Giving Compass' Take:

• Personalized learning has been trending around the country, but many people are still confused as to what it entails. The 74 reports on expert opinions explaining that personalized learning is reliant on leadership and relationships with students and teachers rather than money or technology.

• What challenges do teachers face when implementing personalized learning? How can these issues be addressed?

• Read about the effects of personalized learning on education equity and learning styles.

The media images illustrating students in “personalized learning” environments often look something like this: elementary schoolers with headphones on, looking at tablets, or teenagers typing away on laptops.

But during a recent panel discussion, experts and educators sought to make one thing clear: Personalized learning is not about technology, and you don’t need a lot of money to carry it out.

“It’s really about leadership,” said Heidi Vazquez, a third- and fourth-grade teacher at The Compass School in Kingston, Rhode Island, at the Education Writers Association’s national seminar in Los Angeles.

“It’s definitely a lot easier [with money], and technology is an amazing tool to help you get there,” Vazquez said, “but … in order to do this work, the thing that teachers need the most … is time.”

“They need time to collaborate; they need time to figure it out,” Vazquez said. “The pacing question is the biggest piece of it.”

Also on the panel were April Chou, vice president of education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University and skeptic of technology-based school reform.

Read the full article about leadership in personalized learning by Emmeline Zhao at The 74.