Understanding Personalized Education in Schools

Written by Eva Yeung, Director of Education at BSD Education.

Personalized learning is widely debated among educators. While I am not writing this as an expert in this area, I want to use this opportunity to begin a dialogue with readers about personalized learning – what are your thoughts, experiences, practices, hopes?

In recent years, a great deal of attention and investment has gone into pushing initiatives and software by Silicon Valley in utilizing technology to enable personalized learning. This has been met with varying degrees of criticism (for more on this, you can check out this Education Week article by Benjamin Herold.) In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic propelling the shift to online learning, the suggestion that it’s a “good time” to try-out tech-driven personalized learning is reemerging. Even so, the start of the academic year has been met with varying degrees of success. Schools and communities that have a robust digital learning culture and infrastructure are thriving while underserved communities with the lack of access to devices and connectivity are suffering greatly, thus the learning gap is becoming (scarily) increasingly wider. 

The definition and approach to personalized learning vary from educator to educator and from organization to organization – it really depends on your pedagogical viewpoint.  In practice, we can be talking about the introduction of a platform/software that guides students through different learning journeys built on an algorithm, or to some schools, a loose pedagogical framework in whole-school curriculum redesigns. 

According to Herold, we can summarize this model as follows:

  • Personalized learning can be tailored to students’ strengths, weaknesses, and areas of interest
  • Pace and instruction are used to design for each individual
  • Technology is greatly leveraged to track and measure student learning and develop “learner profiles”
  • Educational tech tools are used to develop a student”s “learner profile” to help customize educational content

 

Too often, nowadays, we try to find a tech solution to all that we do and often begin to lose focus on what is most important. Personalized learning is not about technology. Let us not forget the power and importance of teacher-student relationships and our role as teachers in inspiring and being beacons to our learners. The human element in our learning environments, be it in-person or virtual is more important than ever in these uncertain times. 

Paul Emerich France, author of Reclaiming Personalized Learning: A Pedagogy for Restoring Equity and Humanity in Our Classrooms (2019) debunks five common myths about personalized learning and a great comparison between a “humanized” versus “dehumanized” approach to personalized learning. I find these two resources particularly helpful to refer to when I find myself needing to refocus my pedagogical approach when creating and improving our programs at BSD Education. 

From Paul Emerich France, Reclaiming Personalised Learning (Corwin Press, 2019)
From Paul Emerich France, Reclaiming Personalized Learning (2019); Barbara Bray, Rethinking Learning (2019).

It is easy for us to say just use some software to guide our learners through their learning journey, but France’s resources remind us to dive deeper and consider wider perspectives and circumstances when we plan our curriculum because too often, students just simply need to know that you are there for them and to inspire them – something no algorithm can replace.

What are your strategies when it comes to personalizing education in your classrooms and schools? What are your struggles? How can we better humanize your journey in bringing digital skills learning into your classrooms?

You can reach me at ey@bsd.education at any time to continue the dialogue I want to hear from you!

About Eva:

Eva found her calling in Education when she left her job at a Canadian women’s magazine in 2012 to join the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme to teach English at an agricultural high school in rural Japan. Blending her passion in Media Studies and Education, she later returned to Hong Kong to pursue a Master of Education at the University of Hong Kong followed by a PGCE with the University of Sunderland. As the Director of Education at BSD, Eva works closely with team members across the business to provide engaging opportunities for students to learn through authentic curricular experiences to prepare them to be future-ready.

 

How Project Based Learning Boosts Personalization

Written by Scott Peterman, BSD Education

A growing chorus of employers are voicing frustration about job applicants who are technically proficient, with touted high grades and test scores but lacking in key skills such communication, decision-making, and problem-solving that are necessary to successfully do the jobs they have applied for.  In order to effectively address this mismatch, educators are increasingly embracing a combination of project based learning and personalized learning in order to better prepare students for careers in the 21st century.

Project Based Learning (PBL) blends content mastery, meaningful work, and personal connection to create powerful learning experiences, in terms of both academic achievement and students’ personal growth. PBL can be transformative for students, especially those who lack access to out of school time educational opportunities such as workplace internships.  

Project Based Learning offers students the opportunity to actively engage in activities that provide real-world relevance and a direct application for what they’re learning. For example, students can solve problems that are important to them and their communities. At it’s best, PBL leads to deeper understanding and greater retention of content knowledge, with students better able to apply what they know to new situations thanks to a personal connection to their academic experience.

Let’s dive a little deeper to better understand how project-based learning leverages technology and how it intersects with personalized student learning.

 

What is Project Based Learning?

Simply put, Project Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching method through which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.

It is becoming widely used in schools and other educational settings, with different varieties being practiced because it supports students at all skill levels, meeting each student exactly where they are. Problems can be delivered based on what a student knows and doesn’t know, which customizes the experience to be unique for each student.

 

What are the benefits of PBL?

Project-based learning can be a catalyst for transforming learning, helping students move from asking “what?” to also asking “why?” and “how?”

In a traditional classroom, students often focus on memorizing facts to pass a test. However, research has shown that by organizing learning around meaningful goals, PBL can be an effective way to cultivate a “need to know” attitude in students—students are motivated to deepen their understanding in order to solve a problem that is meaningful to them.

Concepts are better understood when students see a need for their use, make an authentic connection with them, because that need encourages them to apply what they’re learning to relevant situations, leading to a better sense of understanding. Researchers have also observed higher rates of students staying on task and paying close attention to the teacher and their peers.

 

Understanding the limits of Project Based Learning

However, there are key characteristics that differentiate “doing a project” from engaging in Project Based Learning.

While PBL has been increasingly embraced by educators in pursuit of ‘personalized learning,’ it is important to remember that without the right tools, it can still be just a buzzword. Preparing students to be lifelong learners capable of partaking knowledgeably in both civic life and a rapidly changing workforce, requires not just focusing on technology, personalization, or even coding, but the broader content and foundation at the heart of these experiences. Put another way, quality curriculum and instructional design is still the key to the long-term impact PBL can have on any student.

A vivid example of these limitations is provided in the following passage from a 2017 Edutopia article:

“As students learn to read, it is critical that they build a strong and wide foundation of knowledge. A learner’s background knowledge is a key ingredient in her ability to learn and absorb information from what she is reading and consuming. Accordingly, personalizing learning through technology will be most powerful when it is coupled with intentional, coherent and rigorous instruction… Yes, tapping into and developing children’s interests and instilling in them a sense of ownership of their education is important. Yet allowing them unbridled choice of what they learn, especially when they are young, means that in certain cases they will miss building that foundation… If students don’t have a working familiarity with a body of knowledge, a new passage on the topic—no matter how elementary it may seem and no matter how strong the reader’s fundamental decoding skills—will frustrate… Without at least a working familiarity with a topic, Google—where you have to generate the right question to ask—will only take you so far in the moment. That is because, as cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham wrote, “Every passage that you read omits information. All of this omitted information must be brought to the text by the reader.”

This passage is an important reminder that how educators incorporate PBL and Technology into their curriculum, will really define the success of their efforts and long-term impact it has on students.

 

How does BSD use Project Based Learning?

One of the best attributes of PBL is it’s versatility to be highly impactful for students in practically every learning context. For example, PBL is not only the foundation of all of BSD’s in-school curriculum,  but also our out-of school-time (OST) curriculum as well. We do this not for convenience or even continuity, rather because it has proven itself to consistently be the most effective model for sparking & sustaining engagement for the vast majority of students we work with, regardless of their prior tech experience or interest level.

PBL offers us the contextual framework to change students to shift their thinking from, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ to, ‘what problems do you want to solve when you grow up.’

By engaging in project-based learning units that have a strong career focus, students have the chance to see how concepts & lessons that may have previously seemed abstract directly apply and can be used in the working world. This offers students the chance to experience education through the eyes of artists, entrepreneurs, tech professionals and more.

These clear connections to contextually relevant career opportunities creates excitement by encouraging students to strive to learn more in a subject and ultimately changes their experience of education from learning as a task to learning to achieve bigger and better outcomes.

How Coding Promotes Personalized Learning

Written by Brandon Berthrong of BSD Education.

 

Personalized learning is a topic of ever-increasing importance in today’s educational environment, and code fits perfectly within its ideals.

Personalized learning is all about tailoring the learning experience to the needs of students, allowing them to gain more out of education by focusing on things that interest them and using learning styles that best suit their needs. Code offers a unique opportunity to allow for structured and yet personalized learning. Ultimately, the way you learn to code is by completing projects.

Just as there is an immeasurable number of applications for code, there are a huge number of application connected project scenarios out there for students to get the practice they need. Moreover, in programming, there is rarely only one way to solve a problem. This lack of definite right answers means that learners are able to flex their own creative muscles, engaging their minds in figuring out how to reach the desired outcome. This lends itself strongly to personalized learning, as even if a class of students at school is all working on the same project, each student can focus on solving the problems in a way that best suits their interests. More advanced students can try more complicated solutions, while other students can focus on building the basics and developing a better understanding of how fundamental elements work and interact.

As an example, if a class was doing a simple project like creating a poster with HTML and CSS, some students might create a poster with a solid background, blocks of text, and maybe an image. More advanced students might instead add changing background colors, embed videos or make elements of the poster interactive. Every participant can make the poster about something they’re interested in or something they are learning, adding another element of personalization, keeping students more engaged. Projects like building websites, video games, chatbots, to-do-lists, random generators (of characters, world’s, numbers, names…), bots, data tracking programs, etc all allow incredible levels of customization.

Enabling students to do things that interest them while, still working towards a common goal, connects strongly to the foundations of personalized learning. The type of project-based learning that is essential to learn code allows students to practice their creative thinking skills while also producing concrete products they can be proud of. It’s a win-win for everyone.