in a personalized way to reach each student. Setting individual goals for the students helps them to take ownership. To achieve these ends, Redding has created several lesson planning templates to use in the classroom. These templates are simple and allow a teacher to easily personalize their lesson plans. By guiding the teacher to achieving personalization, Redding has given relief to the overwhelmed teacher. (Redding 2013)

While Redding supports personalized learning, he does not advocate using technology in the classroom. Redding believes that an over reliance on technology can be problematic for a student. While he offers many helpful solutions to educators, Redding is also an example of the learning divide that Culatta identified. In his writing, Redding believes that technology should only be used as a complementary aid, not as a main teaching tool. In this way, Redding seems to only digitize education, not reimagine it. (Redding 2013)

In order to re-imagine learning, we must adapt technology for the needs of the individual student while keeping the overall class goal in mind. Re-imagining is not necessarily easy. In Assembling Learning Objects for Personalized Learning: An AI Planning Perspective, Antonio Garrido and Eva Onaindia examine the process a teacher must follow to successfully re-imagine personalized learning for the computer. Garrido and Onaindia argue that the tools to develop a course are not hard to find. However, they feel that these tools are rarely suited to be reused and must be unique to every situation. In order to personalize e-learning, the educator must first identify which learning objective they want to achieve. From there, the educator can develop several different education paths for a student to follow. Garrido and Onaindia believe that is acceptable for a teacher to begin with one program from the class and then slowly change it to match the needs of the individual students. They offer their own methods and ideas on how to do this in their guide. (Garrido and Onaindia 2013)

Using these two guides, teachers can begin to adapt their classroom for personalized learning. By breaking down the problems and offering simple guides and solutions, these academic papers allow educators to begin to overcome the learning divide in technology. As teachers become more comfortable with re-imagining technology, personalized learning can be used to overcome the problems identified by Richard Cullata.

By reading these articles, one should realize that personalized learning is not an impossible goal. More importantly, there is no one approach to personalized learning. Redding, Garrido, and Onaindia are makers. They each took the concept of personalized learning and transformed it for the environments they teach in.While these guides can be used to help a teacher adapt their curriculum to personalized learning, they should not be regarded as the absolute end of transformation. As a maker, educators must continue to transform the ideas of others in order to make it fit in their classroom with their kids. As long as we practice transformation, we can not only bring these new ideas into our classroom, we can make them work. The questions is, will you continue practicing transformation? Will you remix personalized learning into your own teaching style? Will you instead just digitize the learning? The choice is yours.

References:
Garido, Antonia and Eva Onaindia. (2013). Assembling Learning Objects for Personalized Learning: An AI Planning Perspective. IEEE intelligent systems, Volume 28, Issue 2. Retrieved from Serial Solutions

Redding, Sam. (2013). Through the Student’s Eyes: A Perspective on Personalized Learning and Practice Guide for Teachers. Center on Innovations in Learning, Temple University. Retrieved from ERIC