New Designs for School
Set the Stage for Personalized Learning in Your Classroom
Kristen Vogt & Stefanie Blouin
NGLC
Topics
We’ve all had the experience of truly purposeful, authentic learning and know how valuable it is. Educators are taking the best of what we know about learning, student support, effective instruction, and interpersonal skill-building to completely reimagine schools so that students experience that kind of purposeful learning all day, every day.
How can you collect, store, use, and update information about each student’s achievement, needs, and goals? Use Learner Profiles and Personalized Learning Plans.
On NGLC’s Personalized Learning topics page, we state, “In an education model where students are truly at the center, learning is tailored to individual students' strengths, needs, and personal interests. Learning opportunities take into account existing knowledge, skills, and abilities, set high expectations, and push students in supportive ways to reach their personal goals.” Once you decide to embrace personalized learning in your school or classroom, then you need a way to know:
- The individual strengths, needs, and personal interests of your students
- At any time of the day, week, or school year, each student’s current knowledge, skills and abilities; and you need a way to track how these competencies develop and increase over time
- The personal goals of each of your students; and you will likely need to help them set and clarify their goals
With this information in hand, you can then pull together resources and materials, customize learning experiences, and provide the instruction and support that will catapult your students’ learning. How can you collect, store, use, and regularly update this information? Next generation learning schools are utilizing two tools that set the stage for personalized learning to occur: Learner Profiles and Personalized Learning Plans.
As Scott Frauenheim of Distinctive Schools tweeted:
Using a strong learner profile is a great 1st step to understand students interests to build better relationships and plans! #NGLCchat
With the help of 2Revolutions and three NGLC schools, we just released Next Gen Tools: Personalized Learning Plans and Learner Profiles to help you understand what these tools are and how schools are using them. See sample templates and understand how Caliber: Beta Academy, CICS West Belden, and Thrive Public Schools are using these tools. See the variety of data the schools collect. Find out how students drive the process and what happens when students start to take ownership of their goals. Understand the challenges and read what’s next as these schools continue to develop the design of the tools and the strategies for using them.
Download this 3-page brief today to get started on personalizing learning for your students. The Next Gen Tools series documents the strategies and innovations that NGLC grant recipients are using to implement their new models. View the collection.
Kristen Vogt & Stefanie Blouin
NGLC
Kristen Vogt (she/her/hers) is knowledge management officer for Next Generation Learning Challenges. Stefanie Blouin (she/her/hers) was senior program officer for Next Generation Learning Challenges.
