Giving Compass' Take:

• When schools move toward personalized learning, the process can be hard and there are often numerous questions that aren't answered. EdSurge talks with three leaders about how they address the challenges.

• It's important to support educators just as much as students during this process. Which steps can those in the sector take to provide empowerment?

• Learn more about the benefits of personalized learning.

Moving towards personalized learning can be fraught with tension. How do you set a vision? What supports do you need in place? How can you get district and state level systems to work together to get a full picture of what is happening?

Ahead of our 2018 EdSurge Fusion conference in October, we sat down with three attendees to discuss the secret sauce of what is working in their communities.

  1. Putting vision into practice - Any school district knows, creating a vision for personalized learning is useless if you do not provide staff the steps to actually get there. According to Adam Lindstrom, Supervisor of Instructional Technology, Marlboro Township in NY: “The vision is only as good as the action that comes after it.” Therefore, Marlboro set out to provide a roadmap for educators to understand how each element of their vision works in practice.
  2. Creating teacher buy-in for personalized learning - Change management can be a lonely process. If you do not effectively engage your teachers, then there is a good likelihood the initiative will fail. Building on prior work in personalized learning, leaders in Greenwich Public Schools knew they had to start by building strong support within the teacher community.
  3. Setting a state level vision - How do you think about interoperability across an entire state education system? Ask Caitlin Dooley, Deputy Superintendent of Teaching and Learning at Georgia Department of Education, whose department in May 2018 won the platinum level IMS Global Learning Impact Award, a high honor, for their Georgia Virtual Total Learning Architecture.

Read the full article about leaders in personalized learning by Megan McMahon and Molly Levitt at EdSurge.