Giving Compass' Take:

• Schools paving the way for personalized learning share their strategies which include: new teacher roles, collaboration between staff, personalized coaching, and building pipelines for students.

• How can schools create platforms to share best personalized learning practices? Is there a network that already exists to help educators evaluate and implement success?

• Montessori schools are making their personalized curriculum and materials available for public schools to use, thus taking the first steps to create collaborative approaches necessary for success.

K-12 education is abuzz with interest in personalizing instruction and a drive to change the student experience. Yet amid this innovative fervor, the traditional classroom staffing arrangement is still an unquestioned assumption in many schools, with each teacher working largely alone, taking sole responsibility for a roster of students.

By adding personalized learning to teachers’ workloads without changing how schools are organized, schools face a great risk that their attempts to personalize learning will fall short of their promise.

Some pioneering schools with noteworthy student achievement results have begun to address this by personalizing their instruction through innovative staffing arrangements combined with blended learning.

These approaches often provide teachers with team-based support and career paths, and give students more opportunities for small-group instruction, connections to adults, and instruction personalized to their needs.

Key elements of these schools’ innovative staffing models included:

  • New Roles: These roles included teacher-leaders, collaborating teachers, support staff, and teachers-in-training. Teacher-leaders led small instructional teams. They often planned and directed instruction for other team teachers, coached teachers, and analyzed data.
  • Collaboration: What made the staffing arrangements at these schools unique was how they organized their various educator roles into small teams for co-teaching, team teaching, and intensive collaboration.
  • Coaching: The roles and teams at these schools not only allowed educators to better support their students but also provided increased opportunities for support, development, and career advancement.
  • Pipelines: Many schools also created paid fellowships and residencies that enabled them to train their own teachers, thereby building their flow of future educators.

Blended learning — the integration of online learning into brick-and-mortar schools — went hand in hand with innovative staffing models. The real-time student learning data produced by blended learning software gave educator teams a shared picture of students’ progress and needs.

Read the full article about personalized learning by Taylor Swaak at The 74