The benefits of personalized learning outweigh the challenges: students benefit from personalized instruction throughout the school day; teachers are able to respond effectively to individual students’ strengths and weaknesses; and learning becomes more relevant to students’ lives. Learn more about different elements and strategies to implement personalized learning in your class from James Rickabaugh, Mike Anderson, Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda, and other education experts. Start exploring personalized learning with this selection of resources just released on ASCD myTeachSource.®
Solving the Problem of “Teaching to the Middle” (ASCD Express)
For innovative teaching practices to be successful, they must be linked to real problems of practice. See how a teacher leverages personalization and technology to move from teaching to the middle to teaching all students.
The Institute for Personalized Learning provides an in-depth description of personalized learning and outlines how it can be used in the classroom. The website includes professional development offerings and accounts by real teachers who use personalized learning in their classroom.
This Educational Leadership article details how using online quizzes and grade books helps students understand exactly what they need to do to improve.
These four elements can spark intrinsic motivation for English language learners and other students.
Essential questions frame standards through relevant, student-driven inquiry. Here are several standard-aligned examples of lessons that are driven by authentic inquiry and supported by technology.
Differentiation expert Carol Ann Tomlinson is excited about the potential of personalization but suggests that school leaders who are considering implementing a specific personalized approach seriously think through the implications the changes involved will have for all elements of their school’s system—and what further changes or resources they will need to make personalization work well for all students and teachers.
Benjamin Riley asserts that some findings of cognitive science conflict with key principles of personalized learning—that students should control the content and pace of their learning.
Toward a More Student-Drive Practice (Book)
This chapter from Students at the Center explores the seven key elements of personalized learning: goals, inquiry/idea generation, task and audience, evaluation, cumulative demonstration of learning, instructional plan, and feedback.
A teacher describes how she redesigned a project to personalize learning, keeping her students’ unique interests in mind.
Teachers need to mix the components of personalized learning to achieve the right balance of teacher and student control.
This teacher-friendly guide offers examples of choice in action, ideas to try, and a step-by-step process for planning and incorporating choice into your classroom.
Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda show how teachers can adjust classroom practices to facilitate personalized learning that is self-directed, dynamic, sometimes messy, and always meaningful.
Personalized learning is a progressively student-driven model of instruction that amplifies student voice, co-creation, social construction, and self-discovery. In this useful guide, authors Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick explain the four attributes of personalized learning, provide tips to build student readiness in the classroom, and describe the seven elements of progressively student-driven learning.
Check out this research-based, field-tested, step-by-step leaders’ guide to implementing personalized learning in schools.
This issue of Educational Leadership explores the triumphs and challenges of personalized learning, offering insights from classroom teachers and respected experts about what works to personalize learning—and what does not.
