Mistakes I made with Personalized Learning

Happy New Year! One of my goals this year is to write more, and so here I am! I have been thinking a lot about how to make personalized learning more accessible to others - to kind of minimize some of the stigma and confusion surrounding it.
As I've been working through these thoughts, I have started writing down ideas from my own process, and while my intentions for these pieces is unclear at the moment, I figured I would share them along the way here. 
So today, I have a post on the (many) mistakes I made in implementing personalized learning as well as some of the lessons I took away. I hope you enjoy!

Three version of me emerged in college. First, was the freshman stereotype. You know… the kid living on their own for the first time, living on microwavable food, skipping that 8am class, and taking advantage of my new found freedoms. I saw my general educations classes as most do - pointless, or hoops to jump through before the real work begins. Unfortunately, that version of me took that mentality a little too seriously. It just took one 2-point-something GPA at the end of the year for me to send her packing.

Enter, English major me. For the next couple years, I sat in a lot of literature classes. American Lit. Brit Lit. Themes in American Lit. World Lit (twice). I still wasn’t living up to the 4.0 senior in high school I had once been, but I was at least trying compared to my freshmen year. The problem during this phase was that I just did not care. I know most secondary teachers become teachers because they are passionate about their content. Because they love math or history or science. That was never really the case for me. While I always liked English and performed well, I didn’t love reading. In fact, I had kind of grown to hate it over the course of my education. My coursework during this time didn’t help. Obsessing over meter and diction was my own personal Hell. But I put my head down, put in the time, and shuffled through. Simultaneously, I had begun some of my teaching coursework with Introduction to Teaching and Classroom Management, but the reality of teaching was so far away that neither thrilled me.

But then came my third year, and my first methods of teaching course. With this course, a new version of myself was born - the one most similar to the version of me typing this unnecessarily long anecdote. Because that year, I finally started to imagine myself in a classroom, trying out the different things I was reading and learning about. For the first time, it felt real.

Fastidious is probably the nice word to describe this new me. Now that an actual classroom and actual students were just a stone’s throw away, I became almost obsessive about my school work. They told me the secret to good teaching was a thorough plan, so I planned and planned and planned every lesson plan, unit plan, and activity. I wanted everything to be so thorough that I could one day pull it out and use it in class. (In fact, for one class, I created an entire binder for one incredibly over-the-top unit plan. The cringiest part? My professor brought that to actual teachers as an example of how they should lesson plan. I hate to think I was complicit in gaslighting my future peers). I was, in short, obsessed with being an amazing teacher. 

I share this story not to inspire you with my bludgeoning love for teaching, but to paint a picture of my teaching style as a young teacher. As you may have guessed from this little story, I graduated with a deep need for control. A perfect classroom, I thought, was the result of thorough planning and preparation. If I could just plan, plan, and plan, enough, everything would always run smoothly. If I anticipated every possible roadblock, every lesson would be perfect.

Those of you who have spent more than five minutes teaching an actual class can probably guess how that worked out for me…

I learned quickly that some things are just out of your control, but it took me a long time to shake the innate need to be in control of every, single aspect of my classroom. And in hindsight, that should have been my first step in trying to personalize learning for my students. And it should be yours. To truly personalize learning, you need to start with just that: Prepare yourself to give up control. 

There are two questions you should ask yourself before embarking on a journey toward more personalized learning…

1. Are you willing to give up total control? 
   
2. And you willing to accept that you don’t always know what is best? 
   

If you can’t answer yes to both, you aren’t ready. Which I say from a place of wisdom. I definitely wasn’t ready to say yes to either of those questions, and I paid the price in a number of mistakes I made along the way. 

Come along with me as I relive each ugly misstep.
​

Mistake #1:  Individualizing  instead  of Personalizing.

This was my first and biggest mistake. It is also a mistake I see over and over again as an instruction coach now. Too many people mistake individualization for personalization. And that makes sense because the difference is subtle and maybe hard to visualize. 

I lean on the definitions shared by Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda in their book, Students at the Center.

Individualization is…​

Personalization is…

“Individualization, as with personalized learning, allows for instruction learning to happen anytime and anyplace. The blended learning approach is well-known application of individualization. However, in individualization students are always assigned the learning task, and they go on the use technology, such as computer-adapted models, a software platform, or a teacher-generated playlist, to complete the tasks….Individualized learning is ‘personalized’ in that it is a way to use the efficiencies of technology to adjust the assignment and pacing to reflect the needs of the learner. There might be an emphasis on students reflecting on their learning and deepening their understanding of how they learn best. However, the relational part of learning may be overlooked.”

“Personalized learning is a progressively student driven model of education that empowers students to pursue aspirations, investigate problems, design solutions, chase curiosities, and create performances. There are four defining attributes of persoanlized learning…These are voice, co-creation, social construction, and self-discovery.” “A personalized learning model involves students in the design and development of the tasks that they engage in.”

In other words, personalized learning is based on relationships. It cannot succeed without the “relational part of learning.” In an individualized model, teachers will set up an entire unit so that students can progress through at their own pace, rarely giving them opportunities to engage with their peers. 

Also known as… me, circa 2019.  I set up neat little folders and told kids to make their way through each. To complete their notes, then a practice, and then take an assessment. I was so proud of myself for creating a digital environment where they could all work at their own unique pace. 

Only… I was bored. They were bored. We were all dying of boredom! They would sit on their devices, completing their tasks and I would… wait. Because they were all over the place in terms of pace, I felt a little unsure of how to connect with them, other than to see how far they’d gotten on their checklist each day. On occasion, I would sit down to give them feedback, but I found myself saying the same things over and over again. Things I could have easily corrected collectively if everyone was working on the same task.  Needless it didn’t take long for all of us to decide we were “over it.”

By switching immediately to flexible pacing, I overlooked the important truth outlined by Zmuda and Kallick: learning is social. I also overlooked how easy it is to look engaged when really, you are just staring at a screen or document. I removed the most profound tool for learning - social construction - and replaced it with mind-numbing monotony. 

So Lesson #1 is this…
Don’t overlook the value of learning socially. Instead of jumping to a free for all of pace and individualization, become secure in your understanding of what personalization actually is. When it really hits, it is give students voice, creates opportunities for co-creation, emphasizes social construction, and promotes self-discovery.

Mistake #2: Too  Much,  Too  Fast

Then a pandemic happened, and I guess - like most students - I forgot everything I learned. In the spring of 2021, instead of taking a moment to recalibrate to teaching post-pandemic and rethink my version of personalized learning, I doubled down and committed even harder.

That spring, I set up five units for my AP Language and Composition students to complete. Not only did I give them totally flexible pacing again, I also let them choose the sequence, the learning method, and their assessment. And to top it all off, I also threw in some dispositional learning as my school had adopted our “Profile of a Graduate.” 

Yes. I let them choose path, pace, method, and assessment. And expected them to be successful after years of educational chaos. Just like when I was an over eager undergrad, I tried to do absolutely everything, all at once. A true recipe for disaster.

I guess I did learn my lesson slightly. Kids weren’t just working through a series of pre-set tasks for the most part, and the advantage to this was that more of them chose to work together and learn social. This time around, I also set up generic deadlines to help them manage pace. (You know… “You have to submit two units by March.”) And to be honest that did help some, but in general, they weren’t really learning. They weren’t managing their time. And they weren’t able to design their own assessments. 

So there I was, looking around at a room of kids who weren’t really “getting it,” as though I hadn’t created this exact outcome. I had tried too much, too fast. Instead of stopping to refine my initial missteps, my reaction was to pile on more new challenges. To essentially, jump years ahead in my journey toward a personalized classroom. 

And (as I’m sure would have been obvious to many of you), it failed.

So Lesson #2 is this… 
Don’t try to do it all at once. Instead, take your time with each new tenet that you’d like to implement. Refine and reattempt each new strategy until you see the positive results.

Mistake #3: Redoing  and Redoing (and  Redoing  Again)

If I were to check, I probably have six or seven versions of some of the assignments I’ve used since beginning this journey. That’s because every year, with a few tweeks to my overall method, I needed to renumber and rephrase standards and create new unit guides and adjust format. The amount of time I’ve spend over the years remaking assignments and materials is enough to make me sick.

But I guess I’ll look on the brightside… now I can produce an assignment or resource faster than anyone I know. 

What gets me, looking back, is that it didn’t have to be that way. My impatience - the same impatience that made me go hog wild in 2021 - didn’t allow me to stop and just think about what the actual first steps should have been. My excitement forced me into a pattern of redoing everything, every year, in the hopes that one combination of choices would result in a magically perfect method.

You might have guessed it, but… I never found that perfect combination. And year after year I started all over.

In hindsight, I can tell you where I should have started: the curriculum. The “year-at-a-glance,” the standards, the progressions of learning, the proficiency scales. I guess in simplest terms… I should have had a freaking plan!

Let me give you an example: I have been using some version of standards referenced grading since about 2017. The problem is… I didn’t have a clear vision for how those standards should fit together, build on one another, or connect. To be honest, the first year, I didn’t really even have specific standards. At the start, I just picked out a list of skills based on the AP Language and Composition class overview and (again) just decided to wing it. Another example of when I tried to do too much, too fast. 

Then, in 2018, the College Board rewrote the curriculum for AP Language and Composition. Now I had a neat set of 22 skills that I could assess. Being handed something I could finally use can only feel like Charlie unwrapping his chocolate bar to see his golden ticket. 

Only… I had not, in fact, found any golden ticket.

For the next six years, I continued to play with how those skills fit together - how I could make sense of them for myself and for the kids. It wasn’t until fall of 2023 that I felt confident in how I had grouped them. (Yes. I am talking about this fall. The fall only a few weeks ago). It took six years to piece together those skills into a logical progression of learning. And as I think about it now… I can only imagine what my classroom might look like had I knew then what I know now. If I had taken the time to piece it all together upfront.

So let me save you the time. The first step in personalizing learning is to have a well organized curriculum, with progressions of learning and proficiency scales that combine and marry the standards in a way that make sense to YOU. Not your colleague, not the curriculum coordinator, or the admin. It has to make sense to you. Clear vision means you won’t waste time redoing assignment and units for trivial things like how the learning target is worded or what the task is titled. Instead, you can invest that time into being responsive to the new learners you get each year.

So Lesson #3 is this…
Start with a strong curriculum. Carefully design the long term plan, with the milestones you want the kids to reach. For instance, if I want my kids to analyze rhetorical choices, then I better know every step along the progression of learning. If I can’t articulate how we are reaching the target comfortably, I don’t have a deep enough understanding to co-create with students or the resources to provide choice and flexibility on the fly.

In the future I’d love to go deeper with each of the lessons, but at the very least, I hope that you can look at my mistakes and learn from them. The best skill we can learn as educators is to reflect and accept when we were wrong, and writing out these mistakes was humbling to be honest. Looking back I cringe and shake my head. But maybe the biggest take away is that regardless of each poor outcome or chaotic day in my classroom, I always saw value in personalization itself (even if I wasn’t doing it very well). As the years have gone on, I have only grown more committed to creating a personalized learning model for my students. And that comes from the immense joy I’ve felt in teaching this way.

So for today, I end with a final thought…

Implementing personalized learning is a journey, and a tough one at that. It means abandoning prior beliefs about teaching and surrendering up control. It also means knowing when to slow down. But in the end, its a journey worth embarking on. I am most joyful as a teacher when the attributes of personalized learning play out:

• When I ask, “Well what you do think?” And see them hesitate - like they don’t know how to use their voice - only to come to a conclusion that reflects them and who they are.
  
• When I get to co-create an assessment with students and learn about their interests and passions. 
  
• When I see them work through really tough things together, and I hear them encourage each other and construct new meaning in their learning.
  
• When I get to witness them changing their mind - about a topic, a learning method, a decision they made - and I see the self-discovery happen right in front of me. 
  

Even amidst the mistakes, these are things I have seen along the way, and they keep me on the journey.

Sincerely,  Cwik