Giving Compass' Take:

• The Clayton Christensen Institute partnered with Public Impact to study how school staffing and personalized learning affect one another.  In three critical insights, researchers found that team teaching will increase supportive relationships, support staff is useful for personalized learning, and blended learning complements innovative staffing. 

• How can schools now use these insights to make better staffing choices around personalized learning? Can experts in edtech also use these insights to make better software focused on teacher influence? 

• What other benefits are there of personalized learning? Read about how personalized learning can lead to education equity. 

For personalized learning to actually move the needle on improving student experiences and elevating student outcomes, the question of how schools and teachers personalize is just as important as why. Across the K–12 education landscape, teachers have by far the biggest impact on student learning and student experiences.

Over the past year, The Clayton Christensen Institute partnered with Public Impact to study the intersection between personalized learning and school staffing. Our aim was to observe how schools might be using new staffing arrangements to better meet the individual learning needs of their students. Below are brief snippets on three of our most interesting insights.

  1. Team teaching increases supportive relationships: With these new staffing arrangements, schools found that having many eyes on each student helped keep students from falling through the cracks; increased students’ chances of forming a strong, positive connection with at least one adult; and decreased the odds that a student risked going through a year with just one “really bad fit” teacher.
  2. Support staff help schools personalize through small group instruction: At the schools we studied, teaching teams included not only teachers, but also other support staff, such as tutors, teaching fellows, or small-group instructors. These support staff members played a critical role in helping the schools offer their students frequent opportunities for personalized learning in small groups.
  3. Blended learning complements innovative staffing: As schools used new staffing arrangements to personalize their instruction, blended learning gave them increased flexibility in how to best use their educators’ time and talents. By letting online learning provide some instruction, educator teams could focus more on coaching students and addressing their individual needs instead of worrying about covering their course content.

Read the full article about personalized learning insights by Thomas Arnett at Christensen Institute