For decades, formal education has been focused on comparatively narrow forms of academic ability, which results in disregarding the diversity of human talents and interests. Modern educators see a solution in personalization, a teaching and learning process that addresses the strengths and needs of individual learners.
Sir Ken Robinson, the Professor Emeritus and education and creativity expert, remarks that the movement towards personalization is already advancing in medicine and education must move in that direction too. ‘We need to stir the motivation, vision, optimism and political commitment. That too is a task for education,’ he is convinced.
The Mark Zuckerberg backed educational foundation CZI has recently committed to the goal of “bringing personalized learning to every child,” and the Bush Foundation is funding schools designed to enable “mass customization” of instruction.
Personalization includes a balanced approach to progress monitoring of student progress that uses authentic assessments rather than single data points like standardized tests and ensures that every learner’s academic, emotional, and physical needs are understood and accommodated.
Aspects of personalized learning are already being implemented in schools around the world. Just to name a few, in some schools students are allowed to proceed at their own pace setting long-term goals in which time is not the driving factor. Personalized classrooms feature flexible seating arrangement that allows teachers to create learner-centered environment which provides for high levels of interaction. Among technologies educators use, there are learners profiles that let teachers to know students better by collecting data that communicates how, when, and what students can or want to learn. Modern digital textbooks feature attractive animations, integrated videos, check-your-understanding questions, pre-highlighting of key concepts, and analytics on learner usage. Some digital textbooks even customize questions to assess student performance and correspondingly adapt instruction.
Still, there are a number of educators who point out that the process of implementing personalized learning is not that trouble-free. Andrew Miller, the director of personalized learning at Singapore American School, expresses an opinion that personalized learning runs the risk of becoming a buzzword and of being both oversimplified and mischaracterized. In his similarly named article he explores myths of personalized learning.
It is obvious culture and creativity have always been powered by technology. Ken Robinson highlights that ‘digital technologies are <…> changing the context in which we educate people, and what we’re educating them for. They can help us support teaching and make education more vibrant and more collaborative.’ Unfortunately, this point is often simplified to equating personalized learning with computer- or technology-based instruction, which is by all means incorrect.
‘Many people believe that personalized learning mostly involves students using iPads and technology such as games and software to work at their own pace,’ Miller admits. ‘They may think students only watch videos from playlists or play games. And some researchers wrongly claim that personalized learning isn’t effective because of issues with technology.’
Jay Lynch, Senior Academic Research Consultant for Course Design, Development, and Academic Research (CDDAR) at Pearson, points out that there are other reasons why edtech as a means of personalization misses the point: the main one is that the wrong things are being personalized. By ‘wrong things’ he first of all implies instructional content, insisting that the learning experience has changed very little as far as instruction is concerned, notwithstanding the new implementations in modern educational technologies.
He believes that the instructional approach at the core of virtually all available learning products, be it a fancy massive open online course, or a technologically sophisticated personalized classroom, or an adaptive learning software, is ‘largely inadequate for engendering the type of deep, transferable, and complex learning we want to impart to students. It simply doesn’t support the acquisition of the integrated set of cognitive strategies, affective dispositions, and foundational skills necessary to be a successful and flexible problem-solver, self-direct learner, and critical thinker’.
‘Current instructional content is highly balkanized and modularized, divided into small disconnected learning components and ‘objects’ that deny learners the opportunity to grasp the interconnected, meaningful, and holistic knowledge underlying complex learning.’
Current approach is good for memorizing isolated facts, while the key point, as suggested back in 2007 by M. David Merrill, Professor Emeritus at Utah State University, is that the foundation of instruction should be a collection of rich learning tasks that reflect the activities students are supposed to carry out post-instruction. Instruction should be problem-centered, combining real-life problems with supporting direct instruction.
‘We’re so focused on ensuring students can successfully recall every component needed to construct a house,’ Lynch explains, ‘ that we neglect to ask learners to actually pick up a hammer and build one. And not just once, but over and over and over again.’
Imagining an education technology that would be capable to support personalization and complex 21st century learning, Lynch describes such challenges as creating a large database of meaningful real-world tasks students may encounter, potentially involving simulations and interactive multimedia, as well as technological expertise in designing and collecting performance assessment data that is seamlessly linked to such tasks.
Apart from real-life tasks that support deep, meaningful, and complex learning and valid performance-based assessments, personalized learning, according to Lynch, should include collaboration as well. This idea is supported by Andrew Miller who agrees that students must master collaborative competencies along with other competencies focused on content and success skills. Though personalized learning does focus on the individual student, it is impossible for learners to meet collaborative competencies alone. ‘As students find their passions,’ says Miller, ‘they discover they share passions and interests with others in the classroom and form affinity groups to implement group projects and learning experiences’.
More to that, personalization is not a model of teaching where students determine everything. Miller is convinced that the teacher plays a critical role in personalized learning. According to him, teachers ‘support student collaboration and scaffold appropriate skills’ as well as ‘serve as a sort of coach, supporting students in reflecting on their choices ‘, these tasks being the critical elements of education that technology cannot provide.
To sum it up, it is crucial to understand that personalization should be looked upon as an approach to learning rather than a set program and is much more multifaceted to be simplified to edtech or mere individual pacing.