Learning Personalized

The Habits of Mind and the Four Attributes of Personalized Learning were vital for weathering the disruption of the school year during the pandemic– and improving as a school district as a result of it– as Debbie Perez outlined in this interview with Bena Kallick.

Debbie is the Director of Professional Learning and Contemporary Instruction for Humble ISD, a sprawling school district with over 45,000 students on 45 campuses near downtown Houston.

Find out more about what she shared with us.

Falling Back on the Habits of Mind: Interview with Debbie Perez - Habits Personalized Debbie Perez discusses the disruption of the school year during the pandemic, and improving as a school district as a result of it.

Let’s just assume that making mistakes and failing to do what we are trying to do is a signal for reflection and self-discovery. How can teachers encourage students do that in the most effective way?

To answer that question, we need to look at the type of work students are engaged in and then the clarity of roles for both student and teacher.

How Should Students "Celebrate" Mistakes and Failures? Students do not celebrate mistakes or see failure as an opportunity to return to work and improve it. Instead, they see it as a final judgment and move on.

What elements of remote learning do we want to keep? What new aspirations have emerged as we return to campus?

Bena Kallick posed these questions and more to Scott Fellows, teaching assistant superintendent at Regional School District Number One in Connecticut.

Fellows named four major goals for the new school year, and beyond.

Formative Assessment and Habits of Mind: Interview with Scott Fellows - Habits Personalized Scott Fellows, teaching assistant superintendent at Regional School District Number One, discusses four major goals for the new school year.

As we settle into our “new normal,” returning to in-person instruction, there is some lingering anxiety over what it will take to recover from the past school year and what disruptions might await us in the year ahead.

Kim Morton is an elementary school principal at the Leadership Academy in Vista Unified School District, in California. In an interview with Allison Zmuda, she shares some silver linings she has uncovered, as well as how positivity is the throughline that informs how she views the “lost year” of education and its impact on the year ahead.

Given the space to reflect on the past year, she says, “I think the biggest takeaway is that we are all stronger than we think and we can do hard things.”

Positivity and the "Lost Year" of Education: Interview with Kim Morton - Habits Personalized For Kim Morton, elementary school principal at Leadership Academy, positivity is essential when viewing the “lost year” of education.

“Schools are changing, and the pandemic is helping us to change our mindset about that.”

Allison Zmuda spoke with Carlos Nascimento Jr., coordinator of grades 4-9 at the Concept School in Brazil, about the challenges of the 2020-21 school year and his most significant takeaways from that experience.

Students Must Wish to Be in School: Interview with Carlos Nascimento Jr. - Habits Personalized One way Carlos Nascimento Jr. of the Concept School in Brazil got through the 2020-21 school year was by leveraging the Habits of Mind.

"In elementary schools, we train kids to be teacher-pleasers. In middle school, we teach them how to jump through hoops to get grades, and by high school, they have learned how to simply comply to get by."

As Mike Anderson explains in this post, it doesn’t have to be like this.

When Students Learn to Choose, They Choose to Learn - Learning Personalized How do we help our students move away from a teacher-centered focus and instead move toward student choice? Empower them to choose for themselves.

Portfolios help us continuously recreate the narrative of our own learning. Powerful classrooms help students arrive at an understanding of themselves through collecting work over time that they can reflect back on. Beyond the chronological history of producing work, being evaluated, and work toward improving, there is the deeper layer where the patterns of their work tell a personal story of where they are at this time.

This post offers guidance on how to make portfolios work, and includes examples of digital portfolios.

Student Portfolios: the Narrative of Learning - Learning Personalized Student portfolios provide an opportunity to collect and then select the work that best recognizes where the student is in the learning journey.

There is a different energy to this work, one in which the student has an increased level of ownership in both the inquiry and pursuit.

This post, written with inspiration from the fabulous staff at Aveson Charter School, contains examples of essential questions (teacher designed) that generated a series of student questions as they continued to investigate, a rubric on levels of questioning, and student frames for developing questions.

How to Help Students Drive Their Own Inquiry - Learning Personalized Driving questions guide research, action, and creation. Student-generated and inspired by Essential Questions, they intended to optimize student ownership.

Imagine your ideal learning space — a place that inspires you to focus, to problem solve, to create, to reflect. What would it look like?

This exercise prompted me to reexamine the spaces where I currently create and wonder how form and function impacts daily learning.

The following suggests ways to take this from a nice conversation to a more significant opportunity to connect and transform our spaces.

What is Your Ideal Learning Space? - Learning Personalized What would your students do if you gave them the task of coming up with your classroom design? How would it change your learning environment?

Certain students may have a great deal of intelligence, but without the drive to follow through and use it, they can fail despite being gifted. Further, Harvard researchers emphasize the neuroscientific connection between emotional thought and knowledge: in order to apply school knowledge in real life, we need an “emotional rudder” that guides our judgement and action.

Having knowledge is simply not enough. We also have to know how to use it.

Noncognitive Measures: The Academic Trend that Could Change Everything - Learning Personalized Tweet Guest Blogger Alan Boyle Alan Boyle is currently finishing up his communications degree and he spends his free time getting some real world experience by helping out and contributing to OnlineEducation.net. He can be reached at [email protected] This was Read More ...

It seems unwise that at a time when the workforce is shifting to more flexible options we may be reverting back to a familiar and outdated uniform approach in our schools.

The percentage of employers who are allowing employees to choose their work setting has gone from just 2% up to 19% during the pandemic. This choice requires the employees to know themselves, their strengths, and to align the optimal environment with their needs.

From an educational perspective, are we preparing our students to know how to make these types of decisions?

Post by Devin Vodicka.

Increasing workplace flexibility means that schools can’t become more rigid - Learning Personalized While the world of work has changed from an industrial system to more of a knowledge economy, our education system has been slow to adapt.

Effective teachers realize the power of having an in-depth knowledge of their students, and they modify their instruction based on this information. This takes time and relies on information outside of the classroom walls.

Research also shows that external factors such as socioeconomic status and family situation have a significant impact on student success. As educators, we do not have control of these external factors, but we do have control of what happens in our classroom.

By Lorena Kelly-- The Power of Knowing Your Students.

The Power of Knowing Your Students - Learning Personalized If we take the time to listen and know our students, we are able to think about their assumptions and use this information to better meet their needs.