Personalized Learning: 4 Things That Are Sticking As We Start Year 3
Three years in, and I continue to be a believer in the power of personalizing the learning experience. After 10+ years working in traditional environments, I would never go back. However, not all things are sticking; in fact, some things aren’t, but that is for another blog post.
Here are the things we are doubling down on going into Year 3 of this work:
Mastery-Based Grading
This is fundamental to our vision of creating a more personalized learning experience. Mastery based grading simply means to us that students must know, at the start of every quarter, what is expected of them to master and what they need to accomplish to get their desired grade. Then, we get out of the way and let students approach their learning with each other, with a teacher or with the help of their Chromebook. This allows for both our teachers and our students to customize the learning experience every moment of every day.
Dynamic Tech Infrastructure
We assembled a cocktail of Illuminate, Canvas, Hapara and 1:1 Chromebooks that continue to allow us to run a dynamic and elegant system that is lightly managed. Teachers can easily interchange 140+ apps daily to the infrastructure. Talk to our Director of Technology about how he built it. It is beautifully simple.
PMC Performance Tasks
The efficiency of Mastery-Based Grading has opened up more time to do things that are more real and relevant to our students. Our Positive Multigenerational Change (PMC) performance tasks connect our students to a deeper purpose for their learning. This year we are doubling down on learning experience that are more student-driven, more creative and more connected to the real world.
The baby that didn’t go out with the bathwater
Call me old school, but we still couldn’t do any of this without the foundation of hiring great people, establishing a culture of high expectations, making every minute count and using pre/post and interim assessments aligned to the ACT. Having these foundations in place allows for us to think at higher levels of learning each day.
Ednovate is building on the successes and learnings of USC Hybrid High with the launch of USC East College Prep on Monday. With two schools challenged to create a more personalized college prep experience, we know we are going to learn a lot more, faster. That has already been the case three days in to the new school year. We plan to blog more frequently this year to continue to share our learnings as we grow.
Please share with us what is sticking with your schools as we all move towards a more personalized path. We don’t have all of the answers, but we do love having the conversation with others in our learning community.
Have a great year everyone.