Third-Grade Shoes Won't Fit In 2020
If there is a business that understands the trouble with a one-size-fits-all approach, it's a shoe store. Shoes may be divided into toddler, children and adult sections, but within those divisions are a variety of sizes and styles. Children of the same age may wear a size 3, a size 5.5, or a size 7.
Now, imagine if shoe stores, instead, divided their stock by the grade of the intended-wearer. Imagine, as a parent, the options for your child's shoes were limited to just what was sitting on the third-grade shelf. Imagine it was a shelf filled with rows of identical sneakers, designed only to match the specifications of the average third grader. Some children simply would be out of luck.
And yet, as we head into 2020, K-12 classrooms still look largely like they did a century ago. They hand down one-size-fits-all instruction, and students who do not fit the mold are out of luck.
In 1920, universal public education had only been a requirement across every state for two years. The United States had hit the crest of the industrial revolution and it needed workers with the skills to fill more advanced manufacturing jobs. So, we designed schools the same way we designed factories-to work as fast as possible by eliminating any variation in approach.
In 2020, our economy will depend less on manufacturing than any point since industrialization, instead favoring knowledge-based industries like technology and medicine.
We now know more about how students learn and have developed tools that equip teachers to tap into the creativity and strengths of all students-even those who do not fit in the rigid mold of standardized lessons. But, the structure of most K-12 classrooms hasn't changed much. We still classify students by age and fuse content with grade levels in ways that are empirically at odds with what we now know about human development. Teachers who do their best to differentiate are often boxed in by grades, class sizes or the invisible hand of curriculum and assessment nudging them to teach to the average.
It is a dilemma that persists in most schools, even as rapid technological advances converge to change the way we work and live, in the midst of a "fourth industrial revolution." In response, a growing number of educators are innovating with an approach called personalized learning. Personalized learning as a concept is rooted in the belief that students' differences should be seen not as deficiencies, but as opportunities for their growth. It urges educators to walk in their students' shoes, sometimes quite literally, to build relationships that are rooted in a better understanding of their needs. It's about developing not just academics, but agency-and confidence-by allowing students to take ownership of their learning, how they progress and how they demonstrate what they have learned.
In cities like Chicago, where more than 140 schools have started to embrace the approach, results show that personalized learning-when thoughtfully designed and practiced-can work. But while early research on personalized learning suggests that the approach is effective, it is mired in controversy, fueled by myths and misunderstandings of the role technology plays in the classroom that are perpetuated both by critics and even some of its less-informed practitioners.
Skeptics have, as a result, come to view personalized learning as an Orwellian approach to education that amounts to little more than "behaviorism on a screen." The important, though often exaggerated, role that technology plays within personalized classrooms means that the approach is often conflated with replacing teachers with technology, or the rise of screen time in schools. It is mistaken, by critics, as an attempt to lower standards for student performance.
In reality, personalized learning promotes rigor. But it does so through a learner-focused pedagogical design that draws upon a teacher's deep knowledge of students as individuals and of their levels of learning. Personalized learning is about allowing learners to become masters of their own educational destiny. It empowers students to understand what grade-level standards they should be reaching for, and provides them with the vocabulary to express what they need to reach those goals.
Of course, a personalized approach to learning is not new to education. At the turn of the 20th Century, Dr. Maria Montessori brought home the pedagogical lessons she learned in Rome to build empathetic, observation-based classrooms. In the 1960s, "individualized instruction" materials proliferated across schools. Most parents are familiar with the concept of reading levels, and the assorted "just right" or "stretch" books used in early grades as students take different paths toward a common standard for grade-level reading. These levels represent clear goals that students are expected to reach by the end of a school year, but allow for variability to reflect the pace-but not potential-of individual learners. While common in the early years, it is not an approach that is used across the remainder of the K-12 spectrum.
Child in a personalized learning classroom.RYAN MOORE 2018
No child should have their feet forced into shoes that don't fit. And cramming an increasingly diverse population of students into one-size-fits-all classrooms is at odds with both the aspirations-and evolving expectations-of our public schools. As students prepare for a future where technological disruption will be the norm and standards for workplace success may evolve by the day, the embrace of a continuous, truly personalized approach to learning will be an economic-if not moral-imperative.
We ask our students to continue learning, growing and evolving throughout their lives, and we owe it to them to build a school system that does the same. We can do better than to ask 2020 students to learn within the model of a 1920 classroom.