We should spend every Face to Face session for Cohort21 at MaRS…. this has been a day of inspiration.
My action plan remains as stated in my previous post, The Journey. And yet, already today I have been able to see where this will lead in the future. Next year I hope to push classroom flexibility to the next level of personalized learning: allowing my students to work through the syllabus at their own pace. Want to complete a unit in one week and then focus on other areas of life for a while? No problem. … or at least, no problem for small classes of highly motivated students.
As I look ahead to what kind of personalized learning opportunities I can offer my students, I hope that my larger classes of less-motivated students can also benefit from what I am discovering about the advantages of increased student independence and flexibility in classroom learning (I bet they can and will… I just don’t see it clearly yet!)
I think it is ironic that although ‘personalized learning’ can lead to greater student independence, inevitably it requires more effort from the teacher to guide each individual student.
Motivation continues to be the greatest impediment to learning and personalized learning appears to be one way of motivating the learner; however, I’m not sure that merely allowing students to work at their own pace on a prescribed curriculum will fully address the motivational issues that plagues our students. I expect that teachers will, as with the IB, have to allow students to approach their subjects from different perspectives so that they can find meaning in their studies. The challenge will always be to make your subject relevant to a class of students who have different interests and different levels of understanding. Instead of a pile of videos explaining how to get the answer, we need to have videos that preface the typical mathematical demonstration with the wonders of the world to which they lead.
All the best in your efforts to do it in a way that encourages students to engage when they are ready for engagement!