Building a Truly Student-Centred Program

I am delighted to kick off another year of blogging here on First-Person Plural. Our aim this year is to accentuate the title of this blog by having a number of our classroom teachers do some blogging about their experiences with personalized learning. This approach will provide followers of this blog with a real sense of this year’s personalized learning initiatives at Greenwood. Specifically, we are focusing on the following four areas:

• More Blended Learning Courses: Aside from our existing blended learning courses in Grades 11 and 12, we have are now using this approach in Grade 9 Geography, Grade 10 Canadian History, Civics, Grade 11 and 12 Computer Science, Grade 12 Chemistry, and Grades 11 and 12 Physics. This approach will ensure that all Greenwood students have some exposure to this hybrid approach to learning.

• Block Scheduling: We are piloting the use of a larger learning space, which will allow for more flexible grouping and interactive learning. We have planned our timetable so that students enrolled in Grade 7 English and mathematics use the same block of time. A similar approach is being used with Grade 9 Geography and Grade 10 History and Civics.

• Major-Minor Choice in Grade 7 and 8 Arts: This year students in Grades 7 and 8 will choose to focus more of their time on Instrumental Music, Visual Arts or Dramatic Arts (“the major”), and study the other two mediums in a “minor” format. Next year, Grade 8 students will choose one art form as a minor and one other as a major.

• Student Adviser: We are continuing to focus our advising program on individual advising rather than the traditional group approach used in most advising programs. Teachers acting as advisers have their teaching loads reduced so that they have the necessary time to meet with advisees. We are also continuing to augment our adviser program with the use of Hapara, a Google tool which enables advisers to use a digital dashboard to support student learning.

All of these initiatives are the result of careful research and planning over the past several years. Our hope, as it has been since Greenwood’s inception, is to continue to build a program that is truly student-centered.

Allan Hardy
Principal

Teachers Work Together To Meet Student Needs

There are many ways to meet the needs of individual students or groups of students within our own classrooms. If we schedule more than one section of a course at the same time, then multiple teachers are available to work together to meet the needs of the students in their classes.

multiple teachers are available to work together to meet the needs of the students in their classes

Teachers can then work together on the initiative of meeting students’ needs rather than working alone.

At Greenwood, we have scheduled two Grade 7 mathematics classes into the same block for the past few years. The teachers stay at roughly the same pace and are able to use assessment to periodically create mixed groups from the two classes. Sometimes, but not always, the mixing is based on readiness:

use assessment to periodically create mixed groups from the two classes. Sometimes, but not always, the mixing is based on readiness

one group gets concept reinforcement and the other group gets some extension work. This is not streaming. The students still have a mixed-level classroom and an assigned teacher who they are with most often, but the students also have the opportunity to work with groups of students whose needs are similar. On the days when groups are created between the classrooms, the teachers can focus in on what the students in their group need rather than having to do multiple tasks all within their own classroom.

We have created a timetable for the 2013-2014 school year in which a few courses have more than one section running at the same time. The teachers of these courses will modify the groups in their classrooms for various reasons. Sometimes they will use assessment results to regroup for content readiness, similar to the Grade 7 mathematics class. Other times, they will shuffle students between classrooms based on interest. In English, students could choose different novels to study and then meet with their novel group for discussions. Students in this novel group could be a combination of students from 2-3 different classes within the same course.

Students in this novel group could be a combination of students from 2-3 different classes within the same course

Alternatively, teachers may give students the choice of how to work through material in a series of lessons: one group may use technology-rich resources, another group would have a teacher-directed lesson and a third group may work through a series of activities. Scheduling 2-3 classes of a course at the same time means that these three paths could run in different rooms, each with a different teacher. Students could also be grouped by their learning style for some lessons.

Students in these courses will have a core teacher to whom they are assigned. They will also have the opportunity to interact with other teachers of this course and other students beyond their usual classmates. Students will get multiple perspectives. Teachers using this approach will work together to plan their classes, assessments and common evaluations. They will get to know the needs and interests of all of the students in the course, not just those in their own room. Teachers and students will be part of a bigger community that extends beyond their own classroom.

Heather Thomas
Director of Personalized Learning

Adaptive Learning

Anytime, anywhere learning is a big component of personalized learning and essential to our program at Greenwood. In order to create this flexible learning environment teachers use a variety of tools including a Learning Management System – Moodle (or as we call it ‘Groodle’) and Google Drive.

Another aspect of personalization at Greenwood sees teachers taking “time to understand each student’s unique personality, strengths and learning style, and design a customized, fully personalized learning experience to maximize that individual’s highest potential for engagement and success" (see article). To thoroughly understand the needs of students requires teachers to assess continuously and in a variety of ways. In a traditional classroom, assessment is often limited to one or two points during a unit and is unable to provide timely feedback or enable intervention. While continuous assessment is essential, it requires a significant time investment by teachers.

In order to help teachers get a quicker and easier understanding of their students’ needs, Greenwood is continuously looking for new technologies. Computers are exceptionally good at collecting and presenting data and have a lot of potential to offer additional support. While Groodle and Google Drive are excellent at fostering a flexible learning environment they are not currently able to help students make decisions based on their needs.

In order to help teachers get a quicker and easier understanding of their students’ needs, Greenwood is continuously looking for new technologies.

An emerging technology that holds promise for both teachers and students are adaptive learning systems. Adaptive learning uses technology to identify student strengths and weaknesses and then presents exercises tailored to those areas in need of improvement. One company receiving a lot of attention for their adaptive learning platform is Knewton. According to their website, Knewton has developed a system that is continuously adaptive providing the right instruction at the right time about the right thing. In addition to guiding students down an appropriate pathway, adaptive learning systems supply extensive data to teachers about each student allowing teachers to provide enrichment or additional support even quicker.

Although adaptive learning systems offer a lot of potential for educators, they are an extremely new technology and most are not yet available to individual schools. Additionally, many of the adaptive learning systems prohibit schools from utilizing their own resources which limits their usefulness.

While teachers will always have the greatest understanding of the needs of their students, technology will hopefully provide greater support in the near future. We will continue to monitor developments of adaptive learning systems and other technologies and implement those that help to further our goal of creating personalized programs.

Kyle Acres
Learning Technology Adviser

Examples of Blended Learning at Greenwood College School

I recently gave a presentation on the progress we have made in developing blended learning courses at Greenwood College School. As I created this presentation, I began to reflect on how far we have come with using this approach to personalize the experience for students. During this current school year alone, many teachers at Greenwood have developed lessons and units that they have already implemented and many full courses that will be implemented next year, all using blended learning tools.

What struck me as I sorted through all of the many blended learning tools teachers are using or have created at Greenwood was how well these teachers understand the needs of their students.

To follow are some examples of the blended learning tools that teachers have used or developed this year.

Grade 9 geography will be implemented as a blended learning course next year. The teachers developing this course recognize that this will be the first blended learning experience for many students, so they have planned to start each class with a teacher-directed lesson, similar to what would be found in a traditional class. They will then use technology to check for student understanding and to send students down one of two paths, either to a task that will reinforce the concepts just covered or to a task that has students apply and go deeper with what they have learned. The teachers are using technology to facilitate the pathways for students. They recognize that not all students will understand all concepts the first time they are exposed to them.

The teachers in Grade 12 English this year have used an online Hamlet text to enrich the learning of their students and to create more classroom discussion about the text. Often, when studying a Shakespearean text, the students spend a good deal of class time reading together as a group. Rather than doing that this year, the Grade 12 English teachers had the students read scenes along with the online resource at home. This resource reads the text with or to the students, while highlighting the words as it reads. Students could also choose to watch the scenes from a variety of different movie or theatrical productions. The resource gave students assistance with the language and its meaning. When students came to class after actively reading/listening/watching the assigned scenes, they were put into discussion groups based on need: do they need help understanding the scenes, do they need to talk about character or do they need to discuss bigger themes of the text? Using technology in this way allowed students to spend class time in meaningful dialogue about the content that they needed to understand most.

Another example of technology helping to guide students’ learning was found in the Grade 11 and 12 blended learning mathematics classes. Students in these classes can move through the material at their own pace. Technology is used to assess students throughout the unit. If they achieve a mastery grade on an assessment, the moodle platform releases the next few lessons for them to work through. If they do not receive a mastery grade on an assessment, moodle will not give them access to the subsequent lessons. In this case, the teacher is alerted that the student needs concept clarification. The teacher then reinforces the concept with the student and provides more practice. The student is then able to attempt a similar assessment and once a mastery grade is achieved, they are given access to the next few lessons. Students have found that technology used in this way has forced them to stay true to their learning and not assume that they understand a concept. Teachers working with the students in these courses have found that the technology has helped them to more easily determine when students need help.

The blended learning tools described in this blog post are creative tools that teachers have found or developed to help personalize their courses. There are many more examples of blended learning being used at Greenwood College School. As teachers develop these resources, they are keeping student needs in mind and varying how the tools are used in different grade levels and subject areas.

Heather Thomas
Director of Personalized Learning