Chapter 1
A Vision for Personalized Learning

Essential Questions

• What does it mean for a student's education to be “personalized”?

• Why is personalization a potential solution to the problems of student disengagement and underachievement?

• What would a personalized learning environment look and feel like?

Personalized Learning—Articulating the Vision

Jillian is an eleven-year-old student who is still at home munching on her breakfast cereal while she looks at the screen of the notebook computer she received from her school. She is reviewing lessons that in the past would have been taught in school but now she does this work at home and discusses the implications with her classmates in school.

An hour later she arrives at school with other students and goes to a room where a group of them meet with Ms. Gabriel, their director of learning. Ms. Gabriel gives each student the activity schedule for the day. Jillian's first activity is a small-group discussion with four other students and an instructor in which they will analyze the assignment she was doing over breakfast.

Beatrice, Jillian's nine-year-old friend, is scheduled to attend a lecture on American history with a group of other students of various ages. Jonathan, who is the same age as Jillian, will stay with Ms. Gabriel for some tutoring in math.

Jillian's elementary school does not have grades. There are students there that range in age from five to twelve, but the students engage in independent work, small-group activities, one-on-one with a teacher, or in larger groups attending a lecture or watching a video. Age is never a factor in the groupings, only the readiness of the students for the level of instruction that they will be taught.

In each subject area the students advance as they reach the established level of mastery. Some students might accomplish mastery in a couple of days and others may require a week. Students progress at their own pace, with gentle prodding from the instructors when they sense that the students are not progressing as they should.

Assessment is ongoing, because most of the online programs used by the students monitor progress and automatically adjust the level of difficulty of the next lesson. In addition to formative assessment, the instructors use performance-based assessments to gauge progress. The director of learning responsible for a group of students is aware at all times of exactly where each student is relative to the standards that have been set in each subject area. This monitoring is also enabled by technology by using a program that keeps track of all the students the director of learning is responsible for.

The learners never miss out on their education. If Jillian is home sick, she can still access lessons online or carry on with her independent work or have an online session with an instructor. The same is true if schools are closed because of inclement weather. The traditional school calendar is a thing of the past. Schools are open year-round and students follow the schedule that has been set for them.

Jillian's friend Maria is a recent arrival from the Dominican Republic. She speaks very little English, but Maria's director of learning has assigned her activities and online programs that enable her to learn in her native Spanish while she is learning English. Maria is very good in math and she is able to participate in some math activities with the English-speaking students. Her lack of competence in English will not deter her from progressing in school and by the time she masters English she will quickly achieve mastery in other subject areas as well.

Remedial programs no longer exist because at all times each student is assigned activities that build on existing knowledge and skills. The same is true for students with special needs. Students move on to the middle school as they achieve mastery of the standards required for all elementary students. There is some accommodation for age so as not to have elementary students move on to the middle school at too young an age or have students staying at the elementary school too long. Decisions are made for each child based on maturation level in consultation with the parents. The same process applies to movement to the high school level.

The middle school and high school no longer group the students by periods. Both schools are also year-round and offer extended days. As is the case at the elementary level, students are assigned to a learning director who has the responsibility to develop an individualized learning plan for each student. The students are also involved in selecting and customizing their schedules, and they take required and elective courses in a number of ways, realizing full advantage of the available technology and the numerous ways the schools are organized for learning. Students also have the option of enrolling in college-level courses and getting college credits.

Because of the personal pacing, Jillian's bother, Chris, has met all of the requirements and will be graduating high school at age sixteen with a semester of college credits. Other students will require more time, but all who receive the diploma will have met the standards set for high school graduation.

Beginning the Journey: The Power of Personalization

We were at the Wright-Patterson Air Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Don Thompson was being installed as the incoming president for the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), and we were having a wonderful meal right under the huge wing of a space shuttle craft directly opposite one of the diminutive early crafts designed by the Wright brothers. Within a period of ninety years we had gone from being barely able to fly to flying to the outer reaches of earth's atmosphere and beyond.

Earlier that same day a group of us had visited an original one-room schoolhouse in Dayton, a model from the Wright brothers' time. Immediately apparent were the students' desks facing the front of the room toward the teacher's desk. Shelves along the sides of the room were filled with books while the walls held maps and pictures conducive to a proper learning environment. Put a couple of computers in that room and it would look like a 21st century classroom.

Although the advances in air travel over a 90-year period had been truly dramatic, a classroom today is not remarkably different from what it looked like at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, our educational system today is still tied to an agrarian calendar, we still follow a grade-level structure that dates back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, and we still group students according to age, placing a number of them in a classroom with a teacher. Attempts to reform education simply try to make the existing structure more efficient rather than re-creating the basic concepts of teaching and learning.

We were recently at an event with Washington University professor Yong Zhao, who told us about one of Google's creations, the driverless car. Yong suggested that it was totally possible that within a short period of time, the driverless car would be a part of our lives and challenged us to imagine what life would be like. We took to the task and set about creating a vision of a world in which people would no longer drive. Driving schools would go out of business; so would motor vehicle bureaus, at least the driving license–issuing department; police would no longer issue tickets for speeding or driving under the influence of alcohol. The changes to the world as we know it would be dramatic, all because cars would drive themselves—changes similar to how the airplane has changed our lives over the last century.

Driverless Cars and the Future of 21st Century Education

What if we applied Zhao's driverless car exercise to education? What if we were asked to imagine a world in which the educational system revolved around teaching a single student? Forget about the educational system as we know it today. Reconstruct a system that focuses on teaching one student at a time. Can we do it and how would we do it? This essential question raises many others:

• How much of what is part of the system today would remain?
• Would the new system be able to achieve the goal of closing the achievement gap?
• Would it resolve the economic gap created by how we fund education?
• Would there be a need for remediation services, summer school, after-school programs, and the practice of not promoting children to the next grade? Would we need classrooms or school buildings for that matter?
• Would all students be expected to graduate after thirteen years of schooling?
• Would we need to assess all students at the same time with the same tests?
• Would we need report cards and grades?

We could let our imagination run wild with all the possibilities, because we would focus on educating a single student as opposed to group after group after group of pupils.

What Is a Personalized 21st Century Education?

What is personalized learning? There is no agreement on one definition. In most cases today personalized learning refers to some form of blended learning in which software programs are used that adapt to the ability level of a child. It may also be used to define programs in which the teacher employs differentiated instruction. These are approximations of what personalized learning could be at the...