Defining Personalized Learning

Defining Personalized, Blended and Competency Education

Mean What You Say:

Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education

Susan Patrick, Kathryn Kennedy and Allison Powell

Introduction

The purpose of the personalized learning framework is to open student pathways and encourage student voice and choice in their education. Personalized learning is enabled by instructional environments that are competency-based. By tapping into modalities of blended and online learning using advanced technologies, personalized learning is enhanced by transparent data and abundant content resources flowing from redesigned instructional models to address the standards. By doing this, new school models can unleash the potential of each and every student in ways never before possible.

THIS PAPER IS INTENDED TO PROVIDE A SCAN OF THE LITERATURE AND EXPAND THE KNOWLEDGE BASE for the field to integrate the core ideas of personalized learning, blended learning, competency education, and standards. The goal of the paper is to explain the nuances of key terms used across the field of K-12 education related to personalized, blended and competency education, and how the ideas integrate in order to create new learning models

From Students at the Center: critical and distinct elements of student-centered approaches to learning challenge the current schooling and education paradigm:

• Embracing the adolescent’s experience and learning theory as the starting point of education;

• Harnessing the full range of learning experiences at all times of the day, week, and year;

• Expanding and reshaping the role of the educator; and

• Determining progression based upon mastery.

Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education 3

Working Definition of Personalized Learning: Personalized learning is tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests — including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn — to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible.

THE MAJORITY OF THE CURRENT TRADITIONAL EDUCATION LANDSCAPE HAS A ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL FEEL, where each student’s education is not differentiated and all are expected to progress at the same time through the same curriculum. Personalization theory pushes educators to think outside the box by emphasizing the need for learners to be involved in designing their own learning process (Campbell & Robinson, 2007). In a personalized learning environment, learners have agency to set their own goals for learning, create a reflective process during their journey to attain those goals, and be flexible enough to take their learning outside the confines of the traditional classroom.

According to Miliband (2006), there are five phases of personalized learning:

1. Assessment phase – Teacher and students work together in a formative manner to identify strengths and weaknesses.

2. Teaching and learning phase – Teachers and students select learning strategies.

3. Curriculum choice phase – Student chooses the curriculum, creating a pathway for student choice.

4. Radical departure from typical education models phase – Built on student progress, this phase provides teachers the flexibility to choose their own teaching strategies.

5. Education beyond the classroom phase – Using social and community connections, students personalize their surroundings (with the help of the teacher, when needed) to create their ideal learning environment.

Many educators surveyed by iNACOL understand how personalization can transform learning. These educators shared their poignant comments below:

•        Personalization is an understanding that tapping into unique interests, individual styles, and specific needs can make work and learning meaningful and authentic.

•        Personalization is asking each student, “What is best for you?”

•        Personalization is about relationships, knowing each individual student based on their academic and personal interests.

•        Personalization is students accessing a curriculum that meets their individual needs, reflects their zone of proximal development, and gives them the opportunity to access resources to progress at their personal rate of learning.

•        Personalization is engaging students with personal learner plans, where contributions from students, parents, support staff, and teachers provide a path for ubiquitous learning to address students’ individual needs, interests, and learning styles.

·         Personalization is every student learning at his/her own pace using the tools that help them learn and augment their strengths.

•        Personalization is meeting the learner where they are, determining where they need to be, and finding and scaffolding the right zone of proximal development to get them there.

As can be seen by some of the responses from the field above, differentiation is part of personalizing learning, and it is essential in education. Many practitioners look to meet each student’s needs via his or her zone of proximal development. Research supporting personalization of learning includes Bloom’s classic 2 sigma learning studies, in which students who were tutored in a 1-to-1 ratio achieved two standard deviations above students who learned in a traditional school setting of a 30-to-1, student-to-teacher ratio (Bloom, 1984). The implications of the 2 sigma learning studies push educators to think about the shifting role of the traditional teacher from provider of knowledge to a group of students to a tutor of each and every student, offering personalized learning to each learner based on his/her mastery learning trajectory.

Without personalization there is a gap between the individual student, his or her learning, and the support they need to succeed in a way that makes sense to his/her interests. Personalization allows students to take ownership of their learning, giving them the opportunity to feel valued, motivated, in control. It also changes the dynamic between the teacher and the student.

What does personalization look like? Personalized learning…

1.       Is an education full of variety and choice;

2.       Always involves a relationship between the teacher and the student, as well as a strong sense of community within the class as a whole;

3.       Is a space where students have access to a wide range of subjects that meet their pathway needs and

4.       interests;

5.       Is, within each subject, a students’ right to access learning experiences that enable them to progress

6.       according to their level of ability;

7.       Is an opportunity for students to make decisions about the direction of their learning; for example, they can pick the topic they are going to research for an assignment, the book for their book chats, and how they want to write the procedures for their lab work;

8.       Is a dynamic learning opportunity providing students with content that addresses their personal learning

9.       needs based on their interests, parental input, and teacher observation as well as assessment data, which is the most important element;

10.   Is students managing their own work calendars and daily schedules to stay on track, so they are free to move

11.   through courses at their own pace and have individualized learning paths and intervention plans;

12.   Is students using personal learning devices, such as mobile devices to individualize their learning and improve

13.   communication within the school community;

Is the school community including multiple layers of support;

Is students interacting and collaborating with each other and with the content;

Emphasizes teachers interacting with the content, with students and with other teachers;

Necessitates social-emotional connections built between students and teachers as the foundation of their work together;

Means various starting points within content, varied amounts of guided practice and independent practice as needed.

Personalization is about many ideas. It is about…

•Discovering students’ prior knowledge and experience of the content they are about to learn and meeting them where they are;

• Guiding students to make healthy academic decisions;

• Developing learning communities that celebrate the individuality and contributions of each student; and

• Consolidating forms of student learning data so that they are useful for planning for personalized instruction.

To personalize learning is to encourage students to develop clear goals and expectations for achievement and support them to make good decisions in a challenging and rigorous learning environment. It’s a space where teachers are allowed the time they need to work with students; design instruction that is rigorous, flexible, and adaptable; and focus on critical thinking and metacognitive practices to develop stronger, deeper, independent learning.

In “How Children Learn,” which was developed by the International Academy of Education, there are 12 elements, with supporting research, that were developed to guide the design of instruction and curriculum to support children’s learning (Vosniadou, 2001). These design elements, illustrated in Table 1, should be used to guide the design of personalized learning environments.

All of the elements in Table 1 are important in the process of personalization. Additionally, according to educators from the field, the following are the top ten essential components of personalization:

1. Student agency (student has voice and choice on level of standards/lesson and some control over how they learn)

2. Differentiated instruction

3. Immediate instructional interventions and supports for each student is on-demand, when needed

4. Flexible pacing

5. Individual student profiles (personalized learning plan)

6. Deeper learning and problem solving to develop meaning

7. Frequent feedback from instructors and peers

8. Standards-based, world-class knowledge and skills

9. Anywhere, any time learning can occur

10. Performance-based assessments — project-based learning, portfolios, etc.

Scott Benson, Program Officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, identified the following working list of essential attributes for a personalized learning model (2013):

• Learner Profiles: Captures individual skills, gaps, strengths, weaknesses, interests & aspirations of each student.

•Personal Learning Paths: Each student has learning goals & objectives. Learning experiences are diverse and matched to the individual needs of students.

•Individual Mastery: Continually assesses student progress against clearly defined standards & goals. Students advance based on demonstrated mastery.

•Flexible Learning Environment: Multiple instructional delivery approaches that continuously optimize available resources in support of student learning.Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education 7

Compare these essential attributes to what most traditional one-size-fits-all classroom environments look like: learner profiles with precise knowledge and skills, students with personal learning paths versus a lecture-based learning experience; flexible learning environments with a variety of modes, resources and modalities (e.g. connectivism, as illustrated in Figure 1) versus one approach for all students at the exact same pace using a single textbook. Today, with these contrasts, the vast majority of traditional classrooms in the K-12 education system are far from realizing the promise of personalized learning. However, this is where the shift to blended learning instructional models can begin to incorporate the essential elements for personalized learning — providing a roadmap and solution as a method or modality for delivery — and a means to transform education to student-centric learning. Realizing this transformation requires highly personalized, blended learning environments designed and built upon competency education.

As Sir Ken Robinson said, “Education doesn’t need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed. The key is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions” (2009).

 

Blended Learning: Using the Tools to Support Personalization

“Blended learning is about the ability to personalize instruction. The only way to do that is for teachers to use the data constantly to individualize instruction and provide targeted instruction.

It isn’t about the tech, it is about the instructional model change. Blended learning is not about whether you are just giving a kid a computer.”

– Samantha Sherwood, Assistant Principal, Bronx Arena High School in New York City

IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE BEING ABLE TO IMPLEMENT PERSONALIZED LEARNING WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY. The tools in blended and online learning can support flexible pacing, differentiated instruction, immediate interventions, and anywhere, any time learning.

What is most important is to understand the nuanced differences between blended learning models and the instructional designs that can enable personalized learning and how personalized learning itself can be a driving concept for new learning models. Blended learning is a combination of face-to-face learning experiences and online learning platforms, content, and tools for personalizing instruction. True blended learning is a modality to realize a fundamental shift in the instructional model toward personalized learning.

This section of the paper will explore:

• How does blended learning enable personalized learning?

• How does blended learning change instructional design?

• How does blended learning enable student co-design?

It is important to examine blended learning models to evaluate the extent to which high-quality implementations create major shifts in the instructional design — from the differences in educator roles in traditional, one-size-fits-all classrooms (one teacher, one textbook, one pathway to learning objectives) — and transform learning experiences to result in personalized learning opportunities to optimize teaching and learning. Thus, blended learning is about the transformation of the instructional design toward personalized learning with teachers and students harnessing advanced technological tools to accomplish the shift toward personalization by design.

Blended learning instructional designs leverage the strengths of both the classroom and online modalities. The blended learning instructional model shifts have the potential to result in “learning optimization” to create more personalized learning opportunities.

What blended learning offers is a rational approach, focused on redesigning instructional models first, then applying technology, not as the driver, but as the enabler for high-quality learning experiences that allow a teacher to personalize learning and manage an optimized learning enterprise in the classroom.

 

TO BE CLEAR, PERSONALIZED LEARNING IS NOT EQUAL TO COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING — but they are related and terms are often (mistakenly) used interchangeably. Competency-based learning is a system of education, often referred to as proficiency or mastery-based, in which students advance and move ahead on their lessons based on demonstration of mastery. In order for students to progress at a meaningful pace, schools and teachers provide differentiated instruction and support. People across the field of K-12 education are using the terms competency-based, proficiency-based, mastery-based, performance-based interchangeably in their own contexts — however, we use the term competency education.

To be clear on what we mean by competency education, Sturgis and Patrick (2011) developed a five-part working definition in partnership with the field at the Competency-based Education Summit hosted by iNACOL and Council of

Chief State School Officers (CCSSO):

1. Students advance upon demonstrated mastery.

2. Competencies include explicit, measurable, transferable learning objectives that empower students.

3. Assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students.

4. Students receive rapid, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.

5. Learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include application and creation of knowledge along with the development of important skills and dispositions.

In a competency-based education system, students understand learning objectives and also know what they must “know and show” to be proficient. If a student does not demonstrate adequate proficiency to advance, they must be provided with supports and interventions that help them fill the gaps in their knowledge and skills.

When we think about the traditional “time-based system,” students essentially have variable amounts of learning in fixed amounts of time — quite simply allowing students to have varying levels of gaps as they move through the system with passing grades. For example, in a time-based system, even a “B” average in a course assumes the student may be missing 15-20% of the content knowledge. Students are passed on with “C”s and “D”s, unprepared for the next course.

Competency-based models rely on students demonstrating their competencies toward the attainment of a degree or diploma, in K-12 education and in higher education. Students may take multiple pathways to acquire competencies.

Competency education supports student-centered, new learning models that bridge formal and informal learning — allowing students to demonstrate competency in a wide variety of ways by learning content through different modalities, experiences and methods — inside and outside of school walls. The same high standards that exist for graduating are set for all students to maintain rigor — but students have greater voice and choice in how, where, when and what they are learning to achieve competency (aligned to the standards) and how they demonstrate mastery through a performance.

Competency education models challenge a key policy issue — awarding credit based on the amount of time a student is in a seat, or seat-time, for each course, regardless of what was learned. Most blended learning models occur within classrooms. However, there is a need for blended learning using competency-based approaches to provide flexibility for learning to take place inside and outside of the school building for students to have control and flexibility over path, place and pace. Right now, seat-time policies at the local and state level may limit a student’s ability to engage in an internship while attending a blended learning high school, to earn credit while learning outside of the traditional school day. If the learning were based on students demonstrating competencies, with adequate policies for quality, accountability and assessment of learning — students could acquire knowledge from both formal and informal settings and demonstrate the knowledge for credit in schools. Competency education models are a foundation to transform and open anytime, everywhere learning that enables personalized learning in powerful ways.