Personalized Learning pt1

I have spent 10’s of 1000’s of days in education in my career. Not as a teacher, but as a video editor trying to show best practices and researched based concepts to help teachers be more effective. I usually have a script and my job is to take that and visually make it work. Make it clear, and show supporting evidence of what the narrator or teacher is saying.

I don’t pretend to be a teacher. I have tremendous respect for those who are.

It is really a day-long concert performance everyday, to run that classroom and keep kids engaged while you are trying to teach them what they will need to know to be productive adults.

Today I have been working on a piece that talks about the changes in education that are generally called personalized learning. One thing I have learned again and again is that everyone thinks their kids are unique, and that practically any ones else’s ideas about how to teach them fall short in one way or another.

Research shows that by middle school many, many kids have lost interest in school. You can say it’s a challenging time of life, you can say it’s an awkward time of life as children start to mature, but that doesn’t keep them from learning new video games, or getting better at soccer and baseball. “Well those are fun!” You might say… and yes they are, but they are also learning experiences. Everyday they gain knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their application.

They learn because the knowledge is about them. Isn’t that what education is supposed to be?

Granted, it will take some creativity and some real thought to make some subjects about the students… algebra comes to my mind, and yet… once I started my career and saw my first spreadsheet, I saw something that looked like Algebra, and had to understand what I had never understood before.

The point today is that every person is a learning machine. The fact that education has not worked for all children is not new. Every adult that has been through school knows of people and stories where the education system failed to teach their peers or themselves... algebra in my case.

When you think of those great teachers you hopefully had, what made them great was they made the learning personal for you.

Sometimes, it might have just been a good relationship. You knew they cared about you as a person. Sometimes that’s enough. You want to perform for your parents, you want to do well for a teacher who has a positive relationship with you. That can make the learning personal… other things being equal. [You have heat, water, food etc] Teacher can also make the learning engaging as a history teacher did by coming in costume related to the time period they were learning about… he would take pieces of history and have the class reenact it. It was a lot of work… but the students loved it, and they learned because the teacher made it personal to them… it was context, it was a relationship and it formed neurons in their brain they will have the rest of their lives.

So we all start out as learning machines and we go to school… virtually every kid wants to go to school. The system then beats that enthusiasm out of all most every kid over the next 6 years… for some it’s a shorter ride. Here is a part of the script I wrote:

Learning as always been personalized.

When you wanted to walk, you stood up.

You didn’t stand up the first time, you didn’t have a deadline to be able to walk. You tried and failed until you mastered the ability to walk. You were not expected to run until you could walk.

When you wanted to communicate you learned to speak.

You started with sounds. You were not given a week or a month to be able to communicate effectively. You tried and failed, and tried again until you were able to speak effectively.

Yet once you get into school, these simple, basic, proven ways of learning get pushed further and further out of the learning process. We convinced ourselves that people where like machine parts and if we applied the same hammer and heat to each child, they would be formed into a capable adult. All of us grew up knowing that this didn’t work for everyone. Many of us grew up knowing that for some subjects this did not work for us either… yet the system kept on teaching children this way.

This is not about pointing fingers… it is not about guilt. We are humans and the education system we built was built with good intentions… sometimes we just get a little blinded to what the unexpected consequences are.

You treat people as abstractions and they become “things” Things don’t care about you, and you don’t care about things.

A great teacher makes students feel human. They know their names, and they know their interests. They bring that into the classroom everyday and connect with the students, and the students connect with the learning. It is incredibly hard work… and frankly there seem to be few that are really good at it. If we stopped treating teachers as abstractions… as things… as universal “plug one in anywhere” devices and recognized their humanity… I think we’d find more good teachers who would find the humanity in their students.

Money is part of the challenge, but we have spent far too long willing to pay for prison cells instead of effective educators and education. Money isn’t the answer at the end of the day either.

In my 10,000 hours of editing classrooms of effective teachers, personalized learning starts with a teacher who shows they care about their students and truly does. One that shares their humanity with their students. It is an ability, and it is very hard work… but it’s where we need to start.

Are there other issues in education? Certainly. Personalized education isn’t 1 thing. It’s a dozen things that create the culture, the expectations and results we say we want. Are there challenges outside the teacher’s control? A lot of them, but if students know the teacher really cares for them, that the classroom is a safe environment for them to be who they are, and most importantly that they can learn, then the hardest part of the battle is won. Sounds simple I know, but it isn’t easy.

Today I’m working in personalized learning and it isn’t found in a binder or workbook. It starts in the heart of a teacher.