Personalized Learning Tenets - Learner Profiles

It is my deeply held belief that school really should be about preparing kids for life, but not just in the traditional liberal arts view of exposing them to deep thinking and the power of learning and not just in the current fashion of economic preparedness that focuses on creating workers.  American public school should operate as an equalizer, giving all kids the opportunity to better themselves, to create their own world of opportunity, to open doors for them.  It should do so by giving kids learning experiences that are personal and common, customized and shared, unique and collaborative all at the same time. After thirteen years in school, our students should come out ready to greet the world with inquisitiveness, with an entrepreneurial and  innovative spirit, with a deep sense of inner creativity and a connection to the world that is both emotional and intellectual.  Kids should leave our high schools as young adults with a vision for the world and a dream for their own experience of that world.
Our district has been deeply diving into what personalized learning means for us and for the future of school for our students, teachers, parents, and community.  For us, the definition of personalized learning really revolves around the tenets you see in the graphic below.  I will be doing a series of five blogs postings talking about each one these tenets.

Each one of the tenets are essential to providing kids with a high quality, rigorous, and meaningful school experience that prepares them to be successful citizens and all around cool people. We believe that the tenets of personalized learning are the tools/processes/mindsets necessary to design school to prepare kids to be awesome college and career ready graduates.

Learner Profiles:
For us, a learner profile is the foundation of relationships with kids.  Kids learn best when they have strong relationships with caring adults.  A learner profile is one way to ensure that teachers know about their kids.  They need to know academic background, behavior background, attendance background.  They need to know about skills gaps and areas of deficiency. Teachers need to know about areas of strength and aptitude where kids excel. Teachers need to know about what kids find interesting, where they have ability, and what they can do.  It needs to include a portfolio of student work as well. This can be housed in a profile that kids, parents, and teachers can see and monitor and use.  This needs to be an easily accessible, intuitive, and focused platform that integrates information from a variety of places into one dashboard.

We see the learner profile also including a personalized learning plan that is co-created and monitored by teachers, students, and parents.  This PLP serves as a place to plan and track learning for the student towards demonstration of mastery of high school and beyond.  The tool for the PLP should be able to list the competencies and courses kids need to complete based on their plan and have a consistently updated progress monitor of that progress toward mastery. This is where kids take ownership, responsibility, and an active role in their own education.

The Learner Profile is more than a piece of software.  The PLP is more than a set of aspirations. The two tools work in concert to provide student voice, autonomy, and purpose to the educational process and act of doing school for kids and parents.  This is a radical shift from doing school TO kids and instead engaging in learning WITH kids.

Check out more at www.henry.k12.ga.us/personalizedlearning

Imp@ct

There is exciting work being done in our district.  We have just announced the launch of Imp@ct Academy .  This is our version of a full time virtual learning program.  With this first foray into full time enrollment online learning, our district is poised to meet the individual needs of a large segment of disruptive innovators.   We have decided that our best option that meets the needs of most kids is provide the opportunity to live in a blended world where students can take part in their education and academics online while still being "allowed" to be full time students at their home school.  Through Imp@ct Academy, students enroll in those classes that they want to meet core requirements, electives, and other academic requirements.  This isn't new and their are numerous examples of online academies throughout the state and nationwide.  Imp@ct is unique in that we make it a program of choice and not a stand alone charter or virtual school.  That allows students to participate in extracurriculars, athletics, and even some choice face to face instruction while taking the majority of their classload online.  It is really about giving students and parents the opportunity to begin to tailor their instructional journey to their needs and desires.  Bundling Imp@ct with the Academy for Advanced Studies and what it will become over the next two years means that students in Henry County now have the option to learn in the ways that work best for them, while taking a rigorous course load that will prepare them for college and careers.  It a break through for public schools to be flexible, creative, and customizable.

We are blending F2F options with online options and allowing students to change the game for themselves.  Now, you can play soccer at your home school, take 4 core courses online, take band at school, and then head over to the Academy for Advanced Studies to complete your pathway for culinary arts.  Its an open campus model, a customizable educational model, a way to make learning work for kids and it is the right work.
It is so exciting to be in the midst of this game changing work where we design systems and programs that allow students' needs to be met utilizing technology, creativity, and a devotion that learning is the constant. 

Starting another school year...

In a two weeks, teachers will be back at school doing all the regular getting ready for Open House and the first day things that we do before welcoming students on August 1.  For the past three years, we have been attempting to create a blended learning environment for our students.  We have pushed our teachers beyond their limits of creativity, technological savvy, and willingness to work with dated machines and a lack of training and knowledge.  And they have risen to the challenge.  They have created meaningful work for students in our LMS, they have learned to manage it well, and they have learned that there is power to using software that promotes and supports learning beyond the school day.  They have also learned that limited resources truly limits what can be accomplished. 

I have lamented on this blog before, how difficult it has been to implemented our version of a blended learning school when we have 60 laptops (20 of which don't really work and another 10 that are missing so many keys that they might as well not work) and one computer lab for teachers to show kids how to gain access to the LMS, what the work is, what it looks and feels like, and maybe even to do work on.  It has been a mighty struggle to personalize education and to harness the power of an LMS and coursework and instruction that is digital and automated when kids can't get to it.  Its been even more of a struggle trying to turn my dedicated teachers into developers.  Our district doesn't have the funds to buy hardware and they surely don't have the funds or the will to buy content for our online course work beyond a great math intervention tool that is purchased for our special education students.

There is high hopes that we will be able to do more as the special purpose local option sales tax is floated to the community in November that we will raise the money to outfit schools with the basics needed to really start to fly.  But, we aren't there yet. 

As I watch the two symposia responsibility for assessment under RT3 and I watch our state DOE develop evaluation systems based on survey data and value added growth assessments and I watch the cheating scandal in Atlanta unfold, I am struck that technology could really provide efficient and effective tools to combat some of the logistical problems associated with all of those items.  The discussions and cultural shifts that go along with the logistical issues are clearly leadership challenges that will push our ability to understand adult learning theory and change theory.  But, many of the solutions that technology answers require their to be end user devices in the hands of the students and teachers.  It requires their to be bandwidth to give students with those devices to access the Internet and the web-based tools they need to do the productive work of learning. 

We have a fairly well off district.  We are not considered poor, although we are inching our way in that direction as the housing boom continues to send after-shocks from the fall out.  We are better off than most in the State of Georgia.  We have been good stewards of our dollars.  There are one hundred other districts in Georgia in a similar or worse position.  There are countless districts around the country who may have the will, but not the way to adopt technology tools that could really disrupt and innovate. 

I am waiting for it....

Change Agents

In a recent conversation with a parent whose children attend my school, the book "Tribes" by Seth Godin came up.  I picked up and have started reading through it. Its really a book about inspiring people to be innovative leaders in areas that are what Clay Christianson and Michael Horn have called disruptive innovations.  The basic premise is that we are all part of different tribes and that the internet has allowed those tribes to not be constrained by time or geography. But the kicker is not just being a member of a tribe, but rather gaining credibility and becoming a leader of those tribes so that you can move out of the muddle and be amazing.  The vignettes in the book speak of members of corporations and communities who have taken ideas and spread them and fertilized them and nurtured them into existence and allowed them to flourish. It is about influence, power, and innovation and that leadership is really about harnessing the tools to rally folks to an idea and then give those who follow the ability to flourish with freedom.  None of the ideas are really new ones or groundbreaking from other leadership texts I have been exposed to, but the tone and energy is definitely spirited and designed to enthuse and inspire. 

I mention this in this blog because I would like to have our push to build a blended learning environment inspire our staff and faculty to be leaders of a new tribe of teachers who are not constrained by budgetary constraints or bureacracy and are able to push out and expand the possibilities of individualizing instruction and learning for students.  As Michael Horne writes in his blogs at the Innosight Institute and how he highlighted in a recent open letter to Massachusetts Secretary of Education, setting up barriers to blocking the improvement of online learning and access and funding for students is a no win situation. It merely maintains a system that relies on the social contract tacitly agreed to by schools and parents that we will provide a safe orderly day care environment for your child so that you can go to work from 8-4 and if your lucky, we will educate your kids a little along the way.  The prevalent thinking is that they will get educated if they want to learn, if they work hard at it, and if they learn in the ways and pace that adults, who have different degrees of investment in the process, set. We also all agree that mastery of any content or skill level isn't really that important as long as the "grades" are good and my child doesn't get in any big trouble.  It extends to say that we would really like our child to go to a good university or college when they are old enough to no longer need the supervision schools provide.  This link to a blog posting from Innosight talks about the how the structure of school supports this social contract.

Now, that view highlights the more cynical parts of the institution of public schools in America, but if we are honestly examining ourselve, we realize that it isn't really that far off from reality.  Seth Godin's book would suggest that those who want to move away from this social contract schools have entered into and create a new one could be leaders of the Tribes.  The power of his book is that tribe leaders come from anywhere and can be at any level of an organization.  Who will be the leaders of these tribes?

Leading Blended Learning

As a middle school principal in suburban Atlanta, it has been exciting to be engaged in leading our school in a blended learning initiative that includes an online course blended with face to face instruction in every single academic classroom. We have learned so much in our first year about how to best integrate the Learning Management System, about the limitations we have in time and resources, and how frustrating it can be when not all your systems are integrated. I hope this blog will be a place to discuss what we learn, to hear from others with their experiences, and maybe even a place to push my own ideas out there. With iste wrapped up for the year and the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year right around the corner, there is so much to do.

Our school has chosen, both as a cost savings on the front end and to help us control the content, to build our own courses from scratch. We utilize ANGEL as our LMS and we have had to largely train ourselves on how to use the tools of ANGEL. It is not the best way to do to it, but I would rather be crawling forward than sitting still and we had to use what was available to us. Of course, I believe that if we had ready made content that teachers could integrate as different modules into their own courses, they would use it more often and more efficiently, but the dollars don't add up and therefore we have to create, find, and build all of our own courses.

It does serve as a model for other schools, though, on how to integrate 21st century tools without all the money, resources, hardware, and/or software that you want.