Personalized Learning

Personalized Learning: from a teacher’s perspective

My def­i­n­i­tion of per­son­al­ized learn­ing means mak­ing sure you meet the stu­dent where she is on the edu­ca­tion con­tin­u­um and give her what she needs to be suc­cess­ful (to move fur­ther along the con­tin­u­um). What does per­son­al­ized learn­ing look like in a sec­ond grade math class­room? Stu­dents receiv­ing instruc­tion on a skill and then prac­tic­ing until mas­tery is just one part of the pic­ture, espe­cial­ly for strug­gling stu­dents. Stu­dents work at their own pace on a vari­ety of strate­gies to accom­plish the same goal, for exam­ple, adding two-dig­it num­bers. But what do you do when this is too dif­fi­cult for a strug­gling stu­dent? Per­son­al­ized learn­ing can keep that stu­dent mov­ing forward.

I recent­ly had a con­ver­sa­tion with the math coach at my school that sparked an epiphany. She asked, “What non-nego­tiables do the teach­ers in the next grade want stu­dents to have when they arrive in their class­rooms?” Her ques­tion changed my way of think­ing about my goals as a teacher. I have a learn­ing dis­abled stu­dent who is nev­er going to mas­ter the “num­ber bond” way or “the arrow” way or any of the oth­er meth­ods for solv­ing algo­rithms. How is my time best spent serv­ing him then? What do 3rd grade teach­ers want to see from him when he arrives in their classroom?

Personalized Learning Case Study

My plan is to test him with two-dig­it addi­tion and sub­trac­tion to get a base­line. My assess­ment will cov­er a vari­ety of skills (e.g. regroup­ing). Once I find a start­ing point to begin instruc­tion, his go-to strat­e­gy with be tra­di­tion­al ver­ti­cal stack­ing.  I will still intro­duce the oth­er meth­ods to him dur­ing whole class instruc­tion, but with me one-on-one, ver­ti­cal stack­ing will be our one method, which he will also prac­tice inde­pen­dent­ly. He will manip­u­late objects and prac­tice online to increase his sin­gle-dig­it facil­i­ty. I will make Qui­zlet flash­cards for him to prac­tice online at his own pace, to avoid the time com­po­nent of most math games. I want him to have a low affec­tive fil­ter so I will lim­it stres­sors like time lim­its. The answers will be on the back of the flash­card and he will need to show his work and com­pare it to the flashcard.

The pro­gram we use for online prac­tice that accom­pa­nies Eure­ka rotates through all the strate­gies. So, if I low­er the lev­el, it still won’t accom­plish what I need for this tar­get­ed plan.

I will set incen­tives for him when he reach­es a goal. The goals will be mov­ing tar­gets. So, the first goal might be two cor­rect out of five to start and even­tu­al­ly eight out of ten, for example.

I want to increase engage­ment for him, so I need to con­nect it to some­thing real-world. I’m think­ing a hero’s jour­ney or even con­nect­ing his prac­tice to Poke­mon. We could compare/combine achieve­ment points of characters.

More Bang for My Buck

My final con­sid­er­a­tion is can I take what I’m doing for him and use it for my oth­er stu­dents to work at their lev­el? One idea I have is to run with the Poke­mon theme and tell them they need to cre­ate com­bi­na­tions that will win a bat­tle. I love the idea of hav­ing them cre­ate their own prob­lems for a spe­cif­ic num­ber I pro­vide. I can set a tar­get num­ber and give them a list of Poke­mon and their strengths (as dig­its). They will have to cre­ate a team that has that tar­get num­ber. To add coop­er­a­tive learn­ing, once a stu­dent has reached their tar­get num­ber, they can work with a part­ner. Stu­dent part­ners could share one of the Poke­mon they used and have their part­ner deter­mine the oth­er mem­ber of the team using sub­trac­tion. There are lots of possibilities.

Stay tuned for my begin­ning data, updates, and results.

If you are inter­est­ed in the doc­u­ments I am cre­at­ing or a link to the Qui­zlet, send me an email.