May 30, 2024

Taking the Leap of Faith into Personalized Learning

My team and I had just finished presenting at an education conference on the work our school was doing with personalized learning. The session had gone well, and many hung back to talk. Some communicated being inspired; others expressed frustrations about wanting to do this work, but not being able to.
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Our school had committed to school wide personalized learning initiatives that looked different at each level. This was the early stages of the personalized learning movement, but being a full IB school, we were committed to a holistic core in each program. It was an easy fit for the primary (PYP) and middle years programs (MYP), but there was anxiety about doing this with content-heavy courses in the Diploma Program (DP).

For our Diploma Program (DP) students, the school made the decision to create something called Student Directed Learning Time (SDLT), which, at a glance, could be mistaken for study hall, but the idea was that time was given for students to work on what they needed to work on at their own pace. The goal was to give students a structured space where they could learn how to learn with teacher support. As a consequence of this approach, all courses, including the content-heavy ones, had their contact hours cut. To support students, teachers were encouraged to flip content and build self-directed modules where students could demonstrate their learning at their own pace. At the time, it was bold, risky, and ambitious.

As we were about to leave the conference room, a head of one of the more prominent international schools in the region shared his thoughts: “You guys are very lucky that your scores didn’t drop.”

Taking the Leap
At the time, I think I quipped something like, “Who brought Captain Sunshine,” but over the years I’ve come to appreciate more the stresses that administrators are under. Putting kids at the center of learning seems like an obvious point, but when those same kids are competing for spots within a given system, and those systems allocate numbers which grant you privilege, and that system and those numbers are not going anywhere, then the obvious point becomes moot.

There are changes happening. Mastery Transcript Consortium has recently partnered with ETS, and a more legitimate alternative to the grading factory is gaining recognition. But the process is slow. Grades are a legitimate part of the fears, not because of what they are, but because what they have been made to represent. I’ll go into how I’ve worked with and around grades in greater detail in another article, but I want to acknowledge that this is a genuine concern that can derail a number of institutions from achieving their missions. It also caps the potential of teachers who are forced to showcase narrow approximations of student achievement. And, most importantly, it alienates students from a more complete understanding of themselves and where they might find belonging and purpose in this world…our business in the first place.
So I’m grateful to have been a part of an institution who first took this leap for me. It granted me a richer and deeper experience of teaching than being master of content could ever have afforded me. Once experienced, it’s not something that is easy to walk away from, and in a later piece I’ll discuss how I’ve kept this focus despite being in systems that do not openly support it. But even being a part of a system that made this decision for me, it was still a big leap to make.

First PD Session
We were shown a clip of two orchestra conductors. The first was the classical picture most are accustomed to: older white gentleman in tails, waving a baton with a fierce look. His orchestra played well, moving to the beat of the conductor’s baton. The second was more progressive: a younger gentleman of color in casual attire who got things started,  and then let the smiling kids take over as he removed himself from the stage. The first was a picture of discipline as the orchestra conformed to the vision of its leader; the second was a picture of personalization. We discussed this a bit, and I wondered privately if it had to be one or the other, but we were basically told to make our classes like the latter.

First Days
I didn’t sleep well the night before my first class. I never usually do, but this night the energy was more anxious than nervous. I was going into class with a completely flipped script, and I was starting with my syllabus. In previous years, I’d take advantage of the honeymoon period and talk at them for the duration of the period, cramming in every last detail of the course and classroom expectations. And because I said it, I could tell myself that the kids know it. But now I was giving students the syllabus and giving them a series of questions to answer at their own pace. A true master of personalized learning, right? Not really.

Like many teachers who start with personalized learning, what I’d started with was something I’d already done before, which was individualized learning. I set the objectives, I remove myself from the stage, I create the module, and the students navigate what I want them to learn at their own pace. Class is often automated, and I can shift my attention to individuals. Not bad, and I think this kind of practice has a place in personalized learning, but we can do better.

In the school’s SDLT initiative, we met with mixed results. Our disciplined students made good usage of this time and sought out their teachers when they needed assistance. For our less disciplined students, it was a battle, one consistent with usual issues with study hall. We measured our students’ performance on the usual course criteria. We made overtures to Approaches to Learning (ATL) and the IB’s Learner Profile, but it came across as a bit hollow. But as I mentioned earlier, our scores remained the same, so we were encouraged to commit to this approach and improve upon the practice.

Later Iterations
While at a new school, my commitment to personalized learning has remained, but my approach has evolved. Before I distribute my syllabus at the beginning of the year, I have students reflect on their proficiency with our competencies. I then ask students to set some SMART goals and to imagine some scenarios they might experience throughout the year and what questions that might lead to. Everyone has their own scenarios based on their own goals, attitudes, and abilities. I then distribute the syllabus to my students and ask them to look it over and see if they can find answers to their questions. If they can’t find answers, I help them to do so, and if the answer to a relevant question is not provided, then I thank them for the feedback and make the needed adjustment.

This is a tone setting experience for the students. We follow this up with completing Student Directed Learning Contracts–I do a new one each year as well. Here students review their competency-based self-assessment and create SMART goals to take their strengths further and to improve upon weaknesses. They then build a plan for their completion and give a clear picture of how they will define success. I then give feedback–ideally conferencing–on their draft, and they make the needed adjustments. I then allocate 20-25 percent of class time each week to Student-Directed Learning Time, where students use a Student Directed Learning Planner to help them work towards what we agreed upon in their learning contracts.

Adding a competency-based approach has really helped. It bridges the initial conductor metaphor divide, creating a student-centered balance between clearly defined outcomes (discipline) and personalization. In the construction of those competencies, it has been helpful to follow two rules: start each statement with “I can” and avoid compounds. The latter is hard, but it is a good rule to try to follow, keeping the focus on the degree to which the student can perform the precise outcome.

Expect Pushback. Know Your Talking Points.
“Why are you experimenting with my kids?” was a question we received early on. As personalized approaches are becoming more common, we get that less, but it is a good reminder to try to get ahead of conversations and be mindful of the words that you are using. You might be excited to experiment, but would you want your kid experimented upon? Instead, try starting with a clear and observable problem, and how you this approach will address that problem. Remind parents that grades are important, but that their child is much more than a number, and you’d like to help them grow in a more holistic way without sacrificing the mastery of content or the development of skills.

A Boon to Self-Directed PD
With this approach, particularly if you have a competency-based focus, you very quickly see the gaps in your practice. When I saw myself as master of content, I felt I was only a few classics away from where I wanted to be. This has opened the floodgates–you should see how many tabs I currently have open. But I enjoy it, and with a solid framework in place, I can add and subtract easily. A recent go-to for me has been Learning and the Brain Conferences.

Creating GPTs to Support
If you are not yet on a frontier model, you are not experiencing this tool in its full capacity. If you are intimidated with creating GPTs, don’t be. Start small. Try creating one to help you with something that is fun. A few iterations and you’ll start to get the picture, and you’ll start to see where you can apply it professionally.

Imagine, for example, feeding your syllabus and course documents to a GPT you built for class. Students could ask the needed question whenever they needed to and receive the needed.
Or imagine a student getting help with one of your competency strands, say “attention.” The student is prompted to assess their current level of mastery. The student says “progressing.” The student is then prompted to reflect on their struggles, eventually exploring the habit loop, being assisted in creating a SMART goal, which they could then incorporate into their learning contract.

Or say there is a long PDF you don’t have time to read, but you do have time to ask it a few questions. You could delegate the ‘responsibility of ‘learning’ the material to an ‘assistant’ so that your own learning is more interactive. And if your assistant is not performing to your liking, you can give it an update. And while this may make some of you cringe, and perhaps rightly so, giving your GPTs personality traits has been shown to improve their performance.

Update on Tools
Ethan Mollick has recently shared three new GPTs. I’ve enjoyed using his “negotiation simulator,” and I look forward to exploring these. I also highly recommend the podcast “Beyond the Prompt” by Jeremy Utley and Henrik Werdelin.

Final Thoughts
Taking the first leap into personalized learning is scary, and I am grateful to have had administrators who pushed me and provided a parachute to help break my fall. I now have confidence in the approach to take my own leaps, which better serves my students as they prepare to take theirs.
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Next week we’ll cover assessing and grading with a competency-based approach and how GenAI might be leveraged to support. ​