Q: Tell us a little bit about your personalized learning journey up to this point.
A: Samantha: When I started with personalized learning I realized very quickly that I could not do everything personalized all the time. I really had to find one thing that I knew would make a difference for my students. I started with using some other teacher’ pathways and modifying them for what I needed. Then I began to figure out how to create my own. I feel like with personalized learning, there was a lot of trial and error. Some things went really great, some things we realized didn’t work, and that's all part of the journey.
This is my fourth year with personalized learning. I've really focused heavily on assessment and building in choice with assessment. I feel like that's where I've gotten the most bang for my buck out of what my students enjoy. Fifth grade students have a lot of opinions, and I gave them a chance to give me their opinions on assessment. By the end of this past school year they were helping me create assessment choice boards, having a voice in what they were learning, and a voice in the showcase of what they've learned.
A: Dori: COVID was definitely a jumping off point for me with personalized learning. The year that students came back from COVID, I was teaching first grade and we knew ahead of time that these students had only had half of kindergarten. So I really dived into pre-assessments. I wanted to see what they got from their kindergarten year and what were their gaps. Some were fluent readers and some didn't even know their letter names. So I knew right then that I had to personalize their learning. I started with pathways for phonics using Seesaw. I focused mostly on the phonics piece and then as the year went on, I started making pathways, pre-assessments, and post-assessments and it all kind of just fell into place. I thought these first graders were too little and too young to really have that ownership, but right from the start they had it. I had a data wall so they knew where they wanted to be, needed to be, and where their peers were. I feel like that motivation from the student ownership went hand in hand with the pathways.
Q: Where do you start when it comes to variation in student ability within the classroom?
A: Dori: Our technology coach and our principal helped us breakdown the objectives and the standards. We started with designing pre-assessments that truly tested that objective and I realized quickly that the way I used to teach didn’t always truly measure all the skills, like in reading. I started getting into the individual objectives and standards and I realized that students might have a strong understanding of the main idea or supporting details but then really need a lot of support with inferencing. So when I used these aligned pre-assessments, their small groups changed depending on every unit that I taught.
A: Samantha: This past year I had a class of gifted students and then I had a general education class. So there was some variation in ability between my two classes. We really had to dig into what the kids actually knew, and a lot of that was based on pre-assessment. That pre-assessment was so important. Knowing the power standards was important too. You can't pre-assess every single standard we teach, but knowing what your big standards are can help you decide what to pre-assess. Then we created a choice board style pathway. Depending on students’ pre-assessment scores, everybody may get the same board or sometimes there may be two or three different boards depending on what your pre-assessment score was. You have choice in the activities that I've chosen (which were activities I probably would have used in class anyway in a station). So, it’s not completely recreating the wheel; it's just organizing it a little differently.
Students were really motivated to see their growth, to get a new choice board once they had mastered something. In addition to pre-assessment, students had choice in their assessment. A great example is one student who was incredibly shy chose to do an animation in Keynote where she animated a main character from a novel. For the assessment, she sketched it and created a voice record telling how this character changed over time and what events impacted this character. It was beautiful. She shone like I had never known. Students knowing where their strengths and weaknesses are in how they show you what they know is also really important.
A: Dori: That reminds me of how we started the journey with personalized learning by investigating some learner profiles. We realized how you're trying to get the same feedback and same information from our students but they could look so differently from a first grade learner profile to a fifth grade learner profile. We investigated questions like, “How do our kids learn best? Who are kids that like to work together? Who are our technology kids? Who are our students who like to produce something and create? Who are the ones that like to read to get the knowledge?”
I think starting out each year with that strong learner profile and that strong understanding of what kind of learners they are is important. I think that helps kids know how to recognize in themselves what kind of learner they are. That helps when they get to the choice board. They’re able to have more insight on what activity would be best for their learning style and then their pre-assessment needs.
Want to learn more?
Listen to Dori and Samantha discuss more about navigating variation in this podcast episode: 47 - Flexibility Within Fences Part 4: Navigating Variation.
