When I wrote my Rowland fellowship proposal a little over a year ago, my main concern was to make sure that mandated personal learning plans didn’t become another superficial piece of paper that had little meaning for students.  Over the past year, I have made a lot of discoveries and confirmations.  I think the number one issue that has taken over my thoughts is that any change or innovation starts with relationships.  This foundation allows for the trust needed in order for every stakeholder to feel safe enough to take the risks necessary to innovate.  The idea of personal learning has also really taken shape for me.  Initially, I was focused on the personal learning plan itself.  It soon became clear to me that the idea of personalized learning was more complicated than I had originally considered.  Many people are developing software that tracks student progress so the student can independently work.  The vast majority of these folks are calling this personalized learning.  Alfie Kohn has made a distinction between personal and personalized learning in his article Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning”.  He argues that “Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well” while “Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week” (Kohn, 2015).  

Many people are confused by these terms and I have become much more clear about my vision for personal learning and how we might get there.  While I agree with Kohn that there are two totally different ideas about how to increase achievement, I’m not so sure it is the language that matters as much as the ideas.  What I have come to realize is that in addition to relationships, the primary concern in making learning more personal is student engagement.  Since this looks so different for each student, any number of options could be used to engage a student in a variety of subject areas.  What might be engaging in one area or to one student might not work in another situation.  So “personalized” learning might be a part of a student’s personal learning plan but it would never be the personal learning plan. In addition, every community will have different needs as its ecosystem will be unique.

Systems & Structures

There are some systems and structures that I am seeing that assist in facilitating relationship building and engagement. Advisories that loop with students for multiple years help students develop much needed trust with adults who can then guide them; authentic student involvement in schedule building and school decision making processes; authentic project based learning opportunities; independent study structures; arts as a part of the core curriculum rather than an extra; professional learning that happens collaboratively between teachers in an ongoing way rather than one time workshop models. These structures are facilitating personal learning in meaningful ways. While change can happen from the top down, it is clear that bottom up change is more sustainable. Administrators can facilitate change by creating systems and structures that enable teachers and students to do things differently. Transforming schools where students are self-directed learners and teachers are facilitating personal learning options is an enormous change from what most of us have experienced as educators and as students.  

Even those of us who are leaders of the change, couldn’t have ever experienced this on a large scale and in a public school setting.  Whenever anyone is expected to learn something new, all other extraneous learning should be put aside.  We would never expect a child learning how to ride a bike to also track her speed and heart rate, right? Making change of this scale happen requires systems that allow and support flexible learning for both teachers and students.  Systems allow teachers, and sometimes force teachers, to make changes while also providing a support structure for inevitably difficult challenges that come with any major transformation. Creating these systems allows teachers to focus on increasing engagement by being creative in their classrooms.  It also allows any change to sustain itself through new administrators and teacher turnover.