After exploring the three articles/video about personalized and competency based learning, I learned that the role of this design and concept is to create and encourage students to be reflective, assessment based learners who, while working with the teacher, strategize how they proceed with their own education. This type of classroom involves teacher instruction, but also must have a classroom culture of supporting student agency.
The grade level I teach is 6th grade and the content area is math and science. I have tried a few of the ideas presented in the articles, but know that I can (and should) invest more time into creating a class that can push and accelerate all of the diverse learners and levels in my classroom. Heather MacLaughlin referred to personalized learning in classrooms and said that much of the learning that happened in the classroom was in groups and workshops. This strategy of putting students into smaller groups is something that I would like to try more of, and build a culture in my classroom of students working together in a positive and meaningful way. I particularly like the idea of students communicating their readiness to show their understanding or the way they show proficiency or their need for more time and remediation before an assessment. One way that I have tried this is putting students in small groups of 3 or 4 students, giving them practice problems that they work on together and then when they feel ready to take an assessment they stop working on the practice problems and take the test. This has worked fine, but it could be much better with a culture of students who are more willing to work together, help those who are struggling or communicate with the teacher when they need extra help. Another way I have used personalized learning in my classroom is giving students rein with the level of creativity, and choice of content they present. A few times this year I have assigned one pagers as a end of unit assignment. I allowed students to choose the content that most interested them from the unit to put in their one pager. This type of creative and open ended assignment is most popular with students, and it is one of the assignments they most often choose to show parents at open house because their project looks different than other student’s and it is very one of a kind. In one of the one pager assignments I allowed students to choose if they wanted to do a traditional one pager of a piece of blank paper with pencils and markers, or they could use google draw to create their one pager. About half the students chose the technology route, which was surprising. One way I have used technology in competency based learning is assigning students Khan math assessments, and allowing students to go through, taking as much time as they need, and showing proficiency with some subjects at their own pace. This is a very basic way I have used technology to allow students to take responsibility for their own learning, and is one way that gives students a way to work with me or each other at their own pace. The idea of moving students into classes or grouping them based on their ability or competency seems like a solution to many problems, but I worry what a classroom would look like or what the culture of a school would be if we starting separating and sorting based on ability without taking into consideration the maturity and age of the student. This extreme idea aside, I think there are some very viable ways that we can personalize and achieve more appropriate lessons based on competency in the classrooms that we are assigned.
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