Let’s face it, personalized learning is the future of education. It’s not that teachers over the years haven’t tried, to some extent, to personalize learning for each student, but the effectiveness of that personalization has yet to come to fruition. Technology is powering society today, more than ever before, and the reach of this technology has yet to see its apex. One of the prime examples of this view is education. Many schools today are under-utilizing, or not using it at all, and it is one of the main areas we can change in order to help students learn.
There are many issues that can be discussed in regards to the integration of technology. The focus of this blog is related to the use of technology to power personalized learning for all students, and to take the pressure off teachers to figure out strengths and weaknesses on their own. Companies like DreamBox, Pearson, Cerego, and many others have developed software to help students with individualized needs. WIth the help of this technology, teachers can accurately find strengths, weaknesses, skills, and interests, and create assessments and assignments based around those criteria.
This style of learning isn’t new or unique, in fact it has been around for over a hundred years. Following her medical studies, Maria Montessori began taking pedagogy classes at the University of Rome, where she studied educational pedagogy that had taken place over the last two-hundred years. Italy 1907, the first classroom by Maria Montessori was opened, called Casa de Bambini (Children’s House). By 1912 this method had reached the United States, and a year later the first Montessori school was opened by Narcissa Cox Vanderlip and Frank A. Vanderlip, named the Scarborough School. This school closed a year later after clashes with the educational system in place in America and a 1914 booklet by William Heard Kilpatrick, called Montessori System Examined. It took another forty-five years, 1960, for another Montessori school to be established in the United States.
Not to say that American education needs to move into something that looks like a traditional Montessori school, but the pedagogy behind these schools is based on personalized learning and human development. It’s this fundamental idea that educators have been chasing for years, mainly without the use of technology. Students with different backgrounds, different interests, different skills, and different needs are stuffed into a classroom on a daily basis and taught the same exact lesson. On a larger scale, over fifty million students will be attending a K-12 school this year, most of them going through the motions of dis-individualized lessons and assessments.
Technology can help teachers grade student work, and other administrative tasks, in order to allow teachers to interact more with their students. With the help of technology, teachers can have personalized data on all of their students in order to differentiate learning and deliver instruction to students that can be engaging and enjoyable, which allows for students to better learn the concepts being taught inside the classroom. As a teacher, going through the same motions each and every day, teaching lessons, grading papers, and not being able to interact with students, gets to be disenchanting to an extent. Once students see a teacher who stops caring, they stop caring, and they themselves become disenchanted with the classroom setting.
As educators and administrators, our goal should be to not teach to the middle, leaving the lower tier students to fend for themselves and the higher tier students to become bored and engaged. With the use of personalized learning, every level of student can be reached, and better yet, every student can enjoy learning and every teacher can enjoy teaching.
References:
Kramer, Rita (1976). Maria Montessori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-201-09227-1.
“Biography of Dr Maria Montessori”. Association Montessori Internationale. Retrieved 2019-07-10