As I’m now coordinating the Personalized Learning Initiative for Bridgeport Diocesan Schools, I thought that I would share some of my personal learning goals for the year. Already this experience has served to ground my research in practice. My challenges and related goals for learning fall into three domains: 1) maintaining a focus on the principles of personalization 2) change…
Qualitative data analysis to understand student data use
Moving from data collection to understanding and application. What I study and how I am studying it are strikingly similar. Teachers and students, as well as myself, engage in data collection and analysis to make meaning and guide future work. This post highlights some similarities and outlines my data analysis tools and strategy. I focused my dissertatin on the collection…
Data : what we measure and how we use it
What we measure and pay attention to matters. What we measure and pay attention to matters. I argue that how we use this information matters more. For better or worse, student data has become the currency of schooling. Teachers exchange grades and scores – proxies for learning – for student’s effort and performance. Moreover, at school and system levels, educators…
Personalizing Data Use
Teachers and students personalize data use by: Collecting useful data with students on their interests, learner characteristics, and academics; Engaging students in reflective, data-driven conversations where, together, they reflect on data; and Using insights from reflection to co-design and refine learning plans. Teachers and students take ownership over data-use by collecting and using actionable data to design and refine personalized…
From compliance to agency – a look at Culturally Responsive Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports
I recently mentioned to a colleague engaged in a school design process that I thought Culturally Responsive Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (CRPBIS) was the most promising strategy around today for establishing a positive school culture while increasing student, family, and community agency. In this post, I expand on that idea a bit by contrasting CRPBIS with other leading school…
Standards, Personalized Learning, and Instructional Design: Unwrapping standards; Sequencing Content; and Progress Monitoring
Standardization and Personalized Learning Teachers and leaders in the schools I have studied balanced the need for standardization/learning standards with students need for autonomy and agency and desire to pursue interest-based learning targets. Standards-based learning does not have to negate designs for student agency and interests. When standards are unwrapped and deeply understood by educators, they can work with students…
Personalize Learning : negotiating pedagogies of traditionalists, customizers, and liberators
Personalized learning bridges spaces between three camps of pedaogs: traditionalists, customizers, and liberators. Those interested in pedagogy fall into one of at least three categories: Traditionalist – The teacher is the authority. Truth is empirically derived. Knowledge must be carefully transferred from experts. Schooling mostly serves society’s needs for cohesion and for an informed, productive, citizenry. Customizer – Experts select what…
120 years in pursuit of excellence, 50 years in pursuit of equity : the evolution of standards-based policies for education
In reframing my dissertation around the tension between the collection and use of data as a means towards standards- and interest-driven learning ends, it seemed necessary for me to understand the history behind standards-based school reforms and, subsequently, the origins of student-centered learning reforms. This post is the first part of this two-part series and merely serves as an attempt…
Autonomy – The What and Why of Building a Culture of Student Agency
Building a Culture of Student Agency and Autonomy The pilot study to my dissertation found that personalized learning environments established a culture of student agency. In this post, I review what has been said in my reading about student agency in regards to personalized learning and draw on ideas on learner agency from in and out of formal education settings to…
working with students to learn to learn
Tonight I had dinner with Joe, Savi, Mere, and unfortunately pontificated – a bit – on the status of education. They found it poignant. I thought to summarize my statements while I still have them. Mainly they fall into two categories: We teach students knowledge, not how to gain knowledge. We can do both. Our system is not based on…