Giving Compass' Take:

• Thomas Arnett argues that a collective approach to preparing teachers for personalized learning is not the most effective way for teacher development. Instead, he offers a potential solution: adopt an integrated pipeline model following the skills of key stakeholders and pioneers within personalized learning.

• How do collective action and integration work differently to achieve the same goals? Do you agree that an integrated model will be more efficient than a collective one?

• Follow the thought process of a graduate school professor who shares insight as to how she teaches personalized learning to her graduate students preparing to be teachers.

There’s growing recognition today of a huge problem slowing innovation in personalized learning: we don’t have a clear pipeline for preparing and developing personalized learning teachers. Although many aspects of teaching translate across personalized and traditional settings, the schools driving personalized learning forward often find that their teachers need some additional skills and mindset shifts that they just don’t pick up in traditional teacher preparation.

The solution, as many funders, experts, and school leaders see it, is collective action. They talk of bringing together a diverse array of stakeholders to define a common set of educator competencies and then working with established teacher education programs to create new pathways for developing next-generation educators.

But if we look to how innovation problems have played out in other sectors, it’s clear that the “collective action” approach will likely flounder at creating the pipeline of excellent personalized learning teachers that the field needs.

Clayton Christensen’s Modularity Theory illustrates one important reason why the collaborative approach proved less effective. According to the theory, when new innovations are still stretching to meet our expectations, the best strategy for pushing a product’s performance forward is for a single entity to control all the interdependent pieces of the solution that affect performance

So, what should personalized-learning proponents do instead? Given where education is at as a field, the best solutions are going to come from integration. Rather than working to build consensus on common educator competencies and form partnerships with established teacher education programs, the field should focus on supporting leading innovators, like Summit or Lindsay Unified, in developing their own integrated talent pipelines to meet the needs of their particular contexts and instructional models.

Read the full article about preparing teachers for personalized learning by Thomas Arnett at the Christensen Institute