Giving Compass' Take:

· Despite attempts to innovate classrooms and promote personalized learning, The 74 reports that teachers lack support from their superiors and are often impeded by their own school systems.

· How can school systems better support teachers innovating classrooms? How can they better promote personalized learning?

· Read about the effects of a Vermont school that requires every student to have a personalized learning plan.

When school districts adopt personalized learning, the bulk of the work falls to teachers, who, while excited about the opportunity to innovate, are often not supported by their school systems to implement and share their ideas.

That’s according to new research from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which analyzed the efforts of districts and organizations that received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create personalized learning models in their schools. The research comes at a critical moment for the personalized learning field, as scant evidence has emerged to demonstrate whether the billions of dollars invested in these scattered efforts are paying off.

Researchers found successes in smaller districts in the northeastern United States as well as charter schools, underscoring their argument that the bureaucracies of large district systems often impede the implementation of personalized learning.

“This study is very clear that just asking our teachers to do this work is probably not going to work in the long run,” said Betheny Gross, research director at CRPE and co-author of the study along with Michael DeArmond, a senior research analyst. “We noted just tremendous misalignment between what the folks in the schools were trying to do and what their school systems were prepared to support them to do.”

Read the full article about teacher innovation by Kate Stringer at The 74