Last week, Barringer Academic Center was fortunate enough to be one of fifteen schools across the district to pilot a new initiative - Personalized Learning (PL). Headed by our amazing tech and education guru, Jill Thompson, each school selected a design team of about 10 educators for a four day institute to construct the reality of what Personalized Learning would look like at their school.
We started out the day at tables with our teams. The amazing Lisa Pagano helped us kick off the session by doing a concept development lesson about personalized learning. For those of you unfamiliar with concept development (sometimes referred to as a Taba Lesson), groups of people are given a concept, such as personalized learning. The group then generates many ideas of what that concept is. Then, teams are asked to group similar items together and then create titles for each group. The final step is to use the titles created to form generalizations of the concept. I love to do this to kick off a new unit and have my kids create generalizations about the concept (and ultimately essential questions, but that's another blog post for another day).
After that, teams were asked to create their mission statement of how personalized learning will be implemented at their school. After much thought and deliberation, the team at Barringer came up with,
Barringer Academic Center's personalized learning mission is to create a purposeful culture, focused on the growth of the whole child. This will be accomplished by:
After that, teams were asked to create their mission statement of how personalized learning will be implemented at their school. After much thought and deliberation, the team at Barringer came up with,
Barringer Academic Center's personalized learning mission is to create a purposeful culture, focused on the growth of the whole child. This will be accomplished by:
- Providing endless opportunities to explore and discover
- Building relationships that inspire creativity
- Facilitating autonomous learning.
We began to quickly work on how we would roll out the personalized learning initiative at our school. We decided that we would focus exclusively on math (although free to venture to other subject areas) and the design team members would be the only ones focusing on implementing personalized learning (although other staff members are free to join us). Twice a month, we will have reflective meetings to discuss what is working, what is not, and what can we do to improve our instruction. Then, in January, we will begin a roll-out to the whole staff by providing PD based on the experience we learned in the first half of the year. Each design team member will assist a small group of teachers to implement personalized learning in their classroom. We decided to start of small, mainly because we aren't quite sure how we are going to do personalized learning ourselves, and we wanted to create a sustainable model that allows a small group of teachers to refine their craft before roll-out to the whole staff.
The institute had other amazing opportunities as well. I was finally able to meet the incredible Krissy Venosdale (@venspired) who gave an exceptional keynote the second day of the institute. She focused on being a connected educator (YAY for Twitter!) and remembering the acronym of BRICK during this new way of thinking of personalized learning:
- B = Be open minded
- R = Relationships matter the most
- I = Ignite the passions
- C = The 4 Cs = collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking
- K = Keep going
Overall, it was a great institute. It made me proud to be a part of my school and district and for all of the great things we are doing to help educate our students. I was able to catch up with some old friends and make some new ones across the district. The organization and vision was impressive and I'm ready for the new school year!