Personalized learning has taken off in high-powered charter schools. Now proponents are faced with figuring out how to make it work for everyone.

On lengths of yarn stretched between chairs, sixth-grade math students were placing small yellow squares of paper, making number lines—including everything from fractions to negative decimals—in a classroom at Walsh Middle School. Working in teams one recent morning, they paper-clipped the squares along the yarn like little pieces of mathematical laundry.

Their teacher, Michele O'Connor, had assigned the number lines in previous years, but this year was different. She, personally, hadn't spent much time leading students through practice problems or introducing the basic math concepts they would use in the project. That had largely been relegated to online math lessons, part of separate periods of learning time when students were free to work through computer-based lessons in any subject they chose, at their own pace.

The change at Walsh, located in Framingham, Massachusetts, is part of a nationwide pilot program, one that could indicate just how deeply and how quickly the personalized-learning trend will penetrate the average classroom. Indeed, despite the buzz around personalized learning, there's no simple recipe for success, and the common ingredients — such as adaptive-learning technology and student control over learning — can backfire if poorly implemented.

A looming question is whether personalized learning that works in, say, a tight-knit, mission-driven charter school can be reliably translated into traditional district schools with many more students, less flexible schedules, keener standardized-test worries and cultures steeped in established ways of teaching and learning.

Some passionately believe that it can and must, while skeptics fear that personalized-learning hype has outpaced research into if and, importantly, how it helps students. The pilot Walsh joined could be a big part of the answer.

It's led by one of the most celebrated leaders of the blended- and personalized-learning movement, California-based charter network Summit Public Schools. For the last two years, Summit has set out to replicate its success, not by opening more Summit schools, but by offering other schools free tools, training and support to transform themselves. The centerpiece of Summit's franchising effort is their Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, a free, open-sourced learning management system that boasts a full curriculum for grades 6 through 12, including projects, online learning resources and tests. Teachers and administrators from interested schools can apply to join Summit Basecamp, which includes an intensive week-long summer training session on Summit's technology and approach. Basecamp schools then receive mentoring from and troubleshooting by Summit staff, as well as PLP access throughout the academic year.

Summit's Basecamp is far from the only personalized-learning effort out there, but it's among the most ambitious. Nineteen pilot schools participated in 2015; this year, the number skyrocketed, with 119 more joining the Basecamp ranks. More than two-thirds of them are district-run schools.

Bits of student performance data are only just starting to trickle out of the pilot schools, so it's too early to quantitatively assess most of them. Qualitatively, however, some broad themes emerged in visits and conversations with teachers, administrators, students and parents at several Basecamp schools. For most schools, the jump into personalized-learning was really hard. Tales abound of frustrated teachers, crying students and flummoxed parents. Still, the Basecamp participants said they overcame the rocky starts and that any school can follow their lead if its teachers and students are willing to shed old assumptions, comfortable routines and a few tears along the way.
Enhancing Education

One early November afternoon in Sunnyvale, about an hour's drive south of San Francisco, a class of ninth-graders at Summit Denali sat at computers for a 45-minute session of personalized learning time (some days, there are two sessions). Many watched instructional videos or worked with adaptive-learning software that adjusted lessons based on each student's proficiency. Other than a few murmured conversations and the clicking of keyboards, the only sound was mellow acoustic guitar music played on their teacher's laptop. Their school director, Kevin Bock, stood by the door.

"We put the music on because it used to get too quiet in here, and it weirded people out," Bock whispered.Among people new to the Summit program, such scenes of silent, computer-based work can arouse worries that personalized learning means parking kids in front of screens. So it was with parents at one of the first Basecamp schools, Marshall Pomeroy Elementary in Milpitas, a small city off the southern tip of San Francisco Bay.

"Our days aren't as long as Summit's days, and so we have to send some of the [personalized-learning time] home as homework," said Sheila Murphy-Brewer, principal of Marshall Pomeroy. As a result, she said, during the school's first Basecamp year in 2015, "many parents were thinking, 'oh, this is just about kids being on the computer.'" The school has since done more parent outreach to combat that misperception.

Back at Summit Denali, Bock said the goal of personalized-learning time is not to replace teacher-student interactions but to enhance them. By offloading some rote learning to a computer—such as memorizing the steps of cell division or the formulas for sine, cosine and tangent—"we can make the most of the connections between teachers and kids," he said. "We want more of those interactions to be about big ideas, deeper learning and the sort of feedback that you can only get from a real, live adult."

Those connections start with one-on-one mentoring, in which teachers meet with students weekly to discuss short-term goals, such as completing a certain number of units in a history course, and long-term goals that stretch into college and career. Mentor time is also meant to reinforce "habits of success," such as time management and persistence.

"My long-term goal is to go to Stanford and major in aerospace engineering," said Christina Nguyen, a ninth-grader at Summit Denali. Nguyen was working on quadratic equations with her friend, Chloe Starbird, who had recently discussed summer internship options with her mentor in pursuit of a career in medicine or biogenetics.
A Huge Adjustment

Back at Walsh Middle School in Framingham, O'Connor said Summit's approach "opened up a little more room for creativity and higher-level thinking in the [number-line] project."

"I'm not spoon-feeding them anything," she explained. "That's a relief, because there's a lot less of me trying to run around and help everybody with little details, and more of us having conversations about math."

Still, asking preteens to guide their own learning "was a huge adjustment, for everybody," said O'Connor. At the start of the year, her students were often frustrated, and she had to resist the urge to step in and rescue them. For nearly two months of school, she said, "It was tough. There were tears."

While her students worked, O'Connor circulated among them, asking questions and steering chatter back to math. Later, she would grade not the number lines themselves, but the explanations students gave for the placement and spacing of each number. The students were typing those explanations into a page on PLP, and would later present them to the class.

Summit requires Basecamp schools to follow its practice of basing 30 percent of grades on mastery of content and 70 percent on students' use of various cognitive skills, such as making inferences and clearly communicating their ideas. Summit partnered with Stanford's Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity to develop the rubric for evaluating the cognitive skills in each grade.

While Summit's PLP does include tests of content knowledge for each subject, students take them only when they feel ready and, if they fail, can re-take them until they pass. Some Walsh parents, such as Paula Swift, whose sixth-grade son, Trevor, is in the Summit program, are fully supportive of this "mastery-based" grading.

"My son comes home so excited when he passes a focus area," Swift wrote in an email. "I've never seen him react to school so well."

Other parents are puzzled by the approach. "I've definitely heard from at least 10 parents who are like, ‘I don't know what's going on,' " O'Connor said. " ‘Is this good for my child?' "
Her students seemed less ambivalent. "You get to take tests over again, and you get to see what you've done wrong, instead of just getting a bad grade and leaving it like that," said Stephen Boulas. "That's something I like about Summit."

"It's so much better," said Brooke Williams, who sat on the classroom floor with her Chromebook in her lap, adjusting her number line. "I used to fail a lot of math tests. But now, I love school math, because I'm learning better."
Need for Guidance

There's tremendous hype swirling around personalized learning, with money pouring in from foundations and education technology companies eager to capitalize on the trend. Still, there are some stalwart critics, notably Benjamin Riley, who visited many personalized-learning classrooms from 2010 to 2014 as the policy and advocacy director for the NewSchools Venture Fund. Shortly after leaving that post, Riley planted his skeptic's flag with an oft-cited blog post titled, "Don't Personalize Learning."

Riley, who now leads Deans for Impact, a nonprofit he founded to improve teacher training, argued that putting students in charge of their learning defies research on how we learn best. According to Riley, the personalized learning advocates wrongly assume that all students are able to effectively guide their own learning. "Knowledge is cumulative," he wrote, meaning that our ability to learn is changed by what we already know. Teachers guide students through the foundational knowledge they need to think critically about a topic, to structure their inquiries for learning more and to understand new information when they encounter it.

Logically, this concern about the need for guidance heightens with novice learners. The Summit program was designed for high school students and expanded to middle schools. While some Basecamp educators think Summit's model could work at every grade, others are more cautious. Pleasant View Elementary in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, started Summit with fifth-graders in 2015, and this year introduced a few aspects of the approach to fourth-graders. Pleasant View's principal, Colleen Loughlin, said she has no plans to expand Summit to the whole school.

"When you have little ones, it's harder to do the full, self-directed learning. There needs to be a lot more scaffolding and support," said Loughlin, singling out her school's structured and deliberate literacy instruction. "We need to set a strong foundation. We don't want to create gaps in our learning for our little ones."

Last year, according to Summit administrators, 74 percent of Summit students met or exceeded Common Core standards for English Language Arts on California's state tests, compared to 49 percent of students statewide, and 51 percent of Summit students met or exceeded the standards for math, compared to 37 percent statewide. The college acceptance rate for Summit graduates perennially pushes 100 percent.

Nevertheless, in a phone interview, Riley pointed out that there isn't much rigorous research showing what aspects of the model specifically lead to that student success. Is it more about the personalized learning, for instance, or the super-committed and highly skilled teachers?

"I would be shocked if Summit was not an excellent school, because I believe [Summit founder and CEO] Diane Tavenner cares deeply about pedagogy and instruction," Riley said. "But that shouldn't necessarily be the model that we're all rushing out to replicate throughout our education system, because I can point to examples that I've seen time and again where personalized learning isn't working."

Even some of personalized learning's biggest backers admit that it's easy to get it wrong.

"Folks like Ben [Riley] have a valid point," said Beth Rabbitt, CEO of The Learning Accelerator, a nonprofit that works to scale up blended and personalized learning. "Personalized learning is easy to bastardize. It's easy to do it superficially."

Last August, for instance, the Center on Reinventing Public Education published a brief field report from their ongoing study of personalized-learning initiatives warning that some schools focus on the "iconography" of personalized learning — the technology or the project-based learning — but sacrifice rigor.

In fact, some experts would argue that if the transition to personalization is easy, then you're probably doing it wrong.

"When I walk into a classroom and see all the kids on a computer, mostly on the same screen, and the teacher is moving around the room like a test proctor, that is where we've gone way wrong and need to right the ship," said Shawn Rubin, chief education officer for the Highlander Institute, a Rhode Island nonprofit that promotes education innovation.




Note: If this article has helped, please feel free to share. If you'd like to participate and post an article, please send your submissions to info@certificationpoint.org


—————————————---
MARKETING & PROMOTION
—————————————---

Check Out Our Video!
A Smarter Way To Collaborate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hyRxJvIXNR0

Register @ CertificationPoint!
—————————————
https://www.certificationpoint.org/member/index.php?command=signup_page

Find Out More About Student FreelanceWork EXperience Builders
——————————————————————————--------
http://www.certificationpoint.org/stude ... elance.php

Take An Exam Today @ CertificationPoint
——————————--------------------------
http://certificationpoint.net/register.php

APPRENTICESHIPS @ CERTIFICATIONPOINT
——————————-----------------------------------
http://www.certificationpoint.org/Apprenticeship.php

INVESTING IN CERTIFICATIONPOINT
——————————-----------------------
http://www.certificationpoint.org/invest.php

SOCIAL MEDIA
———————
Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/@certpointorg
Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CertificationPoint
Find us on Google+: https://plus.google.com/117737803640713546061
Find us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/certificationpoint/
Find us on Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/certificationpoint
Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/certification-point-65a1642b
Find us on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/certoken/

Additional Options For SHARING CertificationPoint
——————————————————-------------
https://www.scribd.com/document/696921433/CertificationPoint-Manifesto
https://www.scribd.com/document/696921430/CertificationPoint-Student-Poster
https://www.scribd.com/document/696921429/CertificationPoint-Student-Flyer
https://www.scribd.com/document/696921428/CertificationPoint-Inc-Course-Catalog-2024
https://www.scribd.com/document/696921427/CertificationPoint-Magazine