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

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?