I am a huge fan of personalized learning.

Students self pacing while at the same time making choices about their learning. I started personalizing learning for my students 15 years ago.

A lot has changed in those 15 years and personalization is more important than ever. Students are enjoying whole group lessons less and less. They don’t enjoy being held up by their peers’ interruptions or pace of gaining understanding. And they tell me, “We love you, but prefer listening to you online.” So I try to meet those requests.

There are a lot of ways to personalize learning.

• Academic Choice – This is a Responsive Classroom practice that gives students choice in what and how they learn. Regardless of how I personalize for my students, I always use Academic Choice. For Academic Choice to work, you need to know your students developmentally, academically, and personally.
• Choose Your Grade – I don’t remember what this is called, but the gist is the entire unit is provided to the students with Blooms based activities that are assigned different points. Students have to complete activities at each level, and when obtain mastery in the level, they earn that grade. So knowledge activities may be a grade of C, where analysis or synthesis activities would be a grade of A. What’s great about this is students can repeat activities as often as they need until they master it and they can choose where they start. If a student already knows the basic content, they can move to the next grade band of activities.
• Playlists – I learned about this from Jennifer Gonzalez at Cult of Pedagogy. You can provide chunks of units or the entire unit to your students. They have the goal(s) and/or essential questions. Students can choose from a list of activities to meet those goals or answer the essential questions. I try to meet different learning styles and modalities as often as I can to keep it engaging. Here’s one I have created for my students:

• Learning Paths – Again, this is either an entire unit or focuses on one goal or essential question. The way I set them up, looked like this.

• Gamification – This is where I’m at now. The gamification I develop for my students has a flavor of the above. For me to choose a game based platform it has to allow me The opportunity to provide choice, include checkins or assessments, and allow me to embed or link to a variety of tools. Two platforms I use are Symbaloo Learning Paths and Classcraft.

Each of these have served my students well. Any of them will work. It depends on your purpose and teaching into it. I’ll share more about that next!