Giving Compass' Take:

• The Highlander Institute supports schools and districts by offering personalized approaches for schools to implement through a five-phase framework called  Pathways to Personalization: A Framework for School Change. 

• How can education funders help schools develop and maintain personalized learning standards within these frameworks?

• Raed about how personalized learning is on the rise. 

From Providence to Seattle, educators, families, and especially students are calling for education transformation, but they are struggling to get from where they are to where they want to be. Sometimes preferred routes come in the form of buzzwords like “blended learning,” “personalized learning,” or “deeper learning redesign.”

Regardless of the impetus for change, we know our system must evolve. Our students deserve a new vision for teaching and learning that breaks the stagnation of our legacy models.

When the Highlander Institute team first began supporting schools and districts determined to shift instruction to be more student-centered, we typically overpersonalized our services. Some requests asked for help creating a one-to-one program to provide “21st century learning” for all students. Others asked us to run professional development for teachers around a new learning management system.

As we studied the many ways in which we were supporting schools and districts and unpacked our efficacy data around classroom shifts and student outcomes, we learned a lot about what levels of implementation and commitment were necessary for a truly transformative change to happen.

We determined that what we needed was a change process rooted in research and development that schools and districts could commit to over time. We knew it had to emphasize local voice and agency across all stakeholder groups but still allow for the integration of nationally proven and research-backed practices, products, and strategies.

It was with this intention that we developed our Pathway to Personalization Framework, which was just released as a book, Pathways to Personalization: A Framework for School Change, through Harvard Education Press. Our framework lays out a process that consists of five phases, taking teams from planning to scale over a multi-year arc of change.

Read the full article about personalized learning by Shawn Rubin at The 74