March 27, 2023
The other day I talked with a parent who was lamenting how much time her children spend on screens at school. They are in an excellent school—the kind of place celebrated for student-teacher relationships—and the use of technology is presented as an opportunity for personalized learning: the online phonics tutor helps each child with the sounds she specifically struggles with; the online math practice program allows her son to be tackling problems way beyond his peers, but without having to manage the social dynamics of doing so. Technically, the technology is delivering a learning experience that a teacher cannot: the teacher can’t differentiate phonics or math problems for all twenty-eight students simultaneously.
And yet, although grateful for the efforts at personalized learning, this mother said: I just hate the idea that I’m sending my kids to school—where they are surrounded by bright, diverse peers and gifted teachers—to sit on screens. It feels almost like parallel play.
She has a point.
From a teacher’s perspective, I get it—and I did it. When I taught Humanities, I swore by Membean: an adaptive, gamified, platform for teaching vocabulary—or rather, “building word consciousness”. Membean made it so I never made another vocab list or quiz, and students never crammed to take a meaningless assessment. From a teaching and learning perspective, there was a tradeoff—the words students learned were no longer derived from our common reading—each student had a personalized word list based on performance—but from an uptake perspective, Membean was a better vocabulary teacher than I could ever be. The kids actually learned the words. And because they had been taught in such a sticky, gamified, context-heavy way, they actually retained the words and were excited to use them.
As a teacher, it felt like a win. And also, if I’m being honest, like a shortcut. Which is why this parent’s comment went straight to my heart and got me thinking: is personalized learning what kids need? And if so, what is the role of a teacher in a personalized learning classroom?
Personalized Learning Literature
The research and advice in favor of personalized learning abound; the thesis is beyond debatable at this point: kids learn better when their learning is personalized in some way. Examples of personalization include giving students agency in what and how they learn; differentiating content to reflect interest and ability; or assessment to reflect learning styles.
This makes intuitive sense. Humans like things that make them feel known, unique, and in control. Of course, a child would rather learn vocabulary through a program that feeds them words auditorily if they indicate an auditory learning preference than a teacher who is very visual and keeps talking about the power of recognizing prefixes in word diagrams without sounding out the word once. When the program gets annoying or glitches, a student can click out of it—end the session and revisit it later: something you can’t do in a teacher-led classroom.
There are artful examples of personalized learning out there, most of them rooted in a flipped-classroom approach. As an English Department Chair writes for ISTE: “Personalized Learning tailors instruction, expression of learning and assessment to each student’s unique needs and preferences. […] It is the purposeful design of blended instruction to combine face-to-face teaching, technology-assisted instruction, and student-to-student collaboration to leverage each student’s interests. It took my classroom from a traditional sage-on-the-stage affair to a tech-assisted personalized learning haven.”
Whole schools and school systems—Acton Academy, Sora Schools, many virtual charter schools, and homeschooling programs—have been designed to be “personalized learning havens.” And although lower-tech, in many ways Montessori schools were a relevant forbearer. Those are all high-impact models that until the dawn of EdTech, were limited to particular students (whose parents opted-in).
Here’s my question, though: at what point does the emphasis of personalized learning on the individual student shortchange the classroom community? As today’s students spend so much time in (screen-bound) spaces where they are autonomous and delighted by algorithms, is the value of time spent in a classroom to see yourself as part of a human collective? To be taught to see yourself not as an individual with a million micro-differences and preferences—but as one of a group of nine-year-olds mucking through long division together?
What if what’s unique about school is the chance for children to feel seen, known, and challenged by other humans—not an algorithm?
If that’s the case—as the flipped classroom would argue—then the real challenge here is to define where teachers’ humanity can do something even the best personalized learning platform cannot.
And then how to train teachers to leverage it. So, what does that look like?
CREATING A CLASSROOM COMMUNITY IN AN AGE OF PERSONALIZED LEARNING
Although neither explicitly approach their work from this angle, I think that NeuroTeach and Project Zero offer the most powerful starting points for tackling this question; both expose teachers to metacognitive frameworks that could be deployed to create common, live learning experiences in a “tech-assisted” classroom—rituals for when students close their laptops after their personalized learning session.
When I did Membean in my classroom, I missed this step. We didn’t metacognitively and collectively process the learning experience of Membean—we just all did it for fifteen minutes before class actually got started. Or I assigned it for homework with no debriefing beyond a completion grade. But what if I had taken five minutes to have a metacognitive conversation about digital learning with my students? What if I had asked questions like:
- What did I learn today?
- What was challenging?
- What’s my strategy for staying more engaged tomorrow?
- How was my attention management?
- How did I see the Membean platform responding to my answers?
This would have created a common experience among my students and challenged them all to reflect on their shared experience as learners: a missing piece of the personalized learning literature.
I can imagine that my students would have delighted in recognizing that their peers also thought it was “stalker-ish” “when Membean recommended me another word that was so clearly related to the one I got wrong last time” or “hard to stay on task after about five words, but then I figured out to start pressing the audio pronunciation of each word so it was a different experience, then after another five I did the video. That helped me get through all fifteen.”
And: what if, as part of educator PD, Membean taught me how to do this? That’s actually what I needed—and where my value as a human teacher lay—far more than modules showing me Membean’s features.
My hope is that as personalized learning advances, our professional development for teachers shifts, too. May it not be about the tools—and a descent into parallel play and infinite individualism behind laptop screens—but about the “flip” side, the humans in the classroom: how teachers’ very humanity can help students discover and delight in their own.
Where does differentiation fit in?
Differentiation is the gray space between fully personalized learning on one hand and classwide learning on the other. Yes, it’s what technology has learned to do with a precision humans can’t replicate—we call it adaptive—but I would argue that there is plenty of space for teachers to offer meaningful differentiation that makes students feel seen and challenged as individuals … while also emphasizing the classroom community.
There are little hacks teachers can use to personalize off-screen activities.
At R.E.A.L.® we have worked hard to create learning systems that allow for differentiation—students set personal goals for each discussion, for example—while fundamentally being about a live group experience. At the highest levels of R.E.A.L.®, students set personal, skill-based goals (e.g. Ask a Clarifying Question) and they spend the entire discussion tracking a peer’s performance relative to his/her stated goal; they are actually other-centered.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Liza Garonzik for Intrepid Ed News.
