Dawn Hillman, principal of Prairie Heights Middle School in Evans, Colorado, describes her student population as “pretty at-risk.” About three-quarters of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly used measure of poverty.

Mary Hulac, an eighth grade English language arts teacher, says many students are simply exhausted from the trauma that defines their lives outside of school. But teachers try to frame school as a safe place — a break from the outside world.

And this school year, with a new focus on personalized learning, students have a new way to take control of their lives.

After the threat of being closed down, Prairie Heights reorganized itself as a “school of innovation,” and it put personalized learning at the center of its plan. The model is anchored by the Summit Learning Platform, an online tool designed by the Summit Public Schools charter network and then supercharged by Facebook engineers. It offers a comprehensive curriculum for grades five through 12, stocked with instructional content, projects and assessments that students access on-demand, at their own pace. Students who use the platform are prompted to set short- and long-term goals, and teachers monitor their progress and facilitate their learning along the way.

But the transition to personalized learning — and to Summit — has not been easy. Adopting this new approach to instruction has been a heavy lift for teachers who have to rethink the way they run their classrooms and master an entirely new curriculum.  But there are positives: students have started to appreciate that they can move at their own pace. They like the one-on-one feedback from teachers and are beginning to recognize their strengths.

Read the full article on personalized learning and student progress by Tara Garcia Mathewson at The Hechinger Report.