Educational Leadership - February 2012

theme he might want to explore, we realized that he should explore the medieval version of a football star—a knight. It then developed into looking at how British literature addresses masculinity; he was really able to reflect on his own ambitions through the literature. Sometimes finding a passion just takes time; for some students, it takes several texts or subjects before they find something that really sparks an interest.

Assessment changes as well. Don-hauser says that the emphasis moves to assessing in the moment rather than at the end of a book or unit. “Rather than having a defined product that I receive from 25 students,” she says, “I receive 25 individual assignments with their own unique content, insights, and styles.” Using Google Docs, students continually update their progress, and she provides regular feedback. Students also give one another feedback on their plans as they go. Everyone follows a rubric that covers such areas as standards, learning outcomes, artifact explanation, blog posts, learning activities, work ethic, and research. Personalized learning like this requires students to reflect deeply on their effort and assess their work and progress, a fundamental part of developing the skills and dispositions to continue learning after the class ends.

The Role of Technology

For Anne Smith, who teaches a course in personal learning networks at Arapahoe High School outside Denver, Colorado, technology facilitates both the learning and the assessment process.

Students keep blogs, which Smith regularly comments on, where they archive their work, reflect on their learning, and connect with potential teachers outside the classroom. Smith uses Google Reader, an RSS feed aggre-gator, to collect all of her students’ posts and support her review process. Students also use podcasts to capture and

share presentations they give in class.

Web 2.0 technologies are at the heart of personalization, and not just in the typical Google search sense. By embedding such social web tools as blogs and social bookmarks into the learning culture, both students and teachers can stay organized and focused. For example, students at Hunterdon Central use Google Docs to share their academic plans with teachers and peers, who edit and comment on the plans both in and out of school. Students can connect to the people who have created the resources they are using—the authors, bloggers, videographers, and others who have shared their work online.

For other schools, the “ disruptive innovation” comes in the form of technologies that are less social but are highly personalized nonetheless.

At the Trinity School outside Atlanta, Georgia, students choose to study one of 23 world languages offered in Rosetta Stone’s online classroom. Each student can work through the curriculum at his or her own pace under the guidance of a world languages instructor at the school who may not know the language but who is an expert in facilitating language learning, goal setting, and personalized practice offline. According to teacher Megan Howard, the personalized nature of the program requires teachers “to meet each child where he or she is and differentiate support and curriculum on the basis of language and learning style rather than grouping or whole class. That’s a necessary shift in the role of the teacher.”

Personalized vs. Personal

Despite the promise of personalizing learning and some teachers’ best efforts to give their students more agency in the education process, many educators wonder whether the concept goes far enough in preparing students for the wide array of learning opportunities outside the classroom.

Many educators cite an important difference between “personalized” learning and “personal” learning—the latter connotes a deeper degree of autonomy for the learner. Some, like Stephen Downes, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and a longtime education blogger, see that as an important distinction. “Autonomy is what distin-guishes between personal learning, which we do for ourselves, and personalized learning, which is done for us,” Downes (2011) tweeted last fall.