help us explore our creativity. Flow describes that feeling people get when they are totally locked into a task and make progress with what feels like effortless movement (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008).
As educators, we know what flow is, but it is a challenge to get to it. Using the five elements of personalized learning and making them a regular part of collaborative team discussions is a wonderful way to intentionally and deliberately create opportunities for students to be more engaged and extend their learning. In our experience, question 4 students who aren’t being challenged or given additional opportunities typically just play along to just get by with minimal effort, or find something else to keep their mind occupied. As educators, we would never allow this with struggling students. It is our job as professional educators to give all students an intentional and engaging learning plan.
With any change in an organization, it is important to start with the why (TEDx Talks, 2009). Along with our personal experiences of being engaged and unengaged, the reality that no student is average, the technology- and personalization-rich era in which today’s learners have been raised, the ways in which emotions impact learning, and the connections of personalized learning to deep research help make a strong case for why we advocate for personalized learning as a tool to extend learning.
The Myth of Average
The myth of average presents a compelling case for personalized learning. In a 2013 TED Talk, Todd Rose, a Harvard professor and former high school dropout, describes the design principles that guided the work of the U.S. Air Force in the early 1950s (TEDx Talks, 2013). The Air Force used fighter jets with cockpits made for the average pilot from the year 1926. Thinking that perhaps pilots were just bigger than they used to be, it was determined that new specifications for planes would be needed, based on ten different physical traits. Air Force researchers, at a base in Ohio, measured thousands of pilots to find this new average. In the end, not one of the 4,063 pilots was average in all ten categories. This finding transformed the way the Air Force began to builds jets (Rose, 2016).
The pilots might have been above average in some areas, average in others, and below in still others, so the manufacturers had developed jets for literally nobody. In a bold move, the Air Force called for companies who built planes to no longer build for the average but to design to the edges, which called for designing planes that could be personalized for pilots, so pilots of various sizes could fly (TEDx Talks, 2013). Because of the new cockpits, pilots were more successful and the pool for pilots expanded. Rose’s (TEDx Talks, 2013) presentation gets to the point: when you design for the average, you design for no one. Rose (TEDx Talks, 2013) then connects this story to education, noting that classrooms are the “cockpits of our economy.”
Often in education, we plan our instructional activities around what we consider to be the average. Teachers we know have shared with us that, realistically, in typical learning and lesson plan creation, whether alone or as a collaborative team, conversations center around average students who have struggled to learn the material. Hardly any mention is given to the question 4 student. When we plan in this way, we are not really planning for anyone. To further illustrate the myth of average, use the tool in figure 2.1 to rate your aptitude on several characteristics educators tend to value in students.
Figure 2.1: Personal rating exercise.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks for a free reproducible version of this figure.
When we do this activity with groups of educators, it is interesting to see that those who consider themselves to be average are, like the pilots, not average in many areas. For those with an average overall score, it is not uncommon to see only one or two individual areas that actually represent the average. Our students are no different. So, like Rose (TEDx Talks, 2013) suggests, when we plan for the average or the middle, we are not serving the needs of anyone. Personalized learning is a wonderful way to consider designing to the edges.
Our Students’ Immersion in Technology
As of 2018, all K–12 educators teach students born after the year 2000. What are some personal characteristics you believe to be true about students today that are different from when you were a student?
The students of this generation have much different backgrounds and upbringings than many of the people reading this book. First, because these students have always had access to technology that quickly responds to their needs, they have had their entire lives personalized; they have been able to access anything they want at a moment’s notice in the way they want. A colleague of ours has a daughter with a 1998 birthday who is a college freshman. His daughter was born the year Google became available for public use. Students in college have literally not been alive for a day when they couldn’t just google the answer to a question. In fact, many young adults live their entire lives through social media; it didn’t happen if it wasn’t published to the world. Unlike this book’s authors’ generations, these students have full-text articles and books, and experts on social media just a click away.
Educators reading this book probably remember watching television shows like The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, Family Ties, or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with their families and also watching whatever their oldest siblings were watching. We remember when there was one TV in the house and the family watched together. Then, the youngest child in the family didn’t have a say in what to watch and was not allowed to change the channel to something else. Now, because of handheld technology, in some families the youngest doesn’t even use the main TV in the family room. They are watching another TV or are using their own devices, watching the shows they want when they want, with no commercials. Tom Murray (2017) calls this generation the Netflix Generation, a term to describe students who use newer platforms like Netflix and YouTube for entertainment. Murray (2017) makes the connection to this idea by calling out a challenge to our profession: “If our existing mindset is that our job (as teachers) is content delivery, we have to realize that we are being outsourced by YouTube.”
Nearly everything else with technology is personalized as well. We authors remember, when we were much younger, buying our music on tapes, records, and CDs and trying to enjoy all the songs that came on the album with the one hit song we actually liked. However, when we choose songs we like on iTunes, we don’t have to order the rest of the album, and as the app begins to learn our tastes in music, it shares potential songs to buy based on what it knows about us. If someone does a search for a product that he or she finds interesting, that person will suddenly see many ads appear with these items when he or she uses other sites such as social media. Netflix similarly recommends shows for us to watch based on what we’ve already viewed. Whether it is watching television, ordering products, or listening to music, we are all used to and expect personalization.
Emotions and Learning
As authors, we had the chance to sit in on a series of conversations with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, associate professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Mark and Blane enjoyed professional opportunities that allowed them to meet with Immordino-Yang on multiple occasions from 2015 to 2017 and speak with her personally on the topic of emotions and learning. In these conversations with us, Immordino-Yang convincingly shares that all learning is emotional (personal communications, 2015–2017). When educators recognize that people only think deeply about things they care about, it becomes clear that asking students to recite or recall facts may not be the most effective strategy. In fact, in her studies on individuals with certain brain injuries, Immordino-Yang (2016) finds that when learning is devoid of emotion, being able to apply what was learned in a novel
