In the modern world, students expect personalized experiences everywhere—from their curated social media feeds to their custom music playlists to their entertainment recommendations. Everywhere, that is, except school. For most students, education remains stubbornly one-size-fits-all. Let’s face the facts: Traditional textbooks, activities, and other premade materials simply can’t cover the wide variety of interests, hobbies, and other rabbit holes our students are into. This makes sense, of course—big publishers are often writing for tens of thousands of students across the country or even the globe. While they often do a great job of finding interesting “universal” topics, they struggle to create materials that truly connect with each individual learner. Instead, teachers are being asked to fill in the gaps. But how can overburdened educators possibly customize learning for every student?
Inclusion. Differentiation. Personalization. We all know that if we could live up to these goals, we could better engage our students and ensure that they feel a sense of belonging. Most educators are already overwhelmed, and while we’d love to build more inclusive practices, we barely have time to get through our curriculum as it is. Luckily, tech is here to help us out. Let’s look at some ways to use tech to make sure that we’re teaching in a way that’s responsive to our students and gives them agency in their learning.
Fully Differentiated Content
One of the best ways to show a student that they belong is to show them that they are seen. If you’re teaching about the volume of spheres in geometry class, for example, you can ask AI to give you custom examples of the same mathematical concepts, matched to the interests of your students.
Let’s say I ask ChatGPT for activity ideas for students with different interests: Juan who loves skateboarding, Wei Lin who loves making TikTok dance videos, Abdul who loves dog sitting, and Darcy who loves all things Halloween. Below are different personalized questions from ChatGPT students can tackle while all using the same formula:
- Juan: How much concrete would be needed to build a skate bowl that two people could comfortably skate in at the same time?
- Wei Lin: You’ve been asked to make a video in an emptied-out, hemisphere-shaped pool that is 16 feet in diameter. How many dancers can comfortably fit in the pool and complete their dance routine?
- Abdul: You’re using a 3D printer to design a spherical dog food scoop. If the scoop needs to hold exactly 2 cups of kibble, what diameter should you make it?
- Darcy: You want to buy enough dry ice for a cauldron you’re planning to put out on Halloween. If the dry ice needs to last for 3 hours without refilling, what size cauldron do you need?
Each of these explorations in spherical volume are interesting enough to each student that they wouldn’t mind spending time figuring out the answer. Still, if students aren’t hooked, you could always flip the responsibility back on them: Have students ask a chatbot to come up with activities based on their interests, then show their favorite option to you before they begin their customized work.
Polling, Not Controlling
If you want to truly give agency to your students, consider whether your content has the flexibility to be open to thematic units where students can overlay their preferred topics onto the work you are doing in class. In a conversation class I teach for multilingual learners, I provide the structure for the class (language points we need for clarity, communication strategies, flexible activities, etc.) and the students choose the thematic topic that we overlay onto the structure I’ve built. First, I collect topics that the whole class might be interested in, either by having them write their ideas on the board or by submitting to a word cloud using online tools like Mentimeter or Poll Everywhere. Then, I consolidate the answers and put them into a rankable polling feature, both of which are available from these tools.
One of the best ways to show a student that they belong is to show them that they are seen.
Ranking topics allows students to order all the suggestions from their favorite to their least favorite and gives them a say in all of the options rather than just picking their “top choice.” Even if a student’s favorite idea wasn’t selected by the class, everybody has a fair shot and the collective class voice is respected. Additionally, students know that they’ll get another chance to use their preferred topic in a few weeks as you move through units. I keep the same tool ready to go, then I simply delete the topic(s) we’ve already used and poll students again. This ensures that each unit theme is selected by the students, and all of the choices were developed by the class. While not every content area will be flexible enough to offer students full thematic choice, consider the ways you can implement polling for things like rotation stations or individual activities.
Hearing Our Students
Even though technology has made it possible to communicate in all sorts of different ways, at school we tend to still focus on the written word. While writing absolutely has its place, we would do well to consider which of our assignments absolutely require compositional writing to show work, and which might be done just as well (if not better) through spoken word, videos, or other media. Keep in mind that hearing our students’ voices or watching them physically work through the solution to a problem can give us a much broader set of insights into how well they understand a concept.
If the idea of adding multimedia into the learning process sounds daunting, start simple with a tool like Mote, which allows students to add quick audio notes to any document (great for Google Slides!). If you don’t want to do any setup or don’t have the capacity to learn a new tool right now, you can simply change the submission type in your LMS to only accept videos—just make sure your students have the tools and knowledge to make a video on their own.
Making little shifts to your pedagogy can change a student’s understanding of their involvement and ownership around their own learning. Implementing a few techniques to align your curriculum or classroom activities with the way students understand the world can go a long way toward helping them feel seen, heard, and valued in your classroom. As always, start slowly by testing these ideas out, and then see if you can build on them as you see how your students react. You’ll find that there are always ways to show students that they belong.
