Dive Brief:
- Grant Rivera, superintendent of the Marietta City Schools in Georgia, argues personalized learning is most effective if students aren’t held to traditional time constraints and teachers are freed to customize.
- For EdSurge, Rivera writes time is treated as the constant in traditional classrooms and how much students learn in those time constraints is the variable, but personalized learning should force a shift to make student learning the constant and time the variable.
- Teachers, meanwhile, have historically been asked to follow pacing guides and unit plans on a class-wide basis — but Rivera says personalized learning should free teachers to customize resources and instructional delivery based on what individual students need at any given time, informed by formative data and personalized assessments.
Dive Insight:
Personalized learning is gaining momentum in school districts across the country as teachers and administrators find new ways to tailor instruction to the needs of more than just the average student. Mark Kushner, CEO and head of school at +Impact School in Lake Tahoe, CA, finds traditional school buildings limit this potential, however.
In an interview this week, Kushner said the independent school is moving to new facilities next year that will eliminate traditional classrooms, instead giving students the opportunity to proceed at their own pace in an open, “focus area,” and then get called in by teachers for small group instruction in what look like conference rooms. A seminar room and a lecture hall will be available for the rarer occasions when large group instruction is necessary and students will also spend time in a project space and social area. Kushner sees this as eliminating “the factory model” and opening the door to “radical personalization.”