Personalization vs Customization vs Individualization
- Sep 9, 2018
- 2 min read
Barbara Bray's book How to Personalize Learning: A Practical Guide for Getting Started and Going Deeper is a key resource in my current work leading a cohort of three schools down the innovative path of applying design thinking processes and principles to create authentic personalized learning environments for TK - 8 learners. Last year, we focused on Inquiry, this year we are going deeper into Shared Inquiry. At the same time, we are focusing heavily on creating districtwide, site, and classroom processes that structurally support personalized learning by Barbara Bray's definition. This will not be a Flipped Classroom, Blended, or online model of personalized learning generated by a series of online tests of which research shows teachers do not know how to analyze, synthesize, or apply the quantitative data.
Instead, this is the design thinking approach starting with the learners, incorporating student voice in every aspect of learning, and using observational qualitative data to design personalized learning at the individual student level. We started with empathy and building relationships to best know our students individually as both learners and children. This involves collecting qualitative data of various kinds, creating customized protocols/tools/resources, and learning how to use all of that observational data to synthesize information for next steps at class, group, and individual levels.
Two weeks ago, the tools created by the teachers to experiment with gathering evidence of student learning AND individual learner information to create learner profiles and design instruction were shared by all district instructional coaches with each other in a practice round of World Cafe. Last week, they led a World Cafe for all district administrators including all district principals to build a solid foundation of understanding and a shared vision of personalized learning from the very beginning. It was a huge success as is evident in this video which was posted on Twitter:
Bray's PDI tool has been instrumental in conversations clarifying where we are and visioning what we want personalized learning to look like specifically from various perspectives. It is being used in conjunction with Bray's other tool that itemizes and draws distinctions between teacher-centered, student-centered, and learner-driven classrooms. Our goal is learner-driven classrooms that maximize student agency, self-efficacy as learners, and maximize individual executive functioning skills.
The tool has been critical to empowered learning for the principals, instructional coaches, and Ed Services department. It will be shared with teachers at our upcoming professional learning day on September 21st. Instructional coaches have been working with me to unpack "personalized learning", understand how to guide others in the process, and prepare the leadership of this day through cognitively guided learning experiences maximizing design thinking principles, habits of mind, and processes.
ISTE Standards for Educators that relate to this include the following: Learner, Leader, Designer, Facilitator
Sources:
https://www.iste.org/standards/for-educators
https://barbarabray.net/
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