domain of all, even for the most experienced and .... To complete the process and to check some of our assumptions ....
PERSONALIZED LEARNING ON A CONTINUUM Strategies that Work for Different Teacher Archetypes JULY 2017
TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT BETTERLESSON
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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INTRODUCTION & METHODOLOGY
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PERSONALIZED LEARNING
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ARCHETYPES BETTERLESSON’S PERSONALIZED LEARNING CONTINUUM PERSONALIZED LEARNING CONTINUUM IN ACTION IMPACT OF ADMINISTRATORS ON TEACHER GROWTH
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NEXT STEPS
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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CONTRIBUTORS
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ABOUT BETTERLESSON BetterLesson’s mission is to empower schools and districts to develop and retain innovative, studentcentered educators by providing personalized instructional coaching to each teacher or instructional leader we support. Since our founding in 2009 as a platform for teachers to share their lesson plans, we have been steadfastly committed to “sharing what works.” With over a million teacher-generated resources on our Community site and 20,000 freely available additional resources created by Master Teachers in Science, Math, ELA, and Blended Learning, BetterLesson
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has become one of the most reliable sources of highquality Open Education Resources for the 500,000 teachers who use our online materials every month. BetterLesson’s focus over the last three school years has been to develop, launch, and refine PersonalizedPD, an innovative professional learning platform that supports nearly 1,000 K-12 teachers, coaches, and administrators in North America to design and implement personalized learning (PL) strategies that solve their most pressing teaching challenges.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. TEACHERS’ PL EXPERIENCE LEVELS CAN BE ASSESSED QUICKLY AND USEFULLY There are a variety of approaches to assess relatively quickly a teacher’s personalization skills, mindsets, beliefs, and values and to identify personalization strategies that are likely to be effective, lowbarrier entry points in his/her particular learning environment.
2. NOVICE TEACHERS CAN BE PL INTERMEDIATES A surprising percentage of early-career teachers demonstrate blended and personalized learning competence, which could be a result of these teachers being digital natives, their having increased access to educational technology in the early parts of their careers, and/or increased attention to blended learning, personalized learning, and technology integration in their teacher preparation programs.
3. MANY VETERAN TEACHERS ARE NEW TO PL (AND EAGER TO GROW!) A significant percentage of veteran teachers are relatively new to personalized learning practices. In general, these “experienced novices“ demonstrate a hunger to improve their practice but may have been constrained by a lack of prior opportunity and support to learn about and implement strategies that would lead to higher degrees of student personalization.
4. EXPERIENCE LEVELS SHAPE TEACHERS’ PL CHALLENGES (AND SOLUTIONS) Teachers with different levels of personalized learning experience and overall teaching experience face different kinds of challenges (e.g., mindset challenges, emotional challenges, political challenges, and technical challenges). Certain strategies and supports are well-matched to the developmental levels and specific challenges teachers experience.
5. WHAT’S GOOD FOR STUDENTS IS ALSO GOOD FOR TEACHERS The most useful tools and frameworks to describe and assess effective teacher practice in blended and personalized learning are plainspoken and precise and empower teachers to engage authentically © 2017
in their own learning in much the same way that students do in effective personalized learning environments.
6. MOST TEACHERS ARE OPEN TO PL COACHING The vast majority of teachers who have consistent coaching, regardless of their levels of prior experience with personalized learning, demonstrate openness to supporting their students’ learning through flexible instructional modalities.
7. TEACHERS STRUGGLE MOST WITH 3 PL DOMAINS After a year of consistent coaching, the three biggest personalized learning growth areas for the majority of teachers are Use of Data, Authentic Learning, and Student Agency.
8. GOOD COACHING HELPS TEACHERS PROMOTE POSITIVE PL CULTURE With consistent high-quality coaching, most teachers who are new to blended and personalized learning practices can become reasonably consistent in deploying strategies and practices that promote positive culture, a bedrock of an effective personalized learning classroom.
9. AUTHENTIC LEARNING IS OFTEN PL’S MOST DIFFICULT CHALLENGE
The most significant personalized learning challenge for advanced practitioners is engaging students in authentic learning opportunities, which suggests that creating opportunities for students to engage in deeper, more relevant, and more powerful learning may be the most challenging personalized learning domain of all, even for the most experienced and skillful practitioners.
10. LEADERSHIP SIGNIFICANTLY IMPACTS TEACHERS’ PL PRACTICE There are specific leadership activities that school, district, and CMO network administrators exhibit that contribute substantially to the professional growth of teachers who are moving their practice in the direction of blended and personalized learning.
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INTRODUCTION & METHODOLOGY BetterLesson is committed to being a fast-cycle learning on highly skilled blended learning pioneers, we felt organization. In the same way that we encourage that it could be useful--for our own learning and to the teachers and leaders in our partner organizations larger field--to document what we have learned about to engage in a continuous learning process (“Trysupporting teachers with a broader range of skills, Measure-Learn”), we try to apply that same framework prior experience, and mindsets with respect to more to our own organizational learning and knowledge personalized pedagogies. management. In the 2016-17 school year, we partnered The first step in this process was to develop clear with dozens of schools, districts, foundations, non-profit organizational definitions for what we mean by the organizations, and state departments of education interrelated terms “blended learning” and “personalized to build the capacity of nearly 1,000 teachers across learning.” At BetterLesson, like many organizations, we North America. Because of the skills and experience think of “blended learning” as the strategic integration of our coaching team, we have developed a reputation of educational technology instructional as an organization with significant strategies with high-quality humanexpertise in helping teachers shift their to-human strategies to maximize practice towards more student-centered the personalization of each student’s pedagogies. Indeed, the majority of experience in school. “Personalized our partnerships over the last two learning” in our context refers to school years have been driven by our the entire suite of tools, strategies, partners’ desire to transform the learning approaches, mindsets, and structures experience of students towards more educators can use to facilitate student highly blended and personalized learning Design studio exercise ownership of and developmentally models. appropriate control of their learning. We provide a more precise operational definition of In the 2014-15 school year, BetterLesson launched the Blended Master Teacher Project, in which we personalized learning in our Personalized Learning closely documented the classroom practice of 11 Continuum framework on page 16. vanguard teachers across the United States who were Once our terms were defined, we had to establish a implementing different models of blended learning foundational understanding of the baseline practices in their classrooms. This project has drawn praise of the teachers we were supporting at the outset of from many different quarters of the K-12 education the 2016-17 school year. We did not have a formal ecosystem--from district leaders and principals who instrument for assessing the baseline personalized routinely use the content to launch professional learning experience of teachers (to that point, we had conversations about the future of learning in their local focused in an intentional way on the specific needs and communities to thought leadership organizations that professional learning goals of each teacher, informed inform policy decisions and school model design to by the larger objectives of the leaders of our partner teachers across North America who use the content organizations). Not wanting to re-invent the wheel, we of the Blended Master Teacher Project to help them decided to use a streamlined version of Dallas ISD’s implement innovations in their classrooms. Blended Learning School Rubric, which incorporates In 2016, BetterLesson published its first white paper, much of the best thinking in the field about blended Blended and Personalized Learning: Insights from the and personalized learning “look-fors.” To understand Master Teacher Project. This paper focused on what we better the general experience levels of the teachers had learned from working in a very intensive way for we were supporting, we asked our coaches to do a an entire school year with some of the most formidable basic prior experience rating of each teacher they were and innovative K-12 blended and personalized learning coaching on a three-point scale. teachers in the country. Because the Blended Master After our coaches made their initial ratings, which were Teacher Project and the white paper largely focused © 2017
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based on their in-person interactions with teachers at our two-day Design Studios and their initial virtual coaching meetings at the beginning of the school year, we interviewed each of our coaches to understand if there were patterns in their approaches to supporting teachers with different levels of prior experience and different mindsets. As expected, the interviews surfaced a number of useful insights, which are more fully detailed in “Personalized Learning Teacher Archetypes” on page 7. After we had captured and synthesized the highlevel themes and specific coaching strategies and approaches our coaches use with different teacher archetypes, we wanted to understand at a more granular level the current state of each teacher’s personalized learning practice. In order to gain deeper insight about the personalized learning practices of each teacher--as well as cohorts of teachers within the same partnership--we knew that we needed to develop a system that was more complex than the three-point initial rating framework but not so complicated that it was difficult for our coaches to use or so complicated that we and our partners would not be able to discern actionable patterns. We also wanted to take this opportunity to put our stake in the ground about what we believe the elements of high-quality personalized learning consist of. After reviewing a number of thoughtful personalized learning frameworks from across the blended and personalized learning ecosystem1, we ultimately decided that no single instrument that currently existed captured precisely and concisely our beliefs about the domains of personalized learning. Somewhat reluctantly, we did what organizations do when they arrive at this point in a process: we invented our own framework. We knew that our new personalized learning framework needed both to do justice to the complexity of high-quality personalized learning practice that we know exists across different educational contexts and at the same time be a nimble and useful tool for our coaches to use to gain insight quickly into the development of the teachers they support. We call our first attempt at this framework BetterLesson’s Personalized Learning Continuum, which is included in full on page 15. Our process from that point on is fully explicated in 1
the sections of this paper entitled “BetterLesson’s Personalized Learning Continuum” and “The Personalized Learning Continuum in Action.” In brief, we asked our coaches to rate nearly 200 teachers for whom they had already assigned an initial experience rating and we analyzed the data to surface trends across the entire cohort of teachers and within experience-similar archetype groups. To complete the process and to check some of our assumptions about what we thought we were learning, we interviewed nearly 10% of the cohort of teachers whose data is highlighted in this paper and we engaged in a second round of interviews with our coaching team. Finally, we administered end-of-year surveys to all of our teachers and used the results of the surveys as a way of triangulating the data we had collected to that point. The end-of-year surveys generated some encouraging and welcome insights, including the fact that 87% of teachers from partnerships that focused on blended and personalized learning were "net promoters" of our professional learning model (i.e., they gave the strongest indications that they would recommend PersonalizedPD to a colleague). Even though there was not a 1:1 correlation between the cohort of teachers whose data we tracked through our initial ratings and our subsequent ratings using our Personalized Learning Continuum and the teachers who responded to our end-of-year survey, there is enough of an overlap for us to feel confident that our data is directionally accurate and consistent with our broader claim that the teachers whose work and growth we portray in this paper were highly satisfied with the coaching they received and highly motivated to continue to improve their craft. Therefore, we conclude that their experience may well be indicative of what we might expect from a larger sample size of teachers. All of that said, we do not claim that the work that underlies this paper is consistent with a gold-standard research study. More than anything, our process was dictated by a desire to understand better the teachers we support and the impact of our coaching on their practice. We offer our findings to the field in that spirit and welcome suggestions to strengthen our process as we iterate further on our work and our application of the Personalized Learning Continuum.
Some excellent resources include TLA/iNACOL’s Blended Learning Teacher Competencies; ISTE’s Standards for Teachers; and Education Elements’ Blended Learning Teacher Rubric, to name a few.
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PERSONALIZED LEARNING TEACHER ARCHETYPES Common Challenges and Low-Barrier Entry Points BetterLesson’s team of talented and experienced coaches support nearly 1,000 teachers across North America through PersonalizedPD. The majority of teachers we work with are looking to shift their practice in a more personalized direction. Each teacher’s school community, disposition, experience level, relationships with student and families, and prior opportunities to learn about and practice personalized learning is unique. In that context, our coaching team has developed a variety of approaches to understand relatively quickly each teacher’s gifts and challenges and to identify personalization strategies that are likely to work with that specific teacher in that particular learning environment. At the outset of a relationship with a teacher, our coaches try in their initial coaching conversations-which sometimes take place in person at our Design Studios and in other instances in virtual coaching sessions--to assess the teacher’s baseline orientation towards and initial level of experience with blended and personalized learning systems and strategies. Some common ways in which our coaches make their preliminary assessments include:
»» Showing genuine interest in their practice and the
overall context of his/her classroom and school by asking questions like: What’s going well? What are your challenges? What is a typical day like in your class?
»» Asking teachers to articulate their vision for
student success and paying careful attention to the values and mindsets their vision statements express.
»» Naming domains of personalized learning
teacher’s approach already is by asking: In what ways do students have the opportunity to use their voices in your class? What opportunities exists for student collaboration? Are students engaged in goal-setting? How often and in what ways are students involved in reflection?
»» Assessing common instructional design/ modalities by asking questions about:
The spatial arrangement of the classroom The typical structure and instructional modalities of a class The frequency, purposes, structures, and results of students working in groups The extent to which the teacher is using data to inform his/her instruction The role(s) the teacher plays in his/her students’ learning process (e.g., director, facilitator, etc.)
»» Understanding how content is generally
delivered/accessed and the centrality of content delivery to the teacher’s perspective of his/her role and identity by asking questions like: What is the experience of students at different levels in your class? How are you building habits of mind? Why did you become a teacher in this grade or content area? How do you typically assess your students?
practice and understanding how personalized the
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»» Asking the teacher to share artifacts of learning and teaching, including:
Examples of assessments and student work samples that illustrate students’ learning challenges and/or exemplars of high-quality student products Data pertaining to student growth and achievement Videos of students engaged in learning Photographs or sketches of the layout of the classroom
»» Assessing the availability of educational
technology and a teacher’s general level of comfort with and orientation towards technology by asking: What technology is available to teachers and students? Is there an learning management system in place? How often are the devices that students have access to available?
»» A belief that all students can learn and grow
under the right conditions and with the right support
»» A willingness to cede control of the learning process to students in developmentally appropriate ways
Our coaches’ preliminary assessments of the initial blended and personalized learning experience of the teachers they supported in the 2016-17 school year lends itself to some useful generalized teacher archetypes: blended and personalized learning Novices (either new to teaching altogether and/or relatively new to blended and personalized learning); Intermediates; and Advanced Practitioners. In the cohort of over 200 teachers that we focused on for this paper, our coaches’ initial teacher archetype ratings break down in the following proportions:
12% 9%
How reliable is the wireless infrastructure? How well (and by whom) are devices maintained? How and why are you using technology? As they explore each teacher’s context, our coaches also strive to form a preliminary point of view about his/her mindsets, beliefs, and values by looking for evidence of:
»» A general openness to making changes in their
practice and the articulation of specific areas of their practice they want to improve
»» Skills and habits pertaining to self-assessment, reflection, and iteration
»» An ability to articulate “the why” of what they are doing
»» A willingness to take risks and try new things,
especially the level of risk and complexity of the first new strategy s/he is willing to try
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PL NOVICES: EARLY CAREER TEACHERS
ADVANCED PRACTIONERS
45% INTERMEDIATES
34% PL NOVICES: VETERAN TEACHERS
Within these broad rating categories, some interesting trends emerged. Approximately 37% of the teachers in the entire cohort are early-career teachers with five or fewer years of experience. However, somewhat surprisingly, only a little under half of the early-career teachers were assessed to be personalized learning “Novices.” Slightly more than half of early-career teachers were rated as “Intermediates” or “Advanced Practitioners” by our coaches, which could be a result of these teachers being digital natives, their having increased access to educational technology in the early parts of their careers, and/or increased attention to blended learning, personalized learning, and technology
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integration in their teacher preparation programs. The other 63% of teachers who were assigned an initial blended and personalized learning experience rating by our coaches had taught for 6 or more years before the 2016-17 school year. Although this group represents a broad experience spectrum that surely contains many nuanced personal stories, it was interesting to note that 34% of veteran teachers were judged to be blended and personalized learning Novices, which suggests a hunger among more experienced teachers to improve their personalized learning practice (as evidenced by their willingness to work with our coaches) but perhaps a lack of prior opportunity and support to learn about and implement strategies that would lead to higher degrees of student personalization.
PL ARCHETYPE 1: NOVICES PL Novices are veteran or early-career teachers who most frequently grapple with challenges related to planning and instructional design; the emotions associated with doing something new and different; developing specific technical skills; and/or resistance to changing their practice. Interviews with our coaches revealed a high degree of strategic thinking about common challenges teachers in the different archetypes face as well as personalization strategies that work well as low-barrier entry points for each archetype. For example, unsurprisingly, blended and personalized learning Novices often face planning and instructional design challenges. Due to a lack of prior experience with personalized learning--either because they are early-career teachers or because they haven’t had sufficient prior provocations to their practice--they don’t yet anticipate the many things they will need to make, do, and become familiar with before they bring their plans to students. As one of our coaches put it, “They need figure out how to teach without a prescribed model and without things they can grab onto and say ‘this has always worked.’ “ When working with our coaches to make their classes more highly personalized, Novices understand the value of an instructional design phase that precedes implementation of new strategies, but they tend not to want this initial planning phase to last so long that they feel like they are not doing anything productive in their classes and get frustrated by their lack of progress.
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Strategies and approaches that our coaches have identified as being useful to Novices who are grappling with planning and instructional design challenges include:
»» Setting a small number of broad goals for
students and trying many different strategies that are connected to those goals
»» Breaking their vision down into smaller steps
to get there and, along the way, defining personalized learning more clearly and making it actionable.
Novice teachers also face a number of emotional challenges when they are at the early stages of implementing blended and personalized learning strategies. There is generalized anxiety and uncertainty about what the results will be. Many veteran teachers feel shame that they are “behind” their younger peers, especially with respect to educational technology, and fear losing control of their classes. Some experienced teachers who are new to personalized learning practices feel uncomfortable changing major components of their students’ experience without having evidence of the efficacy of doing so. In particular, some experienced Novices don’t initially see the benefits of increasing student voice and letting go of control because these approaches to learning and teaching are outside of their experience, both as educators and as students themselves. Coach Voices
Juan Matos on supporting a veteran teacher who was a PL Novice: “We started talking about how we could make it easier for students to get into Math. I got her to commit to breaking at specific posted times in the lesson, no matter where she was as the teacher, to give students opportunities to work on their own. For direct instruction, I got her to say things like, ‘I need your attention for 5 minutes’—like a movie trailer. After awhile, she realized that she doesn’t have to throw away everything that she was doing well before.”
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Some personalized learning Novices who are veteran teachers have a fear of and/or an aversion to educational technology. In a general sense, they understand that the use of technology and other personalization approaches could help their students, but they don’t know how to implement them in their classrooms. Some experienced teachers have had setbacks in their previous attempts to use technology in their classrooms and are understandably reluctant to try more new strategies that depend upon technology. Approaches and strategies that our coaches have identified as being effective in helping personalized learning Novices overcome emotional challenges that are not particularly connected to a fear of technology include:
»» Telling stories about other teachers’ successes
and failures in implementing personalization strategies, including those of the coach himself/ herself
»» In the case of embarrassed veteran Novices,
highlighting and honoring what they already know and do well and showing them how important those skills are in a highly effective personalized learning teacher
For personalized learning Novices who have a strong fear of/an aversion to introducing educational technology tools and strategies into their classrooms, our coaches find the following approaches to be effective:
»» “Shrinking the change” by picking one strategy or
one small iteration of practice that is connected to a specific goal the teacher wants to achieve or a a problem in their practice (e.g., use technology to set learning goals)
»» Choosing and modeling tools that don’t present
huge barriers to entry (e.g., Google Forms or 3-2-1 for formative assessment, Google Docs for conferencing and giving feedback, or Socrative)
»» Sending personalized how-to videos/screencasts about new technologies
»» Starting with interactive, no- or low-tech
strategies that increase student engagement and personalization and offer a change in instructional modalities (e.g., students acting out physical
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gestures they have invented to illustrate academic vocabulary; traditional vocabulary cards vs. Quizlet; etc.) before introducing technology-based solutions that address similar areas of learning Many blended and personalized learning Novices encounter specific technical challenges and challenges having to do with discrete areas of their practice. For example, if a veteran teacher is used to lecturing, the shift towards more personalized modalities of learning can be difficult. New technologies that enable students to work on different skills and content simultaneously have created additional opportunities for teachers to meet one-on-one and in small groups with students. However, the shift towards more student conferencing can be challenging for teachers who have not yet developed the technical skills to use conference time effectively. Early-career teachers tend to be digital natives who are comfortable with technology and eager to integrate it into their classes, but they are still developing basic management skills and core content competence. In these cases, the implementation of technology strategies and solutions can exacerbate already-shaky classroom culture if an early-career Novice has difficulty in making apps and other ed tech solutions work they way that they expected in their classrooms. These types of technical problems of practice are nuanced and often require highly personalized solutions. At the same time, our coaching team has found that the following strategies and approaches can be very useful for personalized learning Novices who face technichal challenges:
»» Focusing on cultivating student collaboration skills so that students can learn explicit strategies for working through their challenges
»» Focusing on close reading strategies (e.g., “Red Card/Green Card”)
»» Focusing on improving student discourse so that the tone and tenor of classroom dialog can be elevated overall
Strategies that are appropriate for Novice teachers who are comfortable with technology but still developing their basic classroom management repertoires include:
»» Early in the school year or during a “reset” period, 10
focusing on culture-setting strategies and building confidence and competence with classroom routines and procedures (e.g., transition strategies from one platform, modality, tool, or station to another)
»» Encouraging proactive contingency planning and other troubleshooting planning
»» Focusing on one station at a time in stationrotation models
»» Implementing classroom management tools like
Class Dojo and non-tech culture-building systems like “Morning Meeting”
As in other areas of teaching and learning--and in life more generally--mindset challenges can be a Novice teacher’s greatest obstacle to implementing blended and personalized learning strategies. Some Novices with teaching experience are fairly comfortable with technology but are unconvinced initially that what they are planning for their students with our coaches is better than what they were doing before. Many early-career teachers have been trained to focus on classroom management and control, and so personalization is not necessarily the first analytical lens they use to think about their practice. Coach Voices
Daniel Guerrero on supporting early-career teachers who are PL Novices: “A key thing is focusing on personalized learning, bringing them back to that phrase often. Differentiation is not the first way an early-career teacher will think about things. You have to focus on culture setting in many cases. I ask, ‘How can I support you to create an environment that will lead to more personalization?’ “
Our coaches have identified the following strategies and approaches as effective for working with personalized learning Novices who initially appear to have mindset challenges:
»» Encouraging teachers to tell stories about their students until they give the coach a way in
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»» Focusing on “the why” when thinking about new
strategies and linking strategy recommendations to outcomes for students (e.g., show how new strategies can motivate/engage students)
»» Helping teachers learn how to self-assess »» Getting them to buy into the path they're taking
by asking “What does this strategy enable you to do that you couldn’t do before?” and “How might this strategy help you solve a problem in your practice?”
Coach Voices
Kelly Kennefick on helping a PL Novice overcome a mindset challenge: “At first she said, ‘It didn’t work,’ and I pushed her to think about why and to do it again. We’re now at a place where she can say which strategies empower students and which limit them, and she realizes that things don’t have to be perfect for her to try new things.”
PL ARCHETYPE 2: INTERMEDIATES PL Intermediates are early-career or veteran teachers who have independently implemented PL systems and strategies but who wrestle with consistent application; accepting the need to iterate on their hard-won PL practice; and/or cultural and political resistance to deeper personalized learning practice from other stakeholders in their schools. The teachers that our coaches identified as personalized learning “Intermediates” face a wide range of challenges. Generally speaking, however, Intermediates’ challenges tend to fall into four distinct but sometimes interrelated categories. Some Intermediates are early adopters of educational technology with unique mindset challenges. Because they are considered Advanced Practitioners by their peers and/or because they have developed their skills and practices to a large extent in isolation, these personalized learning Intermediates are not convinced that they need to improve their practice or innovate further. Paradoxically, this type of Intermediate can 11
appear to be deeply risk-averse and not always as deliberate or reflective about their integration of technology as one might expect. Another challenge that Intermediates can face (sometimes related to the previous challenge) is that they have a system in place that they have worked hard to establish, but it isn’t necessarily the right system yet. Sometimes, owing to a lack of thought partners at their schools, they may not have all the language and analytic skills they need to describe their challenges concisely and accurately and make necessary adjustments. Some Intermediates of this variety do not yet have a clear vision for how to use technology to achieve specific student outcomes; they often get the urge to try something new but they are not sure why (i.e., ed tech tools are substitutions with little added value for students). In some instances, the ways in which this kind of Intermediate teacher uses technology may work at cross-purposes with his/her goals (e.g., stifles rather than promotes collaboration). Coach Voices
Jessica Anderson on the challenges some PL Intermediates face: “You are so far into personalized learning that you have a battle between the traditional you and the new blended you.”
There are two additional notable types of Intermediates. One type consists of very effective, very experienced teachers who are already personalizing learning in many ways but not necessarily through the use of technology. Another increasingly common type of Intermediate is an early adopter or personalized learning pioneer whose practice is constrained from further innovation because his/her school administration, families, and/or students are antagonistic towards increased technology infusion and/or deeper personalization. This latter example is an Intermediate who faces cultural and political challenges more than technical or mindset challenges per se. Our coaches have identified a number of strategies and coaching approaches that work well to respond to the challenges that Intermediates face. All Intermediates
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can benefit from:
»» Modeling framing of their challenges (e.g., “What I’m hearing is . . .”)
»» Asking questions about how they feel about
their current blended and personalized learning practices and what they want to work on/get better at
»» Encouraging them to think in transformative ways by extending their thinking (e.g., “Yes, and what else might students do with this tool/project?”)
»» Challenging them to be more creative in how
they are thinking about their practice and their students’ experience
»» Focusing on showcasing the innovations they
have already developed in their classrooms and plotting out the next moves in their career portfolios.
»» Integrating new tools and strategies and/or going deeper with the tools and strategies they’re already using to personalize learning more (e.g., turn Google Docs into Hyperdocs; use EDPuzzle for flipped/self-paced learning; or introduce game-based learning through Kahoot!)
»» Designing custom strategies together that solve a problem, create an efficiency, and/or offer opportunities to students
»» Iterating on current models by refining/ redesigning specific model elements
»» Looking at student data together and more often
with a learner and a designer’s stance (e.g., “What can we learn from this data? How can it help us design your students’ experience better?”)
Support strategies that our coaches have identified as being particularly effective with Intermediate practitioners who are early adopters of new technology include:
»» Articulating a meaty goal that is connected to
an area of practice they want to work on (e.g., student agency, feedback, etc.)
»» Focusing conversations on students and away from the intricacies of specific tech tools (e.g.,
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“What is the student outcome you are trying to achieve? What do your students need to be successful in their lives?”)
»» Getting teachers off of technology in favor of
working with students more directly (e.g., improve 1:1 conferencing interactions, minilessons, etc.)
»» Creating simple rubrics for introducing new ed
tech tools that get Intermediate teachers to think more critically about the tools they choose to implement
For effective low-tech Intermediate teachers who are already personalizing their students’ learning to some extent, our coaches recommend suggesting technologybased strategies that help them do things they’re already good at in different, more efficient ways and help them understand the reason why (e.g., audiobooks for different reading groups) and then introducing the SAMR model to explore how technology can be used in different ways and for different purposes. Coach Voices
Abbey Goldstein Moss on supporting PL Intermediates: “Intermediates tend not to be as focused on student agency or ownership. You have to go back to the vision for their classroom they set out at the beginning of the year. Most teachers want those things to be a part of their vision.”
For Intermediates who are constrained by community stakeholders who are ambivalent or antagonistic towards technology and/or a deeper commitment to personalization, our coaches suggest helping teachers continue to personalize their students’ learning in noor low-tech ways (e.g., “Mild, Medium, Spicy” grouping strategy). This type of Intermediate can also benefit from:
»» Using Twitter and other online learning forums to find networks of like-minded educators who can sustain and push their practice
»» Tapping into research publications and
organizations to ensure that their practice is
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substantiated to the degree possible by best practice and current educational and brainscience research
»» Building confidence in discerning which battles
are worth it and how best to initiate conflicts of ideas about what’s best for children in respectful ways
»» Documenting the evolution of their practice and
making their professional learning, their student data, and their students’ work public in as many ways as possible
»» Cultivating champions within the school community
PL ARCHETYPE 3: ADVANCED PRACTITIONERS Advanced PL Practitioners are experienced personalized learning pioneers whose challenges most often stem from professional isolation, the strain of multiple commitments, and a need to develop more sustainable and intentional systems. Even the most advanced personalized learning practitioners experience challenges. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of an Advanced Practitioner is never being satisfied with the status quo, no matter how positive the results are for students. Many of the challenges more Advanced Practitioners face are a result of an absence of a local peer group and other helpful professional learning supports on the one hand and a multiplicity of demands outside of their classrooms on the other, some of which are of the teachers’ own making and stem from an insatiable desire to learn, connect, and innovate. Support strategies and coaching approaches that are effective for Advanced Practitioners include:
»» Having regular big-picture conversations about the discipline of teaching and what drew them into the teaching profession in the first place
»» Offering thought partnership to explore new
ideas and build and sustain excitement about new possibilities
»» Sharing ideas/strategies they’ve never thought or heard of (this can be a challenge!)
»» Helping them develop more efficient systems and 13
routines that make their pace and workload more sustainable over the long haul
»» Encouraging them to document and share their
work in national and international conferences and other venues where they are likely to find their professional peers
»» Letting them articulate the questions and explorations that drive their learning
»» Further developing their mindsets and adaptive
practices by getting them to slow down and reflect more intentionally on a narrower band of their practice to do a deep dive on (e.g., goal setting to ensure students own their data)
»» Pushing them towards higher levels of creativity and ambition (e.g., new and different student products, new forms of collaboration, 21st century rubrics, interconnected global projects, etc.)
»» Provoking their thinking about what is possible
with respect to systems of personalization (e.g., competency-based learning) and helping them navigate the technical and political landscape to get there with families, administrators, and students
»» Encouraging them to commit to routines of self-care so they can thrive over a longer period of time
»» Identifying the root causes of political and cultural roadblocks to deeper innovation at greater scale and brainstorming potential action steps towards more sensible policy and public support for ideas that seem futuristic and/or far-fetched today
Coach Voices
Romain Bertrand on the challenges some PL Advanced Practitioners face: “Another shift (for teachers at this stage of their PL development) can be about the creative use of the tech tools. Students are often focused on consuming digital content as a ‘teacher replacement’ but there are very few creative activities with ed tech tools due to a lack of technical knowledge, a lack of belief that this will help students, and maybe a lack of support from district and school administrators.”
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BETTERLESSON’S PERSONALIZED LEARNING CONTINUUM After we went through the process of identifying the initial personalized learning experience levels of the teachers we were supporting in the 2016-17 school year, we realized that we wanted to understand and communicate more precisely the areas in which teachers had grown over the course of the year and their areas for future growth and development. As a result of many weeks of internal discussion, which included consulting various rubrics and other frameworks about personalized learning, we determined that there was no single instrument in the field that captured exactly BetterLesson’s values and technical perspective about the elements of powerful personalized learning. We were looking for a tool that was plainspoken enough to be accessible to various stakeholder groups (e.g., teachers, coaches, administrators, students, and families) but precise enough to have specific technical meaning and inspire concrete action steps. Unlike our initial experience ratings, which we felt might be off-putting to some teachers (especially experienced teachers who wouldn’t in every case welcome being referred to as “novices”), we wanted an instrument that would empower teachers to engage authentically in their own professional goal-setting, progress monitoring, and reflection in much the same way that students in effective personalized learning environments are. The result was the development of BetterLesson’s Personalized Learning Continuum. Our new continuum framework includes seven “domains” that are essential elements of any powerful personalized learning environment, regardless of the specific form or model the personalized learning takes and irrespective of the grade level or subject areas being considered. Each domain contains a series of concise “Descriptions,” action steps that teachers who are proficient in this domain demonstrate consistently and the impact their actions have on their students’ learning.
the new framework to be used. A simple checklist was not going to be sufficient, because a binary “does/ does not” framework would not sufficiently speak to the appropriateness of application of each of the Domains and action steps in the Descriptions in a specific context. Wanting to avoid communicating that engaging in a particular personalized learning activity as often as possible is the goal of personalized learning, we rejected the idea of “frequency” per se as the best way to measure teacher proficiency in the Domains. As with most frameworks of this sort, our initial landing place was a compromise. Ultimately, we decided that the lens of “consistency” was the most satisfying and clear (if imperfect) analytical lens that we were likely to arrive at as a way of assessing teacher practice across the continuum. We accepted the fact that there would be a degree of subjectivity and variation in the way that our coaches arrived at their consistency ratings and were not overly concerned about that, since the goal of using the continuum as a professional learning tool was (and continues to be) to find a way to having the right conversations in the right way with the teachers whose practice we were trying to support. In that context, scientifically quantifying and norming our ratings scheme were not our most important priorities during this first iteration of the continuum. The continuum’s domains and descriptions took their current shape as the 2016-17 school year was wrapping up, so our first opportunity to apply the new tool was to ask our coaches in May of 2017 to rate each of their teachers in terms of the degree to which each teacher had, by the end of the school year, demonstrated consistent practice in each of the 7 domains by providing a rating of “not yet/rarely,” “sometimes,” or “consistently.” By organizing the rating choices in this fashion, we hoped to extend an authentic growth mindset towards the teachers we support in the same way that we hope that they will extend that mindset towards their students.
Once we had articulated “the what” of our Personalized Learning Continuum, we had to decide how we wanted © 2017
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BETTERLESSON'S PERSONALIZED LEARNING CONTINUUM AUTHENTIC LEARNING
Taking students’ backgrounds, cultures, and goals into account, the teacher deliberately organizes the content and processes of learning to allow students to:
»»see the relevance of what they are learning and make connections to their life goals, identities, and communities
»»demonstrate their mastery and synthesis of skills and content through products and processes that are powerful and personally meaningful
»»develop and demonstrate their creativity »»collaborate with students and adults beyond their school community to solve problems, create products, and build deeper understanding of concepts and skills
»»showcase their learning to the wider world STUDENT AGENCY
The teacher designs the learning experience to support students to develop meaningful, ageappropriate ownership of any/all of the following:
USE OF DATA
The teacher ensures that data generated from technology platforms and various other sources are:
»»setting and monitoring their learning goals »»the pace, sequence, and modalities of their learning »»modes of demonstrating their mastery of key skills and concepts »»their collaboration partners
»»analyzed quickly and routinely to understand the learning needs and progress of each student and to plan effective interventions/opportunities for acceleration and greater depth of learning
»»made readily available to students and families in clear, accessible formats in order to make
collaborative decisions about what students should be learning as well as when and how that learning will occur
ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY
The teacher purposefully selects and deploys educational technology with an eye towards:
»»identifying, understanding, and quickly solving student learning challenges »»creating learning opportunities for students that wouldn’t otherwise be possible to the same degree »»increasing student and family access to and ownership of learning data »»providing students, teachers, and families with immediate and actionable feedback
COLLABORATION The teacher designs the learning experience to support students to develop the skills, habits, and dispositions of effective collaborators--both in person and digitally-- including:
»»active listening »»project planning and effective time management »»fostering creativity »»self-advocacy and conflict resolution »»giving and receiving feedback »»documenting team process
FLEXIBLE INSTRUCTIONAL MODALITIES
The teacher intentionally designs and selects a variety of instructional modalities (e.g., small, collaborative groups; independent; whole-class; conferences; performances; etc.) in order to:
CLASSROOM CULTURE
The teacher develops, models, and reinforces systems, routines, and strategies to ensure that learning is safe, orderly, respectful, and productive, resulting in:
»»engage students and ignite their passions »»foster student creativity and collaboration »»meet students’ individual academic and social-emotional needs »»allow students to develop mastery of core content and skills
»»a high degree of student ownership of the classroom culture »»students being able to remain focused, motivated, reflective, and capable of solving most of their challenges independently
»»students persevering through complex tasks and processes © 2017
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THE PERSONALIZED LEARNING CONTINUUM IN ACTION By the end of the 2016-17 school year, our coaches had provided initial blended and personalized learning experience ratings and summative personalized learning ratings based on 198 teachers’ consistency of practice in the seven domains of BetterLesson’s Personalized Learning Continuum. ALL TEACHERS WITH SUMMATIVE RATINGS Not yet / Rarely
Sometimes
Consistently
% of teachers
100 75 50 25
Da ta In st M ruc od tio al na Cl iti l as es sr oo m Cu ltu re
e
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As indicated in the chart above, a very heartening insight that we were able to glean from the end-of-year ratings is that the vast majority (82%) of the teachers were rated by their coaches as either “sometimes” or “consistently” deploying flexible instructional modalities, which suggests an openness among the teachers to supporting their students to learn in different ways and an effectiveness among our coaches in suggesting strategies to help the teachers they were coaching to differentiate the experience of their students. Another significant take-away about the cohort as a whole has to do with areas of personalized learning practice where the teachers we tracked in this study had not yet become consistent after a year of bi-weekly coaching sessions. The biggest areas of growth for the cohort as a whole, as indicated by our coaches’ end-of-year ratings, were “Use of Data” and “Authentic © 2017
Learning.” For the data domain, nearly a quarter of teachers were rated as “not yet/rarely.” Authentic learning experiences are occurring only slightly more consistently--23% of teachers were identified as “not yet/rarely” engaged in significant ways in this important domain. One in five teachers were also rated as “not yet/rarely” in the domain of “Student Agency.” Taken together, these data points make a clear case for a focus in these three areas in our coaching work with teachers in this cohort in the 2017-18 school year. The end-of-year ratings were illuminating in and of themselves, but they became even more compelling when we layered onto the continuum ratings the initial ratings of those same teachers from the first part of the 2016-17 school year. For example, 43% of the cohort of teachers were initially identified as blended and personalized learning novices. As explained in earlier sections of this paper, the “Novice” group consisted of early-career teachers as well as veteran educators who were just beginning to implement blended and personalized learning strategies in their classrooms. It is encouraging to note that 86% of teachers in the Novice subgroup was reported by their coaches to have been reasonably consistent (i.e., at least “sometimes”) in deploying strategies and practices that promote positive classroom culture by the end of the school year, which suggests an understanding of the foundational importance of classroom culture to learning of any kind and to personalized learning in particular. At year’s end, however, only a relatively small percentage of teachers in the Novice cohort were consistent in the following personalized learning domains:
»» Flexible Instructional Modalities (14%) »» Authentic Learning (17%) »» Use of Technology (17%) In addition, our coaches’ end-of-year ratings suggest
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that, for many PL Novices, the “Use of Data” domain should be a focus of their professional growth next school year (33% were assessed to demonstrate consistency in this domain “rarely/not yet”). As indicated in an earlier section of this paper, 45% of the total cohort of teachers we looked at carefully for this study were initially identified as blended and personalized learning “Intermediates,” meaning that they were already implementing some elements of blended and personalized learning practices at the outset of the 2016-17 school year. By year’s end, we were thrilled to note that 84% of teachers in the Intermediate cohort was reported by their coaches to have been reasonably consistent (i.e., at least “sometimes”) in their use of technology to promote promote student personalization, including nearly a third who applied these strategies “consistently.” This data suggest that it is developmentally appropriate for this group of teachers, which consists of teachers with varying degrees of teaching experience, to focus on integrating technology in strategic ways to advance personalized learning for their students. Furthermore, an encouraging 92% of Intermediates was identified as being reasonably consistent (i.e., at least “sometimes”) in their use of flexible instructional modalities. Given their fairly consistent and purposeful integration of technology and their commitment to offering their students diversity of learning modes, the next area of work for most of our Intermediate teachers, consistent with the cohort as a whole, would seem to be:
»» Use of Data
Only 17% of Intermediates were said to be “consistent” in this domain and 22% were assessed to utilize the strategies in this critical personalized learning domain “rarely/not yet”
teachers with little or no experience in these practices take the first steps in shifting their practice. At the same time, every partner school or district has at least a few teachers who are more advanced in their efforts to personalize learning for their students, and we are called increasingly to build the capacity of these vanguard teachers who are often asked to support the development of their peers in formal and informal ways. Not so surprisingly, our coaches noted that, by the end of the school year, very few of the teachers in the Advanced Practitioner subgroup were rated as demonstrating consistent practice “rarely/not yet” in most of the domains in our Personalized Learning Continuum. Indeed, the vast majority of Advanced PL Practitioners demonstrated consistency in their deployment of practices in the bedrock personalized learning domains of Flexible Instructional Modalities (76%); Use of Technology (72%); and Classroom Culture (72%). At the same time, it was notable that 12% of Advanced Practitioners were assessed as “rarely/not yet” engaging their students in deep ways through more relevant and authentic learning opportunities, which suggests that creating opportunities for students to engage in deeper, more meaningful learning may be the most challenging personalized learning domain of all, even for the most experienced and skillful personalized learning practitioners. It may be that these Advanced PL Paractitioners have taken their personalization approaches as far as they can under exisiting conditions and would benefit from a reconsideration of some of the policy and structural constraints described on page 19.
»» Authentic Learning
21% of Intermediates were assessed to utilize the strategies in this domain “rarely/not yet”
Not surprisingly, the smallest subgroup within our study (12% of the larger group) are those teachers whose initial blended and personalized learning proficiency was judged by our coaches to be at the “Advanced Practitioner” level at the beginning of the school year. In most cases, the schools and districts that form blended and personalized learning focused partnerships with us are looking for support in helping © 2017
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IMPACT OF ADMINISTRATORS ON TEACHER GROWTH Clearly, teachers’ prior knowledge and dispositions, as well as the skill and commitment of their coaches, play a significant role in the depth of growth a teacher may experience in his/her capacity to make their students’ learning more highly personalized. At the same time, as we noted in our first white paper, school, district, and CMO network administrators have a significant impact on teachers who are moving their practice in the direction of blended and personalized learning. According to our interviews with our coaches and the teachers they support, administrators who are the most supportive:
»»
»»
»» »»
»»
»»
»»
Encourage a culture of risk-taking among their teachers and create a culture in which it is safe to try new things and fail. As lead learners, they highlight successes, learn from failure, and elevate risk-takers publicly. Ensure that teachers have the resources they need in a timely and reliable fashion (e.g., hardware, software, digital curriculum resources, internet connectivity, etc.). Articulate and revisit a clear, compelling vision of personalized learning. Authorize teachers to evolve their own classroom models (i.e., if something isn’t working, teachers are encouraged and trusted to make changes). Create and protect time for teachers to plan and learn together and individually. Teachers who are trying to transform their practice need to have other duties and responsibilities reduced so they can focus on their development. Participate in regular and authentic checkins and observations driven by questions and conversations about practice. Are clear and consistent about roles and expectations, including expectations to which
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administrators will hold themselves. Coordinate support and feedback from internal coaches and administrators so teachers don’t become overwhelmed.
»»
»»
»»
»»
»»
Promote a common, plainspoken instructional language that students, families, and faculty can understand and use in conversations about learning and teaching. Support the most innovative teachers by helping them network with like-minded educators in their system and beyond. Support struggling teachers, especially teachers who are wrestling with classroom culture challenges, to develop consistent and effective systems early in the school year. Ensure adequate support for English Language Learners and students with disabilities, including appropriate adult-to-student ratios, adaptive software, etc. Create policy conditions that empower educators to personalize student learning in innovative and more far-reaching ways, including reexamining traditional macro-structures such as age-alike cohorts, “seat-time” requirements, prescribed course sequences, and standardized curricula and pacing guides.
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NEXT STEPS In April of 2017, Dr. Betheny Gross published a compelling if somewhat distressing article entitled Starting With the “Why” in Personalized Learning on the blog of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. As the blog entry’s title suggests, the big takeaway of Dr. Gross’s findings was that, even in schools where personalized learning has been identified as a core element of the educational experience of children, many teachers are not able to articulate why they are doing what they are doing to personalize learning for their students2.
the teachers they support in much the same way that students drive their own learning in highly effective personalized learning environments.
In BetterLesson’s Personalized Learning Continuum, we believe that we have developed a tool that is both generally useful to the field of educational innovation and powerful for helping us understand the impact of our coaching on individual teacher growth and the efforts of our partners to bring personalized learning practices to scale within their districts, CMOs, and states. We hope that readers of this paper will use the continuum in their contexts to promote discussion about what personalized learning consists of and looks like in action and to assess the efficacy of their own efforts to move in the direction of more highly personalized learning environments for their students. We invite anyone who uses our continuum framework to share with us its impact on your work.
Consistently
Meantime, we intend to use the continuum in three concrete ways in the coming school year--and beyond if doing is useful. For teachers who are new to PersonalizedPD, we intend to use the continuum in our initial coaching conversations to create a common language and framework about personalized learning and to work with teachers to self-assess and set goals about their practice. In this way, rather than have our coaches engage in an initial rating that will be focused on a teacher’s general level of prior experience and proficiency, the earliest conversations about a teacher’s professional growth can now focus on specific domains that are mutually agreed upon between coaches and
2
For teachers who are returning to work with us for a second or third year, our coaches will have the benefit of having created a sketch of their next edge of professional growth that looks something like the graph below. AN INDIVIDUAL TEACHER’S SUMMATIVE RATINGS
Sometimes
Not yet / Rarely y
nc
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e Ag
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Co
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Au
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l re na s ltu tio litie u c C ru a e m st od Us oo In M r s le as ib Cl ex l F
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In this teacher’s case (a real teacher from one of our partners), it seems clear that the next level of work in moving towards greater personalization might be focused on building his proficiency with student collaboration strategies, his use of data to drive his instructional choices, and his capacity to differentiate instructional modalities in a nimble way. The continuum also has powerful applications for our current and future partners at schools, districts, foundations, non-profit organizations, CMOs, and state departments of education. For current partners, the continuum can provide a personalized learning “heat map” that can give us insight into the impact of our work in specific personalized learning domains that
Starting with the “Why” in Personalized Learning, http://crpe.org/experts/betheny-gross
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are important to our partners as in the case of “Partner A” below (a real partner), where our coaches’ endof-year ratings point to teachers’ use of data and the authenticity of the products and experiences students are asked to create and participate in as critical areas in which to focus our energies in the 2017-18 school year.
PARTNER COHORT BY DOMAINS AND RATING Not yet / Rarely
Sometimes
Consistently
100
% of Teachers
75
50
25
ta In st M ruc od tio al na Cl iti l as es sr oo m Cu ltu re
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Finally, we see tremendous possibilities for using the continuum as a diagnostic tool for organizations who are considering partnering with BetterLesson to bring PersonalizedPD to their educators. In this context, we will be able to assess organizational priorities and areas of strength fairly quickly while we are introducing a common language of learning to our partnership relationships that are at the earliest stages of development. We look forward to sharing the insights we arrive at through these various applications of our new and powerful tool in future publications.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors wish to thank our colleagues at BetterLesson for their various contributions to this paper, especially the members of the coaching team for their passionate, brilliant, and tireless work on behalf of teachers and students in our partner schools and for their generous and wise participation in the process of developing the ideas in this paper and the analytical frameworks and concepts within it. Special thanks are due to Liz Arney, John Rice, Ellen Dorr, Lynne Beattie, Eileen McMahon, Grace Magley, Julie Baudreau, Cathy Sanford, and Jin-Soo Huh for their formative feedback about our initial blended & personalized learning experience continuum and the teacher archetype framework. Larry Myatt, Beth Rabbitt, Jeff Astor, Juliana Finnegan,
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Don Beatty, Aaron Kaswell, and Tom Arnett provided insightful and actionable feedback on early drafts of the paper. Their invaluable, A-list critical friendship made our ideas and the words that express the ideas far better than they would’ve been without the benefit of their big brains. Beth Herlin provided brilliant design guidance and acumen under sub-optimal working conditions and made our insights clearer, more accessible, and more powerful. Above all, we are grateful for the teachers and leaders in our partner organizations whose trust allows us to understand and share our learning about the evolving practices in blended and personalized learning with the field.
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CONTRIBUTORS
JEFF LIBERTY
BetterLesson’s Vice President of Personalized Learning, Jeff Liberty is the lead author of this paper and BetterLesson’s first white paper, Blended and Personalized Learning: Insights from the Master Teacher Project. An educational innovator with over twenty years of experience as a teacher, an urban school reformer, and a founding principal of a 6-12 charter school in Boston, Jeff joined the BetterLesson team in May of 2014 to design and lead the Blended Master Teacher Project. Jeff is responsible for BetterLesson’s blended and personalized learning partnerships with schools, districts, and foundations across the country and BetterLesson’s thought leadership in the areas of blended and personalized learning.
KATYA RUCKER
BetterLesson’s Manager of Personalized Learning, Katya Rucker conducted interviews with BetterLesson’s coaches and with teachers who worked with these coaches. Katya works closely with Jeff to develop blended and personalized learning partnerships with innovative schools and districts to support the shift to student-centered pedagogical approaches. Before joining the BetterLesson team in 2016, Katya taught middle school students in three urban school districts in Massachusetts, and served as an English Department Chair and later the Director of School Operations at Salem Academy Charter School.
MORGAN JOSEPH
MARTHA BUCK
Morgan serves as Manager of Product Marketing and Sales Enablement. After a short stint supporting teachers in Baltimore City Schools, she joined the BetterLesson team looking to equip educators with tools and skills needed to inspire students to persevere through challenges and dream beyond their circumstances. Prior to her roles on the marketing team, she worked as a Project Associate on the Master Teacher Projects, planning and creating all classroom video assets. Morgan worked with Katya to interview teachers who are receiving coaching from BetterLesson.
As BetterLesson’s Manager of Data Insights, Martha believes in harnessing the power of technology to support teachers in the wholly human work of empowering students to realize their full potential one day at a time. Prior to joining the BetterLesson team, Martha taught math and science to high school students and technology integration to teachers at public and private schools in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Martha is responsible for the data displays in this paper and the complex data collection systems and analysis that made the data patterns and professional learning insights visible. Daniel, an Instructional Coach at BetterLesson, believes deeply in the personalization of student learning and the strengthening of the teaching profession to build students who challenge the 21st century’s problems. He joined BetterLesson after teaching 4th and 5th grades in Miami, FL where his teaching was profiled in BetterLesson’s Blended Master Teacher Project. Daniel contributed substantially to the development of BetterLesson’s Personalized Learning Continuum.
DANIEL GUERRERO © 2017
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GET IN TOUCH Jeff Liberty Vice President, Personalized Learning (617) 512-6201
[email protected] www.betterlesson.com @JLBetterLesson
APPENDIX
COACHING STRATEGIES FOR PERSONALIZED LEARNING NOVICES PL Novices are veteran or early-career teachers who most frequently grapple with challenges related to planning and instructional design; the emotions associated with doing something new and different; developing specific technical skills; and/or resistance to changing their practice. Grappling with planning and instructional design challenges
Overcome emotional challenges that are not particularly connected to a fear of technology
Have a strong fear of/an aversion to introducing educational technology tools and strategies into their classrooms
»» Setting a small number of broad goals for students and trying many different strategies that are connected to those goals
»» Breaking their vision down into smaller steps to get there and, along the way, defining personalized learning more clearly and making it actionable.
»» Telling stories about other teachers’ successes and failures in implementing personalization strategies, including those of the coach himself/herself
»» In the case of embarrassed veteran novices, highlighting and honoring what they already know and do well and showing them how important those skills are in a highly effective personalized learning teacher
»» “Shrinking the change” by picking one strategy or one small iteration of practice that is connected
to a specific goal the teacher wants to achieve or a a problem in their practice (e.g., use technology to set learning goals)
»» Choosing and modeling tools that don’t present huge barriers to entry (e.g., Google Forms or 3-2-1 for formative assessment, Google Docs for conferencing and giving feedback, or Socrative)
»» Sending personalized how-to videos/screencasts about new technologies »» Starting with interactive, no- or low-tech strategies that increase student engagement and
personalization and offer a change in instructional modalities (e.g., students acting out physical gestures they have invented to illustrate academic vocabulary; traditional vocabulary cards vs. Quizlet; etc.) before introducing technology-based solutions that address similar areas of learning
Face technichal challenges
»» Focusing on cultivating student collaboration skills so that students can learn explicit strategies for working through their challenges
»» Focusing on close reading strategies (e.g., “Red Card/Green Card”) »» Focusing on improving student discourse so that the tone and tenor of classroom dialog can be elevated overall
Comfortable with technology but still developing their basic classroom management repertoires
»» Early in the school year or during a “reset” period, focusing on culture-setting strategies and
building confidence and competence with classroom routines and procedures (e.g., transition strategies from one platform, modality, tool, or station to another)
»» Encouraging proactive contingency planning and other troubleshooting planning »» Focusing on one station at a time in station-rotation models »» Implementing classroom management tools like Class Dojo and non-tech culture-building systems like “Morning Meeting”
Initially appear to have mindset challenges
»» Encouraging teachers to tell stories about their students until they give the coach a way in »» Focusing on “the why” when thinking about new strategies and linking strategy recommendations to outcomes for students (e.g., show how new strategies can motivate/engage students)
»» Helping teachers learn how to self-assess »» Getting them to buy into the path they're taking by asking “What does this strategy enable you to do that you couldn’t do before?” and “How might this strategy help you solve a problem in your practice?”
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COACHING STRATEGIES FOR PERSONALIZED LEARNING INTERMEDIATES PL Intermediates are early-career or veteran teachers who have independently implemented PL systems and strategies but who wrestle with consistent application, accepting the need to iterate on their hard-won PL practice, and/or cultural and political resistance to deeper personalized learning practice from other stakeholders in their schools.
All intermediates
»» Modeling framing of their challenges (e.g., “What I’m hearing is . . .”) »» Asking questions about how they feel about their current blended and personalized learning practices and what they want to work on/get better at
»» Encouraging them to think in transformative ways by extending their thinking (e.g., “Yes, and what else might students do with this tool/project?”)
»» Challenging them to be more creative in how they are thinking about their practice and their students’ experience
»» Focusing on showcasing the innovations they have already developed in their classrooms and plotting out the next moves in their career portfolios.
»» Integrating new tools and strategies and/or going deeper with the tools and strategies they’re
already using to personalize learning more (e.g., turn Google Docs into Hyperdocs; use EDPuzzle for flipped/self-paced learning; or introduce game-based learning through Kahoot!)
»» Designing custom strategies together that solve a problem, create an efficiency, and/or offer opportunities to students
»» Iterating on current models by refining/redesigning specific model elements »» Looking at student data together and more often with a learner and a designer’s stance (e.g.,
“What can we learn from this data? How can it help us design your students’ experience better?”)
Early adopters of new technology
»» Articulating a meaty goal that is connected to an area of practice they want to work on (e.g., student agency, feedback, etc.)
»» Focusing conversations on students and away from the intricacies of specific tech tools (e.g., “What is the student outcome you are trying to achieve? What do your students need to be successful in their lives?”)
»» Getting teachers off of technology in favor of working with students more directly (e.g., improve 1:1 conferencing interactions, minilessons, etc.)
»» Creating simple rubrics for introducing new ed tech tools that get intermediate teachers to think more critically about the tools they choose to implement
Constrained by community stakeholders who are ambivalent or antagonistic towards technology
»» Using Twitter and other online learning forums to find networks of like-minded educators who can sustain and push their practice
»» Tapping into research publications and organizations to ensure that their practice is substantiated to the degree possible by best practice and current educational and brain-science research
»» Building confidence in discerning which battles are worth it and how best to initiate conflicts of ideas about what’s best for children in respectful ways
»» Documenting the evolution of their practice and making their professional learning, their student data, and their students’ work public in as many ways as possible
»» Cultivating champions within the school community
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COACHING STRATEGIES FOR ADVANCED PERSONALIZED LEARNING PRACTIONERS Advanced PL Practitioners are experienced personalized learning pioneers whose challenges most often stem from professional isolation, the strain of multiple commitments, and a need to develop more sustainable and intentional systems. All Advanced PL Practitioners can benefit from:
»» Having regular big-picture conversations about the discipline of teaching and what drew them into the teaching profession in the first place
»» Offering thought partnership to explore new ideas and build and sustain excitement about new possibilities »» Sharing ideas/strategies they’ve never thought or heard of (this can be a challenge!) »» Helping them develop more efficient systems and Routines that make their pace and workload more sustainable over the long haul
»» Encouraging them to document and share their work in national and international conferences and other venues where they are likely to find their professional peers
»» Letting them articulate the questions and explorations that drive their learning »» Further developing their mindsets and adaptive practices by getting them to slow down and reflect more
intentionally on a narrower band of their practice to do a deep dive on (e.g., goal setting to ensure students own their data)
»» Pushing them towards higher levels of creativity and ambition (e.g., new and different student products, new forms of collaboration, 21st century rubrics, interconnected global projects, etc.)
»» Provoking their thinking about what is possible with respect to systems of personalization (e.g., competencybased learning) and helping them navigate the technical and political landscape to get there with families, administrators, and students
»» Encouraging them to commit to routines of self-care so they can thrive over a longer period of time »» Identifying the root causes of political and cultural roadblocks to deeper innovation at greater scale and
brainstorming potential action steps towards more sensible policy and public support for ideas that seem futuristic and/or far-fetched today
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