BY Asher Lehrer-Small ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Alex Westfall
IT'S PERSONAL THE LOW-TECH FUTURE OF THE FUTURE OF LEARNING
At Springfield High School in Southern Vermont, the entryway stairs not only lead students inside the school building—they serve as a reminder that learning can happen beyond the school walls. Five learning options are painted on the face of the stairs in bright white block lettering: “work-based learning,” “early college,” “dual enrollment,” “online learning,” and “River Valley Technical Center.” These are the “flexible pathways” that students at Springfield High can pursue as they work toward high school graduation. They can receive credits through working at jobs and internships. They can take courses at local public colleges and universities, or pursue career preparatory learning at their local technical center. “The challenge is, how do we work to ensure an education for all students that’s engaging, rigorous, and relevant?” Patty Davenport, Multiple Pathways Coordinator at Springfield High, told the College Hill Independent. Springfield’s diverse options for students come as a result of Vermont’s 2013 Flexible Pathway Initiative, which asks all Vermont public high schools to offer their students the same learning options that Springfield boasts on its entryway steps. The move comes as a part of a broader effort in the state to make learning more relevant and engaging to students, and falls under a wider education reform movement known as “personalized learning” (PL). Vermont is not alone in its personalization push. As a reform agenda, PL has become increasingly widespread in schools and districts across the country. Education leaders are recognizing that their students have a diverse array of needs, interests, and learning styles that traditional classrooms are often unequipped to adequately handle. They have begun to turn to PL in hopes of flipping the educational paradigm from a “one-size-fits-all” model to a model prepared to meet individual students’ needs. In the past ten years, PL has gone from a fringe idea to an educational priority for thousands of schools. Nine out of ten districts polled said they were investing in devices, software, or professional development to support PL. These changes hold promise: initial studies suggest that students at PL schools make faster test score gains than their counterparts at non-PL schools. For students who lack essential outside-of-school supports, the accommodations afforded by PL can have outsized positive effects. Yet not everyone sees the PL movement as a good thing. Its links to tech-based philanthropic supergiants such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative have parents and researchers alike sharing worries over data privacy, the time students spend in front of screens, and the invasion of private interests into the public education sector. In 2017, for instance, Facebook’s founder made a multi-million dollar commitment to support PL’s expansion through the development of online learning tools. Does that money come from altruism, or from an interest in pushing American education landscape to develop a dependence on technological tools? Skeptical researchers have coined terms such as “digital privatization” and “philanthrocapitalism” to describe the cycle of PL-focused contributions from tech giants in the education sector that they see as detrimental and potentially self-serving. Vermont has taken a path to personalized learning that stands apart from these concerns with its Flexible Pathways Initiative. The effort embodies a version of PL where students’ one-on-one relationships with
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faculty form the basis for personalization. It’s not flashy, but it may be the approach that serves students best. Instead of depending on computer programs, it emphasizes student agency in selecting from an array of engaged, community-based learning options. If PL is truly the future of learning as experts say, after speaking to Vermont educators, it seems that the Green Mountain State’s approach to personalization may well show us the future of the future of learning. +++ Even as PL spreads to schools across the country, it still lacks a clear definition. “You could ask 10 people and get 10 different descriptions of what it means,” said Sarah Erickson, a math teacher in Rhode Island, to the Independent. In 2016, the Rhode Island Department of Education launched the RI Personalized Learning Initiative to grow personalized learning statewide. “I don't think it has been practically defined at the school level, district level, or state level,” said Erickson. A 2017 RAND study admits as much, and offers a working definition for PL in place of a commonly established one. The study stipulates that “personalized learning prioritizes a clear understanding of the needs and goals of each individual student and [tailors] instruction to address those needs and goals.” Yet what this actually means in practice remains unclear. The absence of a common understanding has allowed two divergent definitions to emerge: first, that PL means using digital software to let students to move through a predetermined body of content at their own pace. And second, that PL means a restructuring of school, not necessarily focused on technology, where students’ one-on-one relationships with faculty guide them to set their own goals and chart their own academic pathways. Vermont’s PL push embodies this second definition. The state’s Flexible Pathways Initiative calls on schools to support their students in crafting a “combination of high-quality academic and experiential components leading to secondary school completion and postsecondary readiness.” It is a “new way of looking at learning,” the Vermont Agency of Education explained in official documents. Students should be in the driver's seat and they should have a say in their route. Schools have come up with creative ways to accommodate these changes. At Winooski High School just outside of Burlington, students can enroll in an “iLab” credit where they design individual semester-long projects with the help of mentors in the school or in their community. Students’ iLab projects can involve internship work, online learning, and independent research. One student learned American Sign Language from a community mentor and incorporated what she learned into a dance piece that she performed at the end of the semester. “We really dig into: What are you interested in?” said Lindsey Cox, Winooski’s iLab co-coordinator, to the Independent. “What do you want to spend time on? What are you passionate about?” The flexibility of the iLab accommodates students who learn best at a pace different from that of a traditional classroom. “The iLab has been a place where students can go more quickly and the iLab has also been a place where students can go more slowly,” said Cox. Where the school might previously have struggled to support certain students due to learning differences or responsibilities at home, the iLab fills in the
gaps. Cox reports that students who previously may have struggled to graduate have gained the credits they need to earn a diploma through work in the iLab. Initiatives like the iLab are not unique to Winooski High. All across Vermont, the Flexible Pathways Initiative has moved schools to adopt a style of learning that is not only personalized, but truly student-driven. Out of a sample of 35 Vermont high schools, 17 reported that students spend over an hour per week in advisory programs where they develop relationships with a faculty member and a cohort of peers. In that same sample, 19 schools reported having a full or part-time coordinator on staff to match interested students to internships and early college opportunities. Several such coordinators spoke to the Independent, describing programs much like the iLab in Winooski where students learn through self-designed projects or online courses about a topic of their interest. Vermont exemplifies the version of PL that best serves students: where students have the capacity to design their own learning. For some, that can mean selecting computer-based, self-paced classes. But for many others, it can mean supplementing traditional classes with real-world, self-directed learning opportunities. While these changes require an investment, it is an investment that schools must make. If the goal of PL is to match the needs of students to the educational opportunities that best fit those needs, it has to start by getting to know the students. +++ In contrast to Vermont, Rhode Island has pursued a very different statewide approach to PL. Rather than focusing on personnel or advising, many Rhode Island schools have invested in personalized learning technologies. In the Providence Public School District, school spending on web-based instructional programs shot up from 158,000 dollars in 2011-12 to 928,000 dollars in 2015-16, the latest year for which data are available. However, the Rhode Island Personalized Learning Initiative claims to be about more than just technology. A state document tries to speak into existence what PL is not: it’s not providing every student with a laptop, it’s not learning in isolation, and it doesn’t mean memorize and forget. But do Rhode Island schools follow through on this vision, or do they just pay lip service to it? From speaking to local educators, the answer seems mixed. In the best cases, PL means engaging classrooms where students actively learn. Dale Fraza teaches at 360 High School in Providence, which received a grant from the state in 2017 to support innovation in personalized learning. In his journalism class, he asks students to pick topics that spark their interest: “In our last [newspaper] issue, one girl was very interested in learning about the coronavirus… so she focused on that,” Fraza told the Independent. Not everyone picks weighty topics. Other students have focused on lighter issues such as the food in their school cafeteria. In Fraza’s history class, the project-based learning model allows students to decide which issues they want to learn about more deeply. Many readers might remember history classes where dry research topics were assigned by their teachers. For Fraza, it’s all about engaging the students. That means letting them pick the particular research project that they are curious to learn more about. “If we’re studying the Harlem
27 MARCH 2020
