Choice Is Only One Part of Personalization

Providing choice to students is a common method of personalizing the learning experience. However, one of the main goals of personalized learning is to encourage our students to be creative, and in this context, choice can actually hinder this goal. More important than choice, students need to be given control and ownership if creativity is to be fostered. 

Choice often provides students with the illusion of control, when in fact they are simply choosing from a series of fixed options. In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford discusses how we have “too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar”. Using examples such as the customization of cars, where users simply pick from a list of accessories, or the Build-a-Bear shops that allow children to create a stuffed bear to their liking, Crawford argues that the user merely chooses from a series of predetermined alternatives. In these examples, users may have choice, but they are certainly not being creative. According to Crawford, this approach encourages reliance and passive consumption.

Many assignments in school follow a similar model to accessorizing a car or the Build-a-Bear, where students simply pick from several choices provided by the teacher. If this approach creates students that are reliant or passive, they will undoubtedly struggle to take ownership over their learning. What is the solution?

While it is unrealistic to provide a blank slate to students for every assignment, it is important to realize that creativity will be stifled when assignments become too prescriptive. Students need to be given the opportunity, and freedom, to explore. Furthermore, it is the role of the teacher to encourage students to take risks and to take advantage of opportunities. A personalized approach that incorporates blended learning provides students with tremendous flexibility in how and when they learn. Students need to take advantage of this flexibility but they will most likely need encouragement, a little push or insight before they will carve out their own path. In order to facilitate this change the teacher needs to know their students’ strengths and interests and create structures that encourage self-reliance and individuality. If we want students to take control over their learning, teachers need to lead by example and give students control, rather than send them down rigid pathways.

Erin Millar, in a Globe and Mail article, writes about a high school in Edmonton where students were given responsibility for launching a café on school grounds. Students oversaw every detail, from selection of furniture to which brands of coffee would be offered. In the end, a tremendous amount of student creativity was observed. While the students obviously had many choices to make in launching the café, it was the control and ownership over the project that promoted creativity, not the choice.  

Kyle Acres
Learning Technology Adviser

Flexible Scheduling Supports Personalized Learning

"Flexible scheduling and mixed ability or heterogeneous grouping can help personalize the learning environment and enhance all students’ ability to excel.” (High School Flexibility Enhancement: A Literature Review (2009). Cushman, 1989; Smith, 2008; Clark, 2006; Garrity et al, 2007)

Almost 20 years ago, the authors of Prisoners of Time (Report of the National Commission on Time and Learning, 1994) concluded that the century-long reliance on the Carnegie unit as the organizing principle for high school schedules was a detriment to achieving the kind of educational transformation that educational experts have long espoused. More recently, others have observed that flexible scheduling—length of school day, school year, daily classes—is a key element to truly personalizing the student experience.

Unfortunately, progress in this area continues to be slow. However, it was encouraging to come across two examples of schools that have adopted a progressive stance to the use of time in high schools. In 2011, the Alberta government launched the High School Flexibility Enhancement Project. This project involves 16 high schools from throughout the province. Essentially, the schools are working together “to develop an approach to school organization that does not necessarily equate time with credit. “ The group expects to release its findings later this year.

One other example comes from Hawken School in Ohio. Among the novel approaches adopted by Hawken is allowing students to take one course for a three-week period at two points in the year. By focusing solely on one course (which the school refers to as “intensives”), students can engage in deeper inquiry and incorporate a higher degree of out-of-class learning without disrupting other classes, which is what currently happens in a traditional high school schedule.

Needless to say, here at Greenwood we are looking closely at these practical examples of innovative approaches to the use of time, as well as the underlying research related to flexible scheduling, so that we can better understand how we might modify our current approach to best serve our students and our ongoing commitment to student centered learning.

Allan Hardy
Principal

A Flexible Timetable Leads to a Personalized Approach

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the belief I share with people such as Salman Khan that schools of the future will utilize blended learning as a tool to personalize the student experience. To truly personalize, however, we need to do more than use technology to enhance learning. We need to change our timetables to create greater flexibility.

At Greenwood College School, we have spent time this year discussing how the timetable will need to change in the eventual future in order to continue meeting the needs of our school’s mission, as well as accommodate a more personalized approach to learning.

The ideal timetable would have large blocks of time dedicated to various learning tasks. There would be some flexible time in which students could choose the subject or activity they would work on during that time. Other time would be more structured with a common lecture, tutorial or rehearsal for many students enrolled in a course.

Our current timetable has equal blocks of time for every subject. This is not ideal for many students. Some students need to spend more time on their writing and research-related courses, others need to spend more time on math or on a language. A flexible timetable can accommodate the needs of each individual student as they can choose to spend more time on their area of need or interest.

We feel that this combination of the flexible with the traditional will allow for more space within a day or week for students to extend their learning with excursions or cross-curricular projects, while maintaining teacher guidance.

A flexible timetable would enable students to enrich and personalize their school experience through excursions. For example, French students could go on a week-long trip to France or science students could do a few days of field study. If these students’ day-to-day schedule is flexible and their courses were being offered in a blended learning manner, then these excursions would not interfere with their learning in other courses.

The online materials and teacher support of a blended learning program would afford students who have a flexible timetable the time to work ahead - or catch up on the work not done - in their other courses while they were out of school.

These trips could become part of a personalized program for a student if they cover the expectations from a unit or multiple units within a course. If, for example, the student has covered a unit of their science course through a field study, they would not need to cover this material in the classroom.

The student would have completed these course requirements, but in a different way than their classmates. This would then free up time for the student to complete cross-curricular projects or to work on subjects that require more of their time.

Eventually adding more flexibility into the timetable will lead to a more personalized approach to many students’ school program.

Heather Rigby
Director of Personalized Learning