Dive Brief:
- A District Administration survey of priorities for K-12 school leaders shows that the number one concern for 75% of respondents is improving student achievement and outcomes.
- Some 43% of respondents described "improving their faculty’s instructional practice" as a key focus area, and 30% said "implementing new learning standards and assessments was a major goal."
- One way to improve student achievement is by having teachers and districts collaborate in order to tailor learning on an individual level to better engage and motivate students to learn.
Dive Insight:
According to S. Dallas Dance, superintendent of Baltimore County Public Schools, the "availability of standards-aligned test results and the national pushback on over-testing will drive teachers and administrators to work together to better tailor instruction to individual students this year."
That bodes well for proponents of personalized learning. Powerful advocates like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg have dumped money into testing and executing personalized learning models. A recent report backed by the Gates Foundation and produced by the RAND Corporation, “Continued Progress,” looked at personalized learning outcomes after analyzing 11,000 students subjected to various personalized learning strategies over two years.
They found that students “made gains in mathematics and reading over the past two years that were significantly greater than a comparison group made up of similar students selected from comparable schools.”
Vermont is unique in that it's passed a legal mandate for all public school students in grades 7 through 12 to have personalized learning plans. Tom Alderman, from the state's Agency of Education, recently told Education Dive that the plan's "...intention is to put students at the center of the construction of their own learning experience, which evidence indicates will result in greater relevance and engagement, and therefore better outcomes."
