Personalized learning is the new trend, as we all know. Many classrooms around the world have been able to implement it successfully, but all of these have a wide array of resources and different classroom styles that won’t work for everybody. There are many benefits to personalized learning in an ideal sense. Being able to target individual concepts at the need basis is an amazing idea. Being able to focus on different content areas at the same time with different kids also sounds like a great idea. In a one to one world with no technology issues and motivated students this is ideal.
However, here I am in a high school classroom, responsible to teach the same content to every student, and cover an extremely large breadth of information in one year. Personalized learning for the gifted individuals is great, as it lets them take learning into their own hands, letting you spend more time with the students that need more time. However, what do you do with the unmotivated students? You cannot spend all your time with them, but you still are responsible to get them to learn the content. Its a bizarre catch 22 that I guess we will be in charge of solving.
In our classroom, we use a premade booklet with all the homework problems and lab for the year (science/math). Ideally, this could be expanded to organized worksheets where the students work on their own to complete the content in as little time as possible, to maximize the amount they can go through. However, students enjoy the lecture (at least in these classes) and I think they would be bored after a time of this same routine.
I am not opposed or for personalized learning. I think it can work, and is a great idea. I just worry about the kids that are already at risk.
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