RI Personalized Learning Initiative An initiative to support personalized learning across Rhode Island This document was created by the RI Office of Innovation, RI Department of Education (RIDE), Highlander Institute, and RI Mayoral Academies (RIMA). It is co-signed by the Rhode Island Campaign for Achievement Now (RI-CAN), the Rhode Island Society of Technology Educators (RISTE), the Rhode Island Association of School Principals (RIASP), and the School of Education at Rhode Island College.
I. Introduction Every day, students across the country arrive at school with a common goal: to learn to be successful in college, career, and life. Yet each of these students also comes with their own unique strengths, experiences, and learning needs that will evolve throughout their school experience. Some students begin kindergarten reading complete sentences while others aren’t yet able to write their names. Some may pick up algebra in a snap while others struggle with basic computation. Differences also exist in students’ interests and learning preferences. Some students prefer reading while others prefer building and creating.
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Effective teachers have always recognized the varying and constantly evolving needs of individual students, and thus have tried to find ways to meet these needs even within the constraints of our existing school models. These efforts have led to a variety of student-centered learning approaches including deeper learning, school choice, career pathways, and internships. They have also spurred a much-needed emphasis on creating and curating learning materials that are more culturally relevant and embedding opportunities for building socialemotional skills.
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Yet attempts to personalize learning at a more granular level can quickly become burdensome— even for excellent teachers—in our industrial-age schooling model that was designed for efficiency, not individuality. In most classrooms, 20-30 students are grouped together with a single teacher based on the students’ age, regardless of academic level. This is true even in schools that provide some level of student choice or curriculum pathways. Students generally move forward together, work on the same learning activities in the same time period, and progress to the next learning activity based on the curriculum schedule, not on evidence that they’ve mastered specific learning objectives. Students who are struggling must move on with the class, even if they aren’t ready, and students who already grasp a concept must wait until others gain the same understanding. Even when teachers endeavor to differentiate, they have a limited amount of time and resources, meaning they are rarely able to support the full breadth of student level and interest on a daily basis. Out of necessity, sticking to the schedule often wins out over allowing every child to achieve mastery. Forcing students to move to the next learning activities before they have demonstrated mastery can perpetuate and even exacerbate achievement gaps. In short, our industrial age education model was not designed to tailor instruction to the unique needs of individual students and places a significant burden on teachers who attempt to do so within the existing model. Fortunately, new technologies are beginning to emerge with the promise of redefining the onesize-fits-all schooling model. These tools are designed to support teachers in providing and managing personalized learning plans for every student on a daily basis. And while technology alone won’t guarantee a personalized learning experience, it can be the catalyst for teachers and school leaders who want to streamline the ability to collect and visualize student data in real time and match high quality digital learning activities to learner needs. These approaches are
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still in their infancy and need to be piloted and tested more broadly. However, if successful, personalized learning may be a tool to improve all students’ mastery of rigorous standards, ignite student engagement, and build student agency and ownership over their learning. Across the country, individual schools and districts have been piloting personalized learning for several years with some impressive results.1 Yet there have been limited efforts to support personalized learning across an entire state or region. Due to our existing bench-strength in student-centered models, Rhode Island is an ideal state to pilot supporting personalized learning at scale. This paper outlines a statewide Personalized Learning Initiative and describes in detail what we mean (and don’t mean) by personalized learning. It offers an initial blueprint for how stakeholders at every level—including students, parents, educators, administrators, and state leaders—can support a movement toward increased personalization for students.
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While we are excited about the potential for personalized learning, we caution against hailing it as a silver bullet. Personalized learning is one of many initiatives focused on student-centered learning and one of many efforts to bring more engagement, rigor, agency, and individualization to students’ experiences. There are also many unanswered questions about how personalized learning models are best designed and implemented. Our hope is to ignite a statewide conversation and series of pilots testing personalized learning and to inspire more educators and administrators to develop new answers to these questions.
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District Reform Support Network, 2016. “Transforming the Culture of Teaching and Learning: Four Race to the Top-District Grantees' Implementation of Personalized Learning.” Retrieved from https:// rttd.grads360.org/services/PDCService.svc/GetPDCDocumentFile?fileId=21503.
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II. Why Rhode Island? Rhode Island is an optimal place to develop and pilot approaches for supporting personalized learning at scale. The small size of our state enables in-person collaboration across key stakeholders. But Rhode Island is the right place not just because of its geographic size. We have supportive leadership at every level and across every sector, including government, nonprofit, and industry. Years of active conversation about personalized learning have created the ideal conditions to establish a statewide model for supporting personalized learning at scale in order to support equitable increased student learning aligned to rigorous expectations.
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PL Resource: The Rhode Island Department of Education’s five year strategic plan, “2020 Vision for Education,” includes specific recommendations for how schools, districts, the state, and adult education programs can support the expansion of personalized learning state-wide.
The following are some of the examples for why Rhode Island is prepared to pilot personalized learning: ■ In 2015, the Rhode Island Department of Education released a five year strategic plan informed by over 11,000 families, educators, students, and community members. Statewide personalized learning is one of six priority focus areas of the plan.2 RIDE’s proposed secondary regulations, currently out for public comment, articulate guidelines for student-centered learning in middle and high schools, including a requirement for every student to have an individual learning plan that reflects the student’s academic, career and personal goals. The regulations also give students the ability to personalize their diplomas by earning optional Pathway Endorsements.
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Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, a child-welfare policy and advocacy organization, has convened a Leadership Table of key stakeholders to share expertise and identify strategies for scaling up student-centered learning practices statewide. The Leadership Table is examining best practices in Rhode Island and across the nation and making recommendations for clarifying, strengthening and amending state regulations to support broader implementation of effective student-centered learning practices in Rhode Island.
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The Enhanced Leadership Development Network, a group of district leaders convened by the Rhode Island School Superintendent Association and facilitated by the Center for Leadership and Educational Equity, have focused their discussions this year on
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“2020 Vision for Education: Rhode Island’s Strategic Plan for PK-12 & Adult Education, 2015-2020.” Retrieved from http://www.ride.ri.gov/BoardofEducation/RI2015-2020StrategicPlanforEducation.aspx.
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advancing personalized learning, including drafting a vision for personalized learning and discussing district policies and partnerships to support educators. ■
Rhode Island Mayoral Academies, a RI-based education nonprofit, is supporting district and charter school implementation and collaboration by using California-based Summit Public Schools’ approach to personalized and project-based curricula.
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Highlander Institute, another RI-based education nonprofit, focuses on researching, developing, and disseminating innovative personalized and blended learning methods to improve outcomes for all learners. The Highlander Institute also hosts the annual Blended and Personalized Learning Conference which brings together experts from across the country to share best practices.
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Additionally, educators, nonprofit leaders and policymakers are coming together to share learnings from these and other initiatives at regular convenings. These include the monthly EdTechRI Meet-ups and the annual Future Ready Summit.
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Yet the vision of implementing personalized learning at scale—across many schools in a region or state—has remained elusive. In order for this to happen, there must be vision and support for this work beyond an individual school or district. Partners from across all parts of the education ecosystem must work together in order to accelerate the adoption of personalized learning at scale. In Rhode Island, we believe we have this alignment and commitment and our hope is to develop and test the first statewide model for supporting personalized learning at scale. Rhode Island is the perfect “lab state” where educators and administrators are supported to develop, pilot, and grow new models for personalized learning—and are supported to share lessons learned and best practices.
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III. What is Personalized Learning? Personalized learning is a type of student-centered learning where learning experiences are tailored to meet the unique needs and targeted growth of each individual student on a near-realtime basis. Specific approaches to support personalized learning are many and varied. For the purposes of this initiative, our definition of personalized learning aligns with the definition established by the US Department of Education3:
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Personalized learning is a student experience where the pace of learning and the instructional approach are optimized for the needs of each student. Standards-aligned learning objectives, instructional approaches, and instructional content (and its sequencing) may all vary based on learner needs and interests. Learning activities are meaningful and relevant to learners, driven by their interests and past performance and are often self-initiated or self-selected. In this definition, pace, sequence of learning objectives, instructional approach, and instructional content are all variable based on the needs of the student. Pace of learning refers to the time students need to engage with a learning objective before they are ready to move on to the next learning objective or explore the current objective at a deeper level.
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Learning objectives are specific learning goals a student is working towards, which are aligned to established learning standards.
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Instructional approach refers to the learning activities, instructional groupings, and resources used to support student mastery of learning objectives.
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Each of these elements may be chosen by or assigned to students based on ongoing measures of their needs, interests, and previous academic performance so that they are on a trajectory to be graduation ready. While a student’s path to mastery is personalized, all students are held to the same rigorous standards-based objectives.
What personalized learning is not While defining personalized learning is key to the success of this initiative, it is also important to be in agreement about what personalized learning is not. There are many approaches that are often conflated with personalized learning. For the purposes of the RI Personalized Learning Initiative:
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“Future Ready Learning: Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education.” U.S. Department of Education, 2016, 7. Retrieved from http://tech.ed.gov/NETP/.
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Personalized learning ≠ providing every student with a device. In a personalized learning model, access to technology is critical, particularly so that students may view their learning progress dashboard. However, personalized learning models can be implemented in schools that do not have a device for every student, and simply giving students devices doesn’t ensure the regular assessment and reflection required for personalized learning.
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Personalized learning ≠ learning in isolation. Adaptive learning software, which automatically assigns learning activities to students based on their responses to assessments, might be a part of personalized learning. However, personalized learning doesn’t mean students are sitting in front of a computer all day; instead, there should be opportunities for collaborative engagements with teachers and other students.4
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Personalized learning ≠ blended learning. Blended learning means using a combination of face-to-face and online learning opportunities as appropriate. While most personalized learning is also blended, simply providing a student with online and face-toface learning opportunities does not ensure that those learning opportunities are tailored to student needs, interests, and strengths.5
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Personalized learning ≠ only quick assessments to document learning. Student mastery of rigorous standards is the goal of personalized learning. In order to demonstrate true mastery, students need to practice, apply, and use their knowledge and skills in real-world applications that measure learning over time and in integrated ways.6
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Culatta, Educause Review, March 2016. “What Are You Talking About?! The Need for Common Language around Personalized Learning.”. Retrieved from http://er.educause.edu/articles/2016/3/whatare-you-talking-about-the-need-for-common-language-around-personalized-learning. 5
iNACOL, 2013. “Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education.” pg 12. Retrieved from http://www.inacol.org/resource/mean-what-you-say-defining-andintegrating-personalized-blended-and-competency-education/ 6
Nellie Mae Education Foundation, 2016. “Looking Under the Hood of Competency-Based Education: The Relationship Between Competency-Based Education Practices and Students’ Learning Skills, Behaviors, and Dispositions.” pg. 11. Retrieved from: http://www.nmefoundation.org/resources.
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IV. Personalized Learning Components
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While there is no single instructional model, curriculum, approach, or platform to support personalized learning, most practitioners of personalized learning experiences follow a typical cycle: (1) engage a student in a learning activity, (2) measure their performance, (3) interpret student data, and (4) adapt the learning experience based on the data. This cycle may happen multiple times a day for any given student.
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The RI Personalized Learning Initiative supports and encourages educators and administrators to pilot models for personalized learning in their classrooms. There are several components to successful personalized learning initiatives. This list is informed by frameworks developed by LEAP Innovations, Next Generation Learning Challenges, and iNACOL based on successful implementations of personalized learning across the US. ■
Learner profiles: Optimizing the learning experience for mastery and success for each student requires starting with an understanding of the needs, strengths, goals, and interests of each student. These needs, strengths, goals, and interests are not static, so learner profiles need to be revisited and updated regularly. Learning profiles can both target closing learning gaps and support students to explore learning objectives at a deeper level or on an accelerated path.7 ■ Example: Students in a middle school science class take a diagnostic assessment and interest survey and complete a goal-setting game with other students at the beginning of the year. This information is stored in a personalized learning management system to inform both teacher and student choices about learning.
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Leap Innovations, 2016. “Leap Learning Framework for Personalized Learning.” pg. 10. Retrieved from http://leaplearningframework.org/.
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Differentiated learning activities: Teachers select learning activities based on student needs. For example, teachers might provide students options for a variety of ways to learn a new concept based on their interests or their reading level. ■ Example: During a seventh grade ELA unit, students practice drawing inferences from text. To do this, students select an article that most interests them, which is also tailored to their reading level, even if that level is lower or higher than their grade level.
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Competency-based progression: In a personalized learning model, students advance to the next objective when they can demonstrate mastery of the preceding. If students haven’t demonstrated mastery, the teacher provides them with other supports and activities to develop competency before moving on.8 ■ Example: A middle school ELA teacher completes a lesson on analyzing symbols using the book Holes. While students write a literary analysis discussion, the teacher notices that five students did not master the objective. Those five students receive additional practice opportunities to analyze symbols until they can demonstrate mastery. Students who have shown that they understand the concept will move on to another objective.
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Ongoing formative assessment: Personalized learning depends on having near realtime data on student performance. This requires ongoing assessment of students’ progress to inform them and their teachers as they make choices about next steps as well as to give frequent, immediate feedback to students. Formative assessments may be short written assessments, reviews of student work in progress, conferences, or student observations. ■ Example: After students complete a lesson on the battle of Antietam during the Civil War in a middle school social studies class, they complete a five-question quiz to check for understanding. Based on this data, the teacher and student together develop a learning plan for the next day’s activities, which includes opportunities for additional practice for those who haven’t yet mastered the objective.
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Flexible learning environment: In personalized learning models, there is flexibility of groupings, time, and locations for learning. In a single day, students may have the opportunity to work independently, in small groups, in one-on-one tutoring, and in larger groups. Students may also have the opportunity to engage in learning outside of the school walls. ■ Example: Students in a high school math class receive the challenge to create a functional company given a certain budget. Students’ time is split between independent work mastering learning objectives around financial modeling (which they complete in a lab station in the room); small group time when the teacher is supporting students who need additional support to master the learning objective; and group work time, during and after school, to progress in their projects.
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Nellie Mae Foundation (2016). “Looking Under the Hood of Competency-Based Education: The Relationship Between Competency-Based Education Practices and Students’ Learning Skills, Behaviors, and Dispositions.” 11. Retrieved from: http://www.nmefoundation.org/resources.
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Student choice and agency: Students in personalized learning models exercise greater control over their learning experience. ■ Example: Students may select how they demonstrate mastery or choose when to explore a topic at a deeper level. Teachers construct environments where students have agency over some aspects of their learning, and teachers support students to practice habits of success so they can monitor their own progress.
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Technology-enabled: Teachers work tirelessly to differentiate with this knowledge of their students, but the human limitations of a teacher’s time mean they cannot be omniscient of every student’s evolving interests and needs at every moment. New technologies provide teachers with tools to curate and deliver high-quality digital content as well as more readily track student progress. Using new technology, teachers can quickly administer formative assessments to gauge student progress and differentiate follow up. New technologies can also provide a framework to move students through curriculum. ■ Example: Using Open Education Resources (OER) an elementary science teacher creates a playlist of resources for students to choose from for a lesson on gravity. The playlist incorporates a video on rollercoasters, an exploration of gravity in the solar system, an online simulation that allows students to see the effects of changing gravity on earth, and an in-person station that allows students to drop objects of varying weight. As part of the lesson, this teacher also incorporates an assessment on gravity that her colleague designed online and adds a couple questions from her school’s testing system. After students engage with the content, the science teachers then meet to analyze the results of their students and create interventions using the data assembled in the personalized learning management system.
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Teacher-facilitated: While technology enables personalization to be iterative and ondemand, it cannot be a substitute for great teaching and the deep relationships teachers build with their students. In personalized learning the role of the teacher is indispensable to select high-quality content; design students’ pathways through the material; adapt and remediate based on students’ progress; support students to develop habits of success; and create a joyful, rigorous classroom environment.
PL Resource: The Learning Accelerator offers a set of strategies to implement personalization across four major themes: Differentiation, Student Choice and Agency, Flexible Resource Allocation, and Support for Self-Directed Learning. Their work also includes examples of these strategies through case studies and videos.
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PL Resource: The Next Generation Learning Challenges site provides multiple case studies of personalized learning and a framework for personalized learning in school design.
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PL Resource: The Office of Education Technology has created a video library about personalized learning and professional development.
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V. Moving to a Personalized Learning Model Implementing a personalized learning model requires time and iteration. Fortunately, there are some easy first steps that can be taken quickly, and schools can continue to move along the personalized learning spectrum over time. Many schools may already have components of personalized learning built into their instructional model. Schools and districts can begin to move toward a fully personalized model by realigning all instructional and operational structures around the ultimate goal of tailoring educational experiences to each student’s needs and interests. This progression offers an example for how schools in Rhode Island may move toward personalized learning, though every school’s path will look different.
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PL Resource: The New England Secondary School Consortium offers a set of best practices for schools to self-assess and benchmark themselves against. Look specifically at “Personalization and Relevance,” the second dimension of their Teaching and Learning strand.
Building a Foundation:
Students are using blended learning technology to learn content aligned to some of the standards students are expected to master. Teachers may be using assessments from blended learning technology to differentiate by creating groupings or remediating.
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Staff and students are tracking students’ individual needs, strengths, goals, and interests in order to better adapt teaching strategies.
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Students have some choice within the curriculum, such as ability to select a project they would like to complete or way show they mastery of a certain objective.
Piloting: ■
A handful of teachers, a grade-level team, or a pilot team implements a personalized learning instructional model that includes substantive changes to their schedule, staffing, and infrastructure to allow for the model. The personalized learning instructional model may not yet be incorporated to every aspect of a student’s day or every area of instruction. AND/OR
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Teachers use one or more personalized learning tools to provide personalized digital content, allow students to follow their own individualized learning plan and profiles, and/ or assess students’ progress. AND/OR
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Staff and students in the pilot group are creating and using individual learning profiles and personalized learning pathways. Students master content at their own pace within a flexible learning environment. AND/OR Students are exercising some agency over what, when, how, and where they are learning.
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Implementing and Iterating: ■
All students in the school are part of a personalized learning instructional model that is aligned to all standards they are expected to master. AND/OR
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School culture, infrastructure, schedule, and staffing have evolved to support and enable the personalized learning instructional model.
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All teachers use personalized learning tools to provide high-quality digital content, allow students to follow their own individualized learning paths and profiles, and/or assess and address students’ ongoing progress. AND/OR
All staff and students are creating and using individual learning profiles and personalized learning pathways. Students master content at their own pace within a flexible learning environment. AND/OR
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Students are exercising greater agency over what, when, how, and where they are learning. AND/OR
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Families are involved in defining learner needs and are informed of student progress.
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PL Resource: The Highlander Institute offers a progression for schools incorporating blended learning into their instructional model in their School District 2.0 report.
PL Resource: RIDE provides a set of resources for leaders implementing change management processes.
PL Resource: District leaders can use the “Future Ready” Dashboard to track their progress toward
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implementing personalized learning, including assessing “digital readiness” and creating a customized strategic plan for their district.
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VI. Role of Technology While elements of personalized learning can be implemented without technology, personalization at scale can be burdensome without tools to help teachers manage all of the moving parts. These personalized learning management tools support teachers and schools in the following ways: Creating, assigning, and sharing learning materials and playlists: Instead of having one lesson plan for the whole class, teachers in personalized learning environments may need the resources for dozens of lesson plans given students’ varying needs. Personalized learning management tools give educators access to engaging digital content and the ability to create and modify learning activity sequences, providing choices or different learning activities for individual students to participate in as they work towards mastery of learning objectives. This may include creating playlists that bring together learning materials and allow students to progress at their own pace. Tools that enable teachers to share learning activities and playlists can save time and encourage collaboration.
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Assessing learning: Tailoring learning to student needs requires regularly assessing students’ learning progress and needs, formally or informally, and matching the most appropriate learning opportunity in response to those needs.
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Visualizing data: Personalized learning management tools provide a variety of options for visualizing student performance. Data can come from a variety of sources, including formative assessments delivered through the personalized learning tool itself, data from computer-adaptive learning systems, state assessment results, district benchmark exams, and other measures of student performance. Personalized learning management tools help teachers, students, and parents visualize these data in meaningful, actionable ways that make it easier to make decisions on how to respond to student progress at an individual or group level. They also provide students with feedback and recommendations based on how they are progressing.
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When selecting technologies to support personalized learning, administrators and classroom educators should think carefully about supports they need from the technology to realize their vision for personalized learning. Some key questions school leaders and teachers may want to consider when selecting personalized learning management tools are: ■
Professional development: Are there quality learning opportunities to help teachers use the personalized learning management tools effectively?
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Ongoing support: Is technical or use support available when users encounter technical problems or have questions about the tool? Is there a process for educators and students to provide feedback to inform the improvement of the tool?
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Technical requirements: Are there certain devices or software that are necessary to support a particular personalized management tool? Is the tool compatible with other technologies that may already be in use?
Technology providers and schools should work together to ensure data will be kept securely and that privacy will be strictly protected, as required by FERPA, COPPA, and any other relevant Rhode Island and federal policies. A key element of the RI Personalized Learning Initiative is identifying and piloting tools that support teachers in personalizing learning. As such, a variety of tools to support personalized learning will be made available to schools participating in the Personalized Learning Initiative. For more information about the available tools and training opportunities are available at eduvateri.org/personalized.
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PL Resource: These repositories support educators and administrators to find personalized learning technology tools. The Illinois State Board of Education has created a repository of curated learning ▪ resources. The nonprofit Common Sense Education has created a site where teachers can rate ▪ digital tools and resources. EdSurge has an Edtech Index ▪
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PL Resource: This set of guiding questions is a starting point for school and district leaders selecting technology to support personalized learning. To determine the right type of technology to fit your needs: ■ What goals do you expect to accomplish for students, teachers, and the school by adopting this technology? What roles will technology play in tailoring learning? Automated adaptation of learning opportunities? Support for resource management? Support for integrating and using student data?
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How do you want the classroom to be organized in terms of space, time, and educator roles? Will it be a blended learning model? If so, which kind (station rotation, lab rotation, etc.)?
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In what ways do you want to empower students to exercise personal agency and responsibility for what they learn?
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How will students with disabilities and special needs, or who are English language learners, be provided access and support for working the technology?
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To evaluate the technology and technology vendor with respect to your needs: ■ Does the technology support a particular pedagogical orientation? Is this orientation consistent with the types of learning opportunities you want to provide your students? How well does the technology support students who are English learners or students who with disabilities or other special needs?
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What kinds of teacher training are necessary to implement the system well? What kinds of professional supports does the vendor offer educators?
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What are the technical requirements for implementing this technology? Does your school have sufficient infrastructure?
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What data reports are available to educators and administrators?
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Is this technology interoperable with other data systems or technologies in your school? How will you handle integrating activities and data from multiple systems
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Are there any research or evaluation reports about the effectiveness of this technology? Are these findings applicable to your particular student population?
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How does the company ensure data privacy and security? Do its services comply with all state and federal statutes?
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What are the potential challenges and downsides of using this particular system?
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To understand how the system works: ■ What is the role of the teacher in implementing this system in the classroom? To what degree and in what ways can students make choices and self-regulate their own learning? Can they make choices that influence their own learning objectives, pathways, and/or pace? Can they seek help? From whom?
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What types of data will be collected about students, and how will the data be used by the technology, the teacher, and/or the student to tailor learning experiences?
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What data are displayed on the product’s dashboards for teachers, students, administrators, and parents? Can the data be customized?
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If the system is competency-based, how do students demonstrate competency and advance to new content?
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If applicable, how does the technology vendor determine what the learning trajectories should be? Does it use an empirical basis for this? Do the empirical data apply specifically to the types of students in your school?
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Does the technology provide feedback about engagement and/or “early warning” indicators? Does it tell you when students are spending too much or too little time on activities or when they are not progressing at a pace that will enable them to finish the course within the academic term?
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Does the system have ways for students to overcome frustration? Does it offer encouragement and reward persistence?
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VII. Action Research Personalized learning holds promise to increase student learning, engagement, and agency by tailoring learning to students’ needs, strengths, goals, and interests. This field is still new, in Rhode Island and nationally, and we have much to learn collectively about best practices. With the RI Personalized Learning Initiative, we hope to inspire all stakeholders to develop and share a set of learnings as these new models are implemented. These are a few of the key questions we hope we can answer as a community: What supports do educators need in personalized learning environments? Personalized learning models require teachers to refine their skills or, in some cases, develop new skills. In these evolved roles, we don’t yet know what training and ongoing support structures will work best. Teacher preparation and support institutions, as well as schools and districts, will have to develop new models for what this support looks like.
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How do different content areas and grade levels most effectively implement personalized learning? Across content areas, personalized learning models may vary significantly. Serving an individual student’s needs when the student is completing a science lab may look very different than when the student is working on mastering algebraic equations. Students’ developmental needs also vary dramatically from elementary through secondary school, and these needs will demand very different personalized learning structures. The goal of tailoring instruction to students’ needs remains the same, but the models that work best will likely vary. We need educators and administrators to lead the way to identify the structures that work best in different situations.
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How does personalized learning function to close achievement gaps? Personalized learning allows students to encounter developmentally appropriate academic material and to proceed at their own pace. Ideally, personalized learning allows students to remediate previous gaps in learning, but it should also allow students to master learning objectives at their own grade level and beyond. Schools and districts implementing personalized learning will need to develop best practices for how students can be supported to close achievement gaps while still maintaining an overall pace to be graduation ready.
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How does personalized learning function to ignite deeper thinking? While students can move at their own pace through learning objectives, there is also much to learn about how students in personalized learning models explore topics at a greater depth. Schools and districts implementing these models will pave the way in demonstrating how deeper thinking strategies like project-based learning and real-world, out-of-school application can be incorporated into personalized learning models.
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VIII. Timeline and Next Steps The RI Personalized Learning Initiative launched in September 2016 with a coalition of partners fully committed to developing the technology, training, and support needed for schools and districts to pilot and implement personalized learning models. This academic year, the RI Personalized Learning Initiative will: Define what personalized learning looks like in action so that schools, educators, families, and students can have a starting point for discussing and developing new instructional models that meet students’ unique needs. This paper is our initial effort to set this definition. The initiative welcomes continued feedback on this paper, which can be submitted in this form. Over the upcoming months, we will meet with parents, educators, and leaders to further flesh out this definition and identify examples in action. You can find an up-to-date list of events at eduvateri.org/personalized.
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Source high-quality personalized learning management tools that provide resources for schools and districts to implement personalized learning. The initial tools selected are from technology partners, Summit Public Schools, Agilix, and InnovateEDU; additional tools will be added over time. Anyone can nominate an additional tool to be included by filling out this form.
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Provide a supported on-ramp for schools to leverage technology tools that support personalization. We will work with technology partners to ensure Rhode Island schools and districts have access to free use of tools for a minimum of one year and training and ongoing support within a community of practice of other educators. School and district leaders can access this matrix tool to explore technology options.
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The Personalized Learning Initiative is an iterative, open-source effort. We hope families, educators, administrators, state and nonprofit leaders, and anyone else who believes in the promise of personalized learning will identify additional supports the initiative can provide. If you have ideas or projects that you would like to connect with the initiative, please reach out to
[email protected]
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