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

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....