Giving Compass' Take:

•  The Hechinger Report offers insight as to how personalized learning strategies encourage educators to first know their students and thus offer more support to an array of diverse learning styles. 

• How is personalized learning a more inclusive system than traditional learning? The Hechinger Report cites examples of schools who have had success with personalized learning. However, do you see any potential challenges with this approach?

• Learn about organizations that provide new innovations in personalized learning. 

“Personalized learning” is among the most discussed initiatives in education today. Most schools nationwide say they’ve implemented personalized learning, to some degree. Some use online programs or software to give students access to content at their individual level, allowing them to move through lessons at their own pace. Others have combined grade levels to best meet the needs of students.

“What’s necessary now is that we widen the aperture of the personalization conversation to include conversations about identity and who students are,” said Caroline Hill, the chief of school creation and transformation at CityBridge Education, a nonprofit that supports innovative schools in the District of Columbia.

You cannot personalize the learning experience for someone if you don’t know who they are.

Hill and her colleagues have designed a framework, which they call the equityXdesign framework, to help schools identify the needs of the most excluded students in a school and to design learning experiences based on what they need to become successful.

At a national level, many advocates for personalized learning and “student-centered” education now make the argument CityBridge does – that this new instructional approach can be consciously used to help all types of students, from all types of backgrounds, become high achievers.

Read more about personalized learning by Tara Garcia Mathewson at The Hechinger Report.