Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for the Christensen Institute, Chelsea Waite explains that to better scale personalized learning and expand its impact, school leaders need to clearly identify and categorize the problems before developing a sustainable solution.

· What types of problems are considered in education innovation? How can donors help extend the reach of personalized learning?

· Read this article to learn more about personalized learning and what certain tools are missing.

Late last year, iNACOL published a landscape analysis of personalized learning across the country. The report showed emerging growth, but it also demonstrated how key elements of personalized learning are still not widely practiced in schools. These findings speak to a broader question plaguing personalized learning advocates: what is limiting our ability to scale personalization?

Undoubtedly there are many answers to this question, but one of them relates to understanding the kinds of problems that personalized learning can address. Clayton Christensen frequently notes, “Hard problems often solve themselves after we get the categories right.” Pursuing an innovative approach that’s mismatched with the type of problem at hand may be limiting the growth of personalized learning.

One of the biggest misconceptions about innovation is that it takes only one form. A great deal of innovation in schools is sustaining — it seeks to address problems by improving whatever’s currently on offer for students, like adopting a new adaptive curriculum to raise math proficiency or using an LMS to streamline how teachers manage classwork. Disruptiveinnovations, on the other hand, are characteristic for creating new access to a given product or service, like offering a virtual AP Physics course despite a shortage of qualified teachers locally.

Read the full article about personalized learning by Chelsea Waite at the Christensen Institute.