At the school I currently teach personalized learning has been part of our pedagogy since the day I got hired. This personalized learning took the form of S.M.A.R.T goals. S.M.A.R.T basically means Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic and Time based. We give a pre test that is based around a specific standard/expectation. Then we level the students based off of that pre-test. Each teacher on the team gives intervention for their specific area of need for a set amount of time. We may do progress monitoring check-ins to see if the interventions are working and plan accordingly. Last, we do a post test to see if we made improvement. Most often these SMART goals are focused on priority standards that carry a large amount of weight.
The obstacle I have found with following through on these SMART goals is meeting with intervention groups and managing to follow through on teaching the rest of the new curriculum that needs to be taught. First grade students also lack the independence needed to allow me to get through the intervention lessons with a small group. Another way we have used personalized learning is by using anchor papers. Students will read or critique their work by looking at samples of students work. They will decided on what level they are currently at by comparing their work to the work samples provided. Then we will set learning goals for how to move to the next level by the next assessment window. We have allowed students to have a say over how they present their knowledge, but we had trouble aligning the final products with the success criteria and also helping so many different students at varying levels of ability complete their projects was a real challenge as well. We have this image of what personalized learning looks like in our classrooms, but achieving it is a different story all together.
2 Comments
Scott Marsden
1/27/2019 11:07:15 am
Caitlin,
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Caitlin Mitchell
1/28/2019 09:27:06 pm
Well, I think that Varatta outlined clearly the questions that come up for people who are very new to the experience of trying personalized learning. I think that allowing students to have more control over more of how they show competency and helping them to have buy- in by teaching them the routine for how to solve problems when the teacher is not right there to help is very important. I aspire to have a clear cut routine for handling this...this year has been a struggle because we are learning to navigate a new language arts program and that has detracted a lot from out ability to do SMART goals they way we have in the past. In the last article I liked how it laid out what a typical day looks like in the classroom and I liked to letter that he wrote to Education Week. If there was one thing that I took away from all of this that I would like to strive to use it is to allow students to show their learning in different ways that still assess the content standards.
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