or disengaged. Concepts, mandated curriculum, and state standards may be set in your school, and you may feel like your hands are tied sometimes; nevertheless, you can still influence the delivery of the material and provide lessons that speak to your learners’ interests and learning styles. Here are four ideas to involve students in the design process for your upcoming lessons.
1. Allow students guided options in how they would like to learn the material: Give them more say in choosing a topic to investigate and write about. For example, let them collaborate on Pinterest boards to organize, comment, and share materials.
2. Let them choose how to demonstrate what they learn: Multimedia presentations, such as using audio and video applications, can help with engaging students through their creativity. Let them demonstrate concepts by tying technology in the classroom to content and lessons in ways that are relevant and interesting to them.
3. Let them self- and peer assess: Self- and peer-assessment support comes from both students and teachers. Encouraging reflection and self-assessment can be a powerful dimension to learning because I have found it fosters a sense of personal responsibility in students for their learning. In addition, it reduces a teacher’s workload and lets students effectively demonstrate understanding. Students are honest in their assessment of their performance and that of their peers and value each other’s insights because it helps them understand the process of their own learning. It also reinforces the importance of collaboration. I write more about self- and peer assessment in chapter 10 (page 121).
4. Let them teach for a week: Assign each student a week where he or she gets to act as the teacher for a set amount of time on a concept or idea of his or her choice. Students’ teaching time doesn’t have to be very long, maybe fifteen minutes per day for a week. Because they will need time to plan their lessons in advance and prepare for their teaching week, get them involved well in advance so they can effectively explore an idea or concept. You can prepare them for each day’s lesson beforehand in perhaps an hour or even less, but you’ll have to gauge how much time it will take to prepare them for multiple days in advance. Use your best judgment and be on hand to offer them insights on how best to conduct their instruction.
Using strategies like these to personalize learning engages students’ creativity and gives them broader context and relevance for learning topics.
Reflection
After you complete this activity with your students, take some time to reflect on and answer the following questions.
• How much deeper was your learners’ connection to the lesson when they had input in creating it?
• How did the outcomes change?
• What was their most meaningful discovery when designing their own learning?
Summary
Teachers and students are both human, and humans are emotional beings. Indeed, learning itself is an emotionally charged experience. Think back to a time when you were young and had an aha moment in one of your own classroom learning experiences. How did you feel when you realized you finally had a complete understanding of a concept? Did you feel joy, elation, and a personal sense of accomplishment? How did the adventure of learning and discovery feel to you then? It’s through this emotional conduit that learning resonates with us and becomes meaningful, and the same is true for the learners in our classrooms. It’s those moments we strive to provide for them as teachers.
The type of learning that sparks emotion and connection by association and relevance is far and away the most powerful learning we can experience, both as teachers and as students. Because as a teacher your learning never ends, you are in a prime position to positively model a mindset of being a lifelong learner to every student you encounter. The more we connect students with learning at a contextual level that is relevant to their lives, the more we transform learning into a deeply personal experience. Your students can experience some of that through the microshifts in this chapter, but the next shift (the next step) is to truly embrace personalized learning even beyond what we explored here.
Guiding Questions
As you reflect on this chapter, consider the following five guiding questions.
1. Why are connection and relevance so vital to successful learning?
2. How do emotional connections fit into the learning process?
3. What kinds of heartfelt questions can you ask students to emotionally engage them in the learning for your curriculum?
4. In what ways can you use edtech to connect students with learning topics?
5. What else can you do beyond the microshifts in this chapter to make learning relevant to your learners?
Future-Focused Learning © 2019 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/21stcenturyskills to download this free reproducible.
chapter 3
Personalized Learning
Traditional instructional practices often dismiss personalizing learning for each student. I’ve seen education stakeholders across the spectrum claim it’s too challenging and time consuming to apply to large groups of students, and it requires real effort from educators to succeed. These challenges are surmountable, and it’s important that we do surmount them, because personalized learning is also a critical component of effective instruction that gets students invested in their own success.
Imagine you are going to an eye doctor because you are having trouble with your vision. You make the appointment, arrive and prepare yourself mentally, and enter the examination room. The doctor performs your eye exam, determines you need corrective lenses, and writes a prescription for you; the problem is solved, or so you believe. Now, imagine that when your glasses finally arrive, you put them on only to find, to your dismay, that your vision is worse than before. You return to the eye doctor and explain what happened and that there must be a mistake with your prescription. “Not at all,” the doctor replies. “That’s the same prescription for my own eyeglasses. It works for me, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work for you.”
Can you imagine ever again having faith in the qualifications of this doctor? Of course not, which is why no eye doctor would do this in real life. All good medical professionals realize that not all patients have the exact same ailments, nor do they always require identical forms of treatment. Doctors individualize, differentiate, and personalize their approach according to the needs of each particular patient in order to obtain the most positive results for the vast number of people they treat. So it is with educators working with complex and versatile learners.
I often see educators confuse personalized learning with differentiation when there is, in fact, a significant difference between them. Differentiation usually involves all learners doing the same teacher-prescribed task regardless of their having any connection to it; the educator simply scales the task for each student’s capacity. Personalization is different. It is the process of creating an individual pathway through learning to arrive at the required outcomes in a way that is relevant to each learner.
This third shift of practice, personalizing learning, happens when educators use connections that are relevant to learners’ interest between the task and the individual student to
